Mindfulness and Creative Expression with Anne Cushman: How to Reclaim Your Inner Artist

Episode Overview

In this rich, heartful conversation, James Baraz and Sean Fargo explore the inner and outer dimensions of teaching mindfulness:

• James leads a 15‑minute guided meditation with his signature gentle humor and clarity.
• They unpack how to work skillfully with wandering attention using the puppy mind analogy.
• James shares his origin story – from reading Be Here Now to studying with Joseph Goldstein and Ram Dass, to co-founding Spirit Rock and creating the Awakening Joy course.
• Together, they explore what it means to teach in secular settings without losing the heart of the Dharma.
• They widen the lens to climate change, social suffering, and collective awakening, and how mindfulness can support real change.
• James offers a powerful intention-setting visualization for anyone who feels called to share mindfulness.
• They close in song with “I Can See Clearly Now” and an invitation to let your light shine.

What You’ll Learn

Inside the workshop, Anne explores how to:

• Create inner and outer space so creativity can breathe
• Recognize creativity as an inherent life force, not a rare talent
• Use mindfulness of the body and senses as a gateway into art
• Work with difficult emotions as compost for creative expression
• Carve out sacred time for practice (even in tiny pockets)
• Listen for and follow the “golden thread” of inner impulse
• Relax perfectionism and embrace “shitty first drafts”
• Approach the scary, tender edges of your own experience with care

Highlights:

Practices Inside the Session

You’ll be guided through:

• A short settling meditation on space, breath, and creative life force

• A body‑and‑senses awareness practice (seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling)

• A 15‑second sensory journaling drill (one detail from each sense)

• A brief RAIN‑like reflection on emotions and how they move through

• A movement meditation where you let one tiny impulse spread through your body

• A mandala drawing exploration using color inside a circle

• A timed “I am…” free‑writing exercise inspired by the poem The Delight Song of Tsoai‑talee

Why Mindfulness and Creative Expression Belong Together

Anne starts by naming a tension many of us know well:

The part that wants to be solemn and spiritual… and the part that wants to be playful, messy, and wildly creative.

In her dream, she’s roller‑skating in a black velvet bikini and white fur‑trimmed skates, delighted with her own fabulousness—until she worries she might bump into Jack Kornfield dressed that way. That image captures the split between “respectable dharma teacher” and “irreverent artist.”

The heart of this workshop is the realization that these are not two separate people.

Mindfulness and creativity share a common core:

• Both ask us to pay attention to life as it actually is
• Both invite us to stay with our emotional landscape, rather than bypass it
• Both help us meet the human experience honestly—in the body, in relationships, in the messy details of daily life.

Research backs this up: studies have found that mindfulness can increase divergent thinking, improve focus, and bolster resilience in the face of setbacks—all essential ingredients for sustained creative work.

On MindfulnessExercises.com, we’ve explored this territory in other ways as well, from a guided meditation on mindfulness while being creative to reflections on mindful daydreaming and creativity.

Anne’s contribution here is to show—in a very direct, embodied way—how your meditation cushion, your yoga mat, your sketchbook, and your journal can all be portals into the same awakened life.

Anne’s Journey of Reclaiming Creativity

It can be tempting to assume that artists like Anne “just came that way.” She’s a senior retreat teacher at Spirit Rock Meditation Center and a pioneer in integrating mindfulness, embodied meditation, and creative expression.

She’s also the author of:

• The Mama Sutra: A Story of Love, Loss, and the Path of Motherhood (memoir)
• Enlightenment for Idiots (a playful, irreverent novel)
• Moving Into Meditation (a mindful yoga guidebook and course)

But in the workshop, she describes how her early creativity was shut down. As a child, she was naturally imaginative—curling up and telling herself stories for hours. Then teachers and adults told her she couldn’t draw, couldn’t sing, that her voice wasn’t good enough.

Once your voice gets knocked out of you, she says, it’s hard to feel you have anything worth saying at all.

Reclaiming creativity for her meant:

• Taking process‑oriented painting classes (where the focus was not on producing “good art”)
• Learning drumming, freeform dance, and 5Rhythms
• Studying writing with Natalie Goldberg and improv with Nina Wise
• Treating each form as a way to liberate stuck energy, not as a performance

Over time, these explorations fused with her meditation and yoga practice. Creativity stopped being a side hobby and became a vital part of her spiritual path.

