Practicing DBT mindfulness skills through drawing: an art therapy perspective
Mindfulness is the miracle by which we master and restore ourselves
—Thich Naht Hanh
Many of us know that practicing Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) mindfulness skills can help us become better able to recognize, tolerate, and regulate our emotions in ways that ripple out into a wide range of increasingly wise and effective behaviors—benefitting both ourselves and our relationships. Mindfulness skills are the foundation of all Dialectical Behavioral Therapy skills training. The issues addressed by core mindfulness skills are understanding who you are, where you are in your life, and developing the ability to be an active curator of what goes on in your mind through your choices related to focus and attention. Mindfulness encourages you to live in the moment by focusing on the present.
The practice of mindfulness comes from the Eastern concept of smriti, a Sanskrit word meaning awareness, or in a more nuanced translation, to come back to awareness. Some find that the concept of a “Beginner’s Mind” is the essence of mindfulness, practiced through approaching each new task with an open mind. This mindset describes the sense of wonder and embodied curiosity that a child attempting a task or witnessing something for the first time may experience.
Learning to practice mindfulness skills can be done in many ways. In a concise form, the DBT Mindfulness skills are broken into two components, labeled the What skills, and the How skills.
“What” skills tell you what to do to be mindful:
Observe what is happening and what you are noticing right now.
This is an active perceptive process in which you use your senses to witness what is going on outside of yourself, and the internal experiences of your mind and body. It is a stance in which you are curiously noticing, but not reacting, responding, or pushing away.
Describe what it is that you are observing in real time.
When a feeling, new sensory-based awareness, or thought comes into your mind, find active ways to describe it. This often includes descriptive language, narrating the awareness in a way that illustrates the experience. It can also include non-verbal descriptions of sensations through focused movement and intentional mark making.
Participate in what is going on right now—throw yourself into the moment.
Do what you are doing . . . let go of thinking about it and become one with what you are doing. Be skillful in this moment. To participate is to enter wholly into an activity by being totally present when engaging with the activity, and consistently committing to the here and now through physical awareness and mind-body connection. It allows a space to practice being in physical control of yourself, and to be intentional about the convergence of your senses in order to skillfully exercise healthy control and integration.
“How” skills: tell you how to do things in order to in order to be mindful:
Non-judgmentally: look at things as they are, without judging whether they are good or bad.
Notice what is happening in a situation, the information of the experience, but don’t focus on what is right or wrong about it. Allow everything to be as it is, and accept that reality without judgmental layering. Be in your body, and commit to the raw unaltered data of the perceptual information without adding a critical lens. Come back as often as needed to the beginner’s mind.
One-mindfully: do one thing at a time, keeping your focus exclusively on what you are doing right now.
Think one mindfully: Ignore distractions! You can only do ONE thing at a time. Go back to what you are doing each time you notice something else going on around you, your thoughts distract you, or you find that you are doing two or three things at once. Remind yourself over and over, “I’m intentionally doing this right now.”
“One-mindfully” helps us be in the here-and-now. It has to do with learning to focus on being fully invested in the present, focusing our attention on what we are doing exclusively, and moving forward deliberately in linear time rather than jumping and skittering in our experience of time like refracted light.
Effectively: focus what is functionally happening and working (not on how things should be).
Focus on what works to get your wise mind goal. Do only what needs to be done in each situation to make it happen, without any wasted effort or extra emotion. Allow yourself to be highly efficient, and focus on the economy of your energy expenditure—be deliberate about what you are doing, and focused on how this helps you reach your goal, even if that goal is a long way off.
Art Therapy Application:
Now that we have covered the basics of mindfulness, let us turn our attention to how drawing can be an effective way to better practice and integrate these skills. Drawing, particularly contour drawing from physical form is a potent and effective method of observing our surroundings, describing our experience of these surroundings through intentional mark making, and participating fully in the present moment. Through a focused and selective intervention like the ones described below, we can help our brains suspend judgment, be one mindful through tracking and converging the experiences of our eyes and hands, and can become increasingly effective in moving towards an embodied practice of “beginner’s mind”. Through these experientials, we can slow our thoughts, enhance our perception, and improve our ability to tolerate uncertainty and imperfection both in our behaviors and in our processing. While we are not product focused in art therapy, the practice of contour drawing does result in powerful sensitive art pieces that can enhance our sense of meaning and reinforce our sense of personal agency and healthy growth and control.
The following experpt is taken from the excellent book Design Drawing, by the renowned artist, architect, and teacher, Francis D. K. Ching. As you follow his writing and engage in the experiential exercises he recommends, allow yourself to bring your awareness of the DBT mindfulness skills into integrated practice. Notice how the process of practicing mindfulness does not need to be a verbal process, and can be powerfully supported by the power of visual art making.
Learning to draw is really a matter of learning to see—to see correctly—and that means a good deal more than merely looking with the eye. The sort of ‘seeing’ I mean is an observation that utilizes as many of the five senses as can reach through the eye at one time.
—Kimon Nicolaides
Despite the subjective nature of the perception, sight is still the most important sense of gathering information about our world. In the seeing process, we are able to reach out through space and trace the edges of objects, scan surfaces, feel textures, and explore space. The tactile, kinesthetic nature of drawing in direct response to sensory phenomena sharpens our awareness in the present, expands our visual memories of the past, and stimulates the imagination in designing the future.
In drawing, we pull the point of a tool across a receptive surface to produce a line. As a graphic element, the line is a one-dimensional trace on a two-dimensional surface. Yet, it is the most natural and efficient means we have to circumscribe and describe the three-dimensional form of a subject. We construct these lines in order to recreate a sense of the form’s existence in space. And as viewers, we readily associate the drawn lines with the physical boundaries of a form and the edges of parts within it.
