Integrating mindfulness and art has the potential to deepen our aesthetic experience and increase our ability to flourish.
No images? Click here
January 2023
HUMANITIES AND HUMAN FLOURISHING NEWSLETTER
Advancing the understanding, assessment, and cultivation of well-being by means of a deep and sustained collaboration between the arts, humanities, and the social sciences
Mindful Arts Engagement
Have you ever experienced the sensation of being stuck ruminating about the past? What about worrying about the future? Jon Kabat-Zinn suggests mindfulness as an anecdote to this “pervasive lack of awareness.” Mindfulness is an “awareness that arises through paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment” and allows us to more fully experience each waking moment.
By rooting the mind and the body in the present, mindfulness has positive impacts on well-being. Mindfulness-based practices are positively associated with reductions in ill-being (stress, depression) and increases in well-being (subjective happiness, prosocial behavior).
Many parallels can be drawn between mindfulness and art engagement. Like mindfulness, meaningful art engagement requires focus and attention, can result in a transcendent experience through immersion, and can increase flourishing through reflectiveness.
Integrating mindfulness and art has the potential to deepen our aesthetic experience and increase our ability to flourish. Mindfulness-based art therapy involves art making and engagement with an added mindfulness practice which results in deeper self-exploration and awareness. Participants report relief from symptoms of anxiety and depression and an increase in quality of life.
Both mindfulness practice and the arts intrinsically ask us to examine who we are, our view of the world, and our place within it. There is an even more profound richness that can come from engaging in the arts mindfully. Engaging in mindful practices like slow looking, focused attention on specific elements of a piece, and grounding practices while experiencing art can increase flourishing by allowing us to slow down and fully experience the offerings of the present moment.
Next time you look at an artwork, try this: while viewing a piece of art, inhale, growing through the crown of your head and grounding through your heels into the earth. On your exhale, lose none of that space you’ve created in your body and focus on a particular element of the artwork. Do this mindful breathing and contemplation of an artwork for 5 cycles of breath before moving on to the next piece.
Mindfulness and Art in Research
In a 2022 study by Van Lith and colleagues, college students reported greater psychological and physiological impacts on stress and anxiety when participating in mindfulness- based art therapy compared to those in the control group who simply engaged in art making without mindful awareness.
Mindfulness and Art in Practice
The Mindful Museum program at the Carnegie Museum of Art invites visitors to engage in a guided mindfulness practice such as chair yoga while engaging in art paths intended to deepen engagement and “nurture the mind, body, and soul”.
HHF News
This month, the initial volumes of The Humanities and Human Flourishing series, edited by HHF Project Director James O. Pawelski, will be published by Oxford University Press, including:
Cinema, Media, and Human Flourishing edited by Timothy Corrigan
Literary Studies and Human Flourishing edited by James F. English and Heather Love
Look out for the remaining books in this nine-volume series over the course of the next year.
Upcoming Events
The HHF Colloquium Series will resume at the start of the Spring 2023 semester. Until then, check out recordings of some of our previous colloquia as well as interviews with editors of the newly published HHF Series.
This newsletter was created by Christa Mahlobo, Katherine Cotter, Sarah Sidoti, and James Pawelski.
