Art journalling to support mental wellness

......imagine yourself as a small boat, how will you chart your course....

Art Journalling to Support Mental Wellbeing.

It's a thing. 

The act of applying paint or paper with glue and glitter to a surface is a mindful practice and we all now know how mindfulness keeps us present and prevents us from straying into the unalterable past or the unknown future. Past and future are places where we do not belong. We have no influence there. No control. The present is what we have. It's where we live our days and create the foundations for the days to come.

.........if you keep doing what you've always done you'll keep getting what you've always got........

Of course you can spend a happy hour or two lost in creative play and then return to being a worrywart but those creative hours are like a healing balm to our soul.

Art journalling can serve many purposes. An art journal can be a place where you make art, just for yourself. It can be where you explore ideas about art that will one day make it onto a canvas and have an audience. It can revolve around a single idea or many. It can be in one medium or mixed. There are no rules.

 After years of journal keeping I had a lightbulb moment in the covid years and started a journal with the specific intention of supporting my mental wellbeing.

Like many, my circumstances changed dramatically overnight in 2020 and I also hit a significant birthday in the spring of that year which gave me another boot up the backside to take the reins of my life in a different way. I used the additional time that I had so suddenly acquired to study courses on mental health and counselling. And when we were eventually able to do things in person again I qualified as a mental health first aider.

Until I began studying I had never previously considered being proactive about my mental health.I have awareness around what are healthy habits for physical health  and I do make attempts to improve where I can. But when it comes to mental wellbeing I realised  that I was effectively whitewater rafting in a very dodgy inflatable with no life jacket. So, I resolved to make changes.

This blog is a record of what I did, how it helped and what has stuck. 

I'm sharing because I have become quite passionate about the process of creating resiliance and that we can become cheerleaders for ourselves rather than being stuck in patterns of self sabotage.