Contours dominate our perception of the visual world. The mind infers the existence of contours from the patterns of light and dark the eyes receive. Our visual system seeks out and creates a cognitive line along the points where two fields of contrasting light or color meet. Some of these edges are clear; others are lost in the background as they change color or tonal value. Still, in its need to identify objects, the mind is able to fabricate a continuous line along each edge. In the seeing process, the mind enhances these edges and sees them as contours.
The most noticeable contours are those which separate one thing from another. These contours give rise to the images of objects we see in visual space. They circumscribe an object and define the outer boundary between the figure and its background. In limiting and defining the edges of things, contours also describe their shape.
Contours do more than describe the outline of a flat, two-dimensional silhouette. Some contours travel inward at folds or breaks in a plane. Others are formed by overlapping or projecting parts. Still other contours describe the shapes of spaces and shadows within the form. In both seeing and drawing, we are able to follow these contours as they eloquently describe the three-dimensional nature of forms in space.
Contour drawing is one approach to drawing form observation. Its primary purpose is to develop visual acuity and sensitivity to qualities of surface and form. The process of contour drawing suppresses the symbolic abstraction we normally use to represent things. Instead, it compels us to pay close attention, look carefully, and experience a subject with both our visual and tactile senses.
Our goal in contour drawing is to arrive at an accurate correspondence between the eye as it follows the edges of a form and the hand as it draws the lines which represent those edges. As the eye slowly traces the contours of a subject, the hand moves the drawing instrument at the same slow and deliberate pace and responds to every indentation and undulation of form. This is a meticulous and methodical process which involves working from detail to detail, part to part, form to form.
The process is as much tactile as visual. Imagine the pencil or pen is in actual contact with the subject as you draw. Do not retrace over lines or erase them. Most importantly, draw slowly and deliberately. Avoid the temptation to move the hand faster than the eye can see; move in pace with the eye and examine the shape of each contour you see in the subject without considering or worrying about its identity.
Contour drawing is best done with either a soft, well-sharpened pencil or a fine-tipped pen that is capable of producing a single incisive line. This fosters a feeling of precision that corresponds to the acuity of vision which contour drawing promotes.
Blind contour drawing involves the drawing of contours while looking only at the subject, not the surface upon which we are drawing or the evolving image. Turn your body away from the paper and concentrate all of your attention on the subject. Your eyes should remain on the subject as the hand attempts to record on paper what you see.
Focus the eye on a clearly defined point along a contour of the subject. Place the tip of the pen or pencil on the paper and imagine it is actually touching the subject at that point. Slowly and carefully follow the contour with your eyes, observing every minute shift or bend in the contour. As your eyes move, also move your pen or pencil at the same deliberate pace, recording each variation in contour that you see.
Continue to draw each edge you see, bit by bit, at a slow, even pace. You may have to stop periodically as you continue to scan the subject, but avoid making these stopping points too conspicuous. Strive to record each contour at the very instant you see each point along the contour. Allow the eye, mind, and hand to respond simultaneously to each and every critically perceived event.
In this mode of drawing, distorted and exaggerated proportions often result. The final drawing is not intended to look like the object but rather to document and express your careful perception of its lines, shapes, and volumes.
In modified contour drawing, we begin as in blind contour drawing. But in order to check relationships of size, length, and angle, we allow ourselves to glace at the emerging drawing at certain intervals.
Begin as in a blind contour drawing. Select any convenient point along a contour of the subject. Place the tip of the pen or pencil on the sheet of paper and imagine it is in contact with the same point on the subject. Check the relationship of the contour to an imaginary vertical or horizontal line. As your eyes follow the contour in space, carefully draw the contour line at the same slow and deliberate pace.
Work from contour to contour, along, across, or around the edges and surfaces of a form. Respond to each and every surface modulation with equivalent hand movements. At certain points—breaks in planes or folds across contours—a contour line may disappear around a bend or be interrupted by another contour. At these junctures, look at the drawing and realign your pen or pencil with the previously stated edge to maintain a reasonable degree of accuracy and proportion. With only a glance for realignment, continue to draw, keeping your eyes on the subject.
The more we focus on what we see, the more we will become aware of the details of a form—the thickness of a material, how it turns or bends around a corner, and the manner in which it meets other materials. When confronted with a myriad of details, we must judge the relative significance of each detail, and draw only these contours which are absolutely essential to the comprehension and representation of the form. Strive for economy of line.
Do not worry about the proportions of the whole. With experience and practice, we eventually develop the ability to scan each contour of a subject, hold an image of that line in the mind’s eye, visualize it on paper, and draw over the projected trace on paper.
While a true contour drawing uses a single line weight, varying the width of a line while drawing enables one to be more expressive. Thickening a line can provide emphasis, create a sense of depth, or imply a shadow. The characteristics of a line used to define a contour can communicate the nature of the form—its materiality, surface texture, and visual weight.
Exercise 1.1
Pick a subject that has interesting contours, as your hand, a pair of shoes, or a fallen leaf. Focus all of your attention on the contours of the subject and draw a series of blind contour drawings. Blind contour drawing develops visual acuity, sensitivity to contours, and hand-eye-mind coordination.
Exercise 1.2
Pair up with a friend. Draw a contour drawing of your friend’s left eye using your right hand. Then draw a contour drawing of your friend’s right eye using your left hand. Compare the rowing done with your normal drawing hand with that executed with the opposite hand. Drawing with your ‘unfamiliar hand’ forces you to draw more slowly and be more sensitive to the contours you see. This exercise may be done by looking in a mirror and drawing your own pair of eyes.