7 Mindful Principles for Creative Expression

The heart of Anne’s teaching can be distilled into a handful of principles you can return to again and again.

1. Come Back to the Body and the Senses

First foundation of mindfulness, first foundation of art.

The more deeply you inhabit your body—its weight, pulse, and sensory world—the more raw material you have to create with. Creativity is a sensuous experience: color, sound, texture, temperature, movement.

Try this (adapted from the workshop):

• Let your eyes wander slowly around the room. Notice light, shapes, and colors without naming them.
• Close your eyes and note: one sound, one smell, the taste in your mouth, the feel of your clothes on your skin, the weight of your bones.
• On a scrap of paper, jot down one detail from each sense—just fragments, not full sentences.

If you want to go deeper, you might pair this with a visualization meditation that uses creative imagery to anchor your attention.

2. Stay Present with Your Emotional Weather

Both mindfulness and art tune us to the emotional body. As Anne’s son (a musician) points out, a computer can generate incredibly complex music, but it rarely lands the way a human’s heartbreak or joy does in a song.

Mindfulness practices like RAIN and compassion meditations train us to turn toward our emotions, feel them in the body, and hold them in awareness. Those same skills allow us to transform raw emotion into poems, paintings, songs, or movement.

Anne tells her students what Joyce Carol Oates once told her college writing class:

Whatever’s going on—your breakup, your exam stress—put it in your writing.

Try this:

• Sit for a few minutes and name your emotional weather: anxious, flat, tender, numb, grateful, confused.
• Ask: If this feeling had a color, what would it be? A shape? A sound?
• Let your body curl into a shape that expresses it. Then, if it feels safe, let your body briefly explore the opposite shape.

You can support this with a gentle self‑compassion meditation to soften around whatever arises.

3. Carve Out Sacred “Playtime”

Anne reframes both meditation and creativity as practices that thrive on protected pockets of time, even if they’re small.

She calls it “playtime” on her calendar—not “work on my masterpiece” but “show up and play.”

She shares advice she once received from Anne Lamott: in a busy season of life, just send one email a day to a trusted friend about something you’d like to write about. After a year, she had a trove of material to shape into essays.

William Carlos Williams, a physician, wrote short poems on his prescription pad between patients. One of his tiny poems, “Between Walls,” turns an alley behind a hospital and a shard of green glass into a whole world.

Try this:

• Schedule 10–20 minutes of “creative playtime” three times a week.
• During that time, you might:
  • Free‑write in your journal
  • Color, doodle, or collage
  • Dance to a single song
  • Practice a creative flow state meditation or listen to a binaural audio for increasing creativity.

The point isn’t output. The point is showing up so the well of creativity doesn’t dry out.

4. Listen for the “Golden Thread”

Once you’ve shown up, the question becomes: Now what?

Anne encourages us to listen for a subtle inner tug—what poet William Stafford called the golden thread. Maybe:

• Your hand keeps drifting toward a particular color pencil
• Your body wants to sway in a certain way
• A random sentence drops into your mind and won’t leave

In the workshop, she guides a movement meditation where you:

1. Feel the body from inside.
2. Notice one small impulse to move—perhaps a toe, shoulder, or jaw.
3. Let that movement ripple and travel anywhere it wants to go.

The art is in following rather than imposing.

Try this:

• Before you write or draw, pause and ask: What is this blank page asking for?
• Maybe it wants a streak of red, or a single line of dialogue, or a list instead of a paragraph. Trust that.
• In teaching, you might ask the same of your group: What does this room of humans need right now? – and let that shape your next cue.

For more inspiration, you might enjoy our conversation with Austin Hill Shaw on bringing mindfulness to our creative nature.

5. Let Go of Doing It “Right”

This one is tender for many of us.

Anne grew up in a military family with a bumper sticker that read, “We do things right.” That conditioning can make creative risk feel dangerous.

She quotes William Stafford’s response when asked what he does when he has writer’s block:

“I lower my standards.”

Natalie Goldberg says you have to feel free to write “the worst crap in the universe.” Anne Lamott talks about “shitty first drafts.” These aren’t flippant phrases; they’re strategies for survival.

