How to Begin Expressive Art Journaling: 9-steps

Journaling as a Practice

Expressive Art Journaling is a practice that can help you connect with your authentic creative self, help you heal past trauma, work on personal challenges, discover your unique creativity and expression, by focusing on your unique story and symbolism, and provide a sacred personal space for you to create, play and grow.

Benefits

I’ve been working and playing with the elements of expressive journaling and intuitive painting for many years, and I notice the difference in my well-being, calmness, and presence when I haven’t been able to do it for a few days. Making time for your creativity, listening to your inner wisdom, and allowing your soul to play, explore and have fun are all so important.

How to Begin

The process I’m sharing for mindful expressive art journaling, is one that that has evolved for me over time by trying different things, keeping what works for me and leaving what doesn’t. I invite you to start with these steps if this kind of practice is new for you, and to add your own variations or steps that feel right for you as your practice evolves. Please share what works for you since it may help others!

Supplies

 You can use whatever you have on hand for this exercise: a notebook and regular ‘ol pen, markers or any other colors if you decide to add color later. The process is what’s most important. I use this journal (I like it because you can work across two spreads and it’s hardcover, but you could make your own or use any other you prefer. I do recommend watercolor paper since we will be using water and water media), this pen: because it’s water resistant and I like to add watercolors over the top, and these watercolors, which are simple and low cost. 

The 9 Steps

1.    Have your journal or paper ready and pen in hand. Close your eyes and focus inward. Notice what body sensation needs your attention. Focus there and anchor yourself to the present moment. Without forcing or changing anything, allow yourself to simply observe.

2.    Watch and notice how your attention moves to other parts of your body, or how the initial sensation shifts to something else. Notice how you are aware of a sound and then a thought. Continue to observe and bring your attention back if (when) you wander off and then just continue.

3.    Notice the observer observing and let that go as well.

4.    At any point, notice the pen resting in your hand. Feel what it feels like. Let it touch the paper and make a mark on it. Let it move across the page and hear what it sounds like. Notice the mark as it’s being made.

5.    If you want to write a word, do so. Allow the writing to open up and become simply marks while still having meaning as words as you write them. Let these marks take whatever form they’d like.

6.    Switch writing hands to your other hand. Let that hand move with the pen, inviting focus back to the mark as it is being made and the sensation of the mark in the moment.

7.    Allow internal images, symbols, sensations, sounds to continue to present themselves as you experience the external sensations of moving the pen and focusing on your body, the sounds in the room and your experience of each moment.

8.    When you feel complete, open your eyes and ask internally if there are any other figures, symbols or images that would like to come forward or if any others have anything to say.

9.    Now it’s time to engage the other side of your brain to focus in on what this experience was communicating to you. This will be important especially if you’d like to create a journal page with symbols and a lot of layers. If you’d like to remain in exploratory mode and keep things more abstract, you can do that as well. What would you say is the main issue or challenge being focused on if you had to name it? What would be the ideal solution. After you finish the piece, whatever that looks like for you,  you will ask if there’s a third symbol that offers balance between the first and second.

Write notes on the journal page or another place if you feel so called and think that you may not remember. The following example comes from notes I took after one of my journaling sessions.

An Example

I started by noticing burning and discomfort in my upper stomach (I have ongoing reflux so this is familiar) so I focused in on it, just allowing and sending the message that I wasn’t trying to do anything or make anything happen, especially with the pressure I’ve been feeling to post what I create.

I continued to note the sensations and where they were, what it was like, allowing, not creating what was happening. I noticed the pen on the paper and by noticing it, it slowed. I focused on sound, the sound of the train, then the saws, then the next thing.

I was writing then changed to free expression with the pen, eyes closed, noticing taste, sound, touch, my feet, the next sensation, free association, the beach, sand dunes, sun, I closed my eyes, switched to left handwriting, words again, who is this, how old?...she is three, young, running, sensations moving to shoulder pain, then to my back, then feet.

She writes on the page about wanting to hide, to get away. Her attention shifts to the dream about horses and the girl with the stick. She says that wasn’t hitting them, she was helping them, showing them where to go, how to get out of the mud, unstuck.

Then two of us are on the horses now in the dappled light not hot not cold and muddy, but moving and flowing shifting. My internal fire has settled for now. I open my eyes to see that the pen has been going over the same place in the upper right corner over and over and it looks like a barbed wire fence.

The colors are pinks, blues, oranges, and cross shapes. The black extends to the left and the crosses fall like water and fall downward. I had felt nervous when I started, having not done any art or written for many days. Now I feel calm. She is grateful.

After opening my eyes and noticing the area with marks that looks like barbed wire on the right that looks like keeping something out or that’s about something being stuck, as well as the connection to the past dream about horses (that was very profound symbolically).

I’m sitting here writing this trying to figure out what it’s about and I’m reminding myself to ask the part that came up at the time: the 3-year-old. I ask her inside and wait to say what bubbles up. She says, you can’t force these things. You have to stay connected (to yourself).

What would the ideal be? To ride on horses all day on the beach (to be able to create and be in nature all the time. To not have to work or do anything boring (she knows this isn’t possible but I did ask).

What would the balance be? Stay consistent. Stay connected. Don’t let go of the thread. I ask her for a symbol for the balance. She shows me a symbol from the journal page I made a few weeks ago. The theme of that page was consistency connected to creativity and it incorporated calendars, time and seasons. The connecting symbol was the moon shining on water.

What’s Next

After finishing this process, I used watercolor as a first layer and worked intuitively to cover the writing and marks with colors that spoke to me intuitively. The image is included in this post. Depending on the piece and where I feel like taking it, I would then add collage, line work, opaque lines, possibly text, or more abstract layers.

As you can see, as you continue to work with images, journal pages, dreams, writing, poetry and communicating internally, it becomes an ongoing process where you’re discovering your own symbolic world: who the players are and what they have to share with you. I find it magical and a deeply personal and spiritual adventure, unique to you and in which you’ll find the keys to your creative life and well-being.

This post has served (hopefully )as an introduction to the foundations of Expressive Art Journaling, showing you the practices of working with a focus on the present and the senses and starting to use layers in a journal. I’ll be following up with more posts, videos and information on the other options I mentioned for adding layers and continuing to work with personal symbols and parts of self, including archetypes based on the Enneagram and Internal Family Systems. I’m also working on offering a course on this topic in the future.

I’d love to hear how this goes for you and if it’s something that resonates with you! Let me know in the comments.

What can you say without words?

I’m very attached to words. The narrator in my head doesn’t really ever stop. I assume it’s that way for most people but I don’t know if it’s as relentless for everyone. It’s as if the words serve as some kind of anchor holding me to the earth, and a part of me fears that without them I would just float away somehow.

It made sense to me when we learned in my trauma program that meditation can feel unsafe for some people. Letting go of that voice to me can feel a bit like l like letting go of reality. But being aware of that in itself can be very freeing. Facing the addiction to naming, judging, telling ourselves what we see rather than just seeing, or hearing and being in our senses can open a door to brand new experience.

To be able to create this way, to paint this way, is freeing. We can step out of the story we’re telling and be in a mood or emotion while it happens without having to describe it and in so doing step out of the moment. I was painting today and realized that I felt sad. The neighbors are building a house next door and the pounding sounds, rather than annoying me, surprisingly led me to feel sadness.

I actually did know why, and I was able to channel the sense I was having into the color I was working with and really be with it. I was taken back to my family but I was still in my body, in the sun, with the sounds, and with the color and mark I was making in that moment.

I value my inner narrator and I respectfully ask her to take a break when I want to shift into creative expression. I actually don’t think she minds too much since she’s been talking nonstop for a really long time!

I’ve been thinking a lot about this kind of topic since I’m in the process of creating an intuitive soul painting class called Authentic Creative Expression, that will focus on going deeper into personal symbolism and story, using nine specific points I call source points that are based on the Enneagram, Internal Family Systems and the Chakras.

Click below to learn more about the course and receive future updates, plus receive a free one-page mediation guide, and a 10+ minute MP3 recorded meditative affirmation that is based on the nine source points and that can be used before you create.