When you’re allowed to make a mess:

• The body relaxes
• The inner critic loses a bit of power
• Unexpected honesty emerges

Try this:

• Set a timer for 10 minutes.
• Promise yourself you will write the worst paragraph you can about your day.
• Don’t cross anything out. Don’t fix spelling. Just keep your hand moving.

If you notice the perfectionist tightening, you might pair this practice with a gentle mindfulness while being creative script to keep your attention in the present moment, not on imagined future judgment.

6. Touch the Edges That Scare You (Carefully)

Sometimes, as we follow the thread, we bump into things we’d rather not see:

• A grief we’ve been outrunning
• An anger we were taught is unacceptable
• A desire or dream we’re afraid to claim

Anne uses a poem about fearing Paris as a metaphor. If you’re afraid something terrible might be hiding there, you might avoid not just the city but the whole country, then the whole continent—until your life grows smaller and smaller. At some point, a good friend says, “See Paris first.”

Creativity offers a controlled container for visiting “Paris”:

• You can write something and promise never to show it to anyone
• You can paint an image and burn the paper afterward
• You can dance a feeling in your living room and then bow to it

Try this:

• Ask gently: Is there a story I never write about? A scene I never draw? A truth I never speak out loud?
• Let one tiny fragment of it appear—one sentence, one color, one gesture.
• Stop if your nervous system feels overwhelmed. There is no rush; the point is choice, not re‑traumatization.

Practices like self‑compassion and letting go of your story can help hold you as you experiment at these edges.

7. Make It Playful: Mandalas, Doodles, and “I Am…”

Finally, Anne brings the inner child directly into the room.

She introduces a simple mandala drawing practice:

1. Draw a big, wobbly circle on blank paper.
2. Spread out colored pencils, pens, or crayons.
3. Ask: What color does this circle want first?
4. Stay inside the circle and let color wander for a few minutes.

The circle gives a soft boundary. Within it, you’re free to be messy and non‑representational. One participant shared that this was the first time since childhood she’d dared to draw, after years of being told she “couldn’t."

Later, Anne reads The Delight Song of Tsoai‑talee and invites a timed “I am…” free‑write:

• Every line begins with “I am…”
• Let images, metaphors, and odd associations spill out: “I am the crunch of an apple,” “I am the wind in the trees,” “I am the hunger of a young wolf.”

This kind of playful identity‑shifting is also at the heart of some of our creative mindfulness activities for children, reminding us that grown‑ups benefit from “getting messy with paints” too. 

Bringing These Practices into Your Teaching

If you’re a mindfulness teacher or coach, you don’t have to become an art therapist to integrate creative expression.

You might:

• Open a class with 5 minutes of sensory awareness, then invite people to jot down five raw sensory details from their day.
• Add a brief movement exploration—one small impulse, then let it spread—to a session on working with anxiety.
• Offer a creative closing ritual: a mandala circle people can color in silence at the end of a day‑long retreat.
• Use the “I am…” free‑write as a way to explore heart qualities or identities people are ready to loosen.

Mindfulness Exercises already hosts a growing library of talks and resources on this theme, including a podcast episode on the link between mindfulness and artistic expression and another on bringing mindfulness to our creative nature.

You can also point students to gentle, body‑based explorations like Wisdom to Dance, which reminds us that movement practice can be prayer, play, and meditation all at once.

About Anne Cushman

Anne Cushman is a pioneer at the intersection of mindfulness, embodied meditation, and creative expression. She’s a senior retreat teacher at Spirit Rock Meditation Center, where she founded the first multi‑year Buddhist meditation training for yoga teachers and has long served on the Teachers’ Council.

Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, Yoga Journal, O Magazine, and leading Buddhist publications, and she continues to teach online and in person through retreats, creative writing classes, and individual mentoring.

Keep Exploring Mindful Creativity

If this workshop resonates with you, you might also enjoy:

• Mindfulness While Being Creative – Guided Meditation Mindfulness Exercises
• Mindful Daydreaming Enhances Creativity
• Find Your Creative Flow State
• Mindfulness & Meditation Podcasts Collection

And of course, you can always return to the workshop video above, try one practice at a time, and let your own inner “golden thread” show you what wants to be created next.

“May your creative journeys and your meditative journeys and your personal journeys and your journeys as a teacher be richly rewarding, and may the benefits be for all beings.” – Anne Cushman

Additional Resources: