Listen or subscribe in your favorite player:

We talk a lot about meditation in this podcast, but there are many other things we do in life that can serve the same purpose of connecting with the deepest part of yourself to build a stable, happy mind. This can include spending time in nature, doing yoga, exercise, music, writing, and art.

For decades before I learned to meditate, art was my meditation. I didn’t feel like my mind was balanced until I made a few drawings that day. My friend John Simon Jr. feels even more strongly about this, so much so that he wrote a whole book about it called Drawing Your Own Path.

He and I got to know each other a long time ago because we’re both artists who work with computer software as our medium. We got together recently at his home in New York State to talk about the ways that drawing the old-fashioned way (with our hands) can serve as a meditation.

Introduction to John Simon Jr.

Scott Snibbe: John, I’m really excited to be here in your studio to talk about your book Drawing Your Own Path: 33 Practices at the Crossroads of Art and Meditation. You and I have been friends and colleagues for a long time. You get to a point where you’re not quite sure how long it’s been… at least a couple of decades. So thank you for joining me for How to Train a Happy Mind.

John Simon Jr.: It’s a pleasure to have you here and at my house.

How did you begin integrating a drawing practice with meditation?

Scott Snibbe: Ironically, you and I are both software artists, but we’re here to talk about the oldest form of mark-making, of art-making, which is drawing, and how that relates to meditation. I’d love to start by asking: how did you begin integrating a drawing practice with meditation?

John Simon Jr.: I like to say, wrong question, right answer. I was trying to write software that I guess would be like an artificial creative intelligence, although we didn’t really call it that at the time. We knew about AI, but it’s not like it is now. I was making software artworks that created continually changing, never-repeating images, patterns and that sort of thing.

But every time you write a piece of software, it has boundaries, it has limits. I wanted to find a kind of software that could recognize those limits and then exceed them. I wanted it to do something outside of its boundaries, to somehow improvise. I tried all the conventional approaches, artificial life, cellular automata, all the techniques being talked about at the time for creative computing. But of course, every set of rules has its bounds, and I was unhappy with that.

I wanted to explore what happened when I just let my hand improvise and make marks. If I could observe that and discern the unspoken rules I was following while improvising, I could use that as a basis to code something. That could be the foundation for an algorithmic approach.

I started to watch myself make marks, and I just did the practice that I do now, which is to be open and let the hand start moving. I don’t exert any judgment. I just let it roll. Paul Klee talked about a line going for a walk for a walk’s sake, just letting the line find its own way. It’s the wrong question because there’s no single source. Your creative mark might come because your arm is tired, or it might go a certain way because you’re angry, or you might have a thought that interferes.

Creativity is coming from your whole life. But it was the right answer because that type of introspection of your motion is a form of insight meditation. You’re watching what’s coming up, and you’re thinking about what’s coming up. I inadvertently began meditating while I thought I was just doing computer artwork.

I inadvertently began meditating while I thought I was just doing computer artwork.

When you’re drawing and you get into flow, it’s an incredible feeling. I started having really good responses to the drawing, and I kept doing it every day. That continued until I started having opening experiences and awakening experiences that I couldn’t explain. That’s when I went on a long search to figure out what was happening. Was it psychological, mystical, spiritual?

When you’re drawing and you get into flow, it’s an incredible feeling.

The Progress of Insight path in Theravāda Buddhism was, at that time, a very good map; I found what I call the crossroads of art and meditation. It was like I had been wandering in the wilderness, then I found some markers. Eventually, I found a teacher in Vincent Horn, and things started to line up.

What does a daily drawing and meditation practice look like?

Scott Snibbe: You have a daily drawing and meditation practice. Can you talk about what that looks like, and how long you’ve been doing it?

John Simon Jr.: I’ve been doing it for a long time. I use these five-by-six cards, and I try to put no rules on it. I want it to arise naturally. As a formal thing, the daily drawing happens on weekdays. There’s a Drawing Your Own Path community session from 11:00 AM to noon, Monday through Friday. I call it creative coworking. That’s a very consistent practice, but honestly, I would draw all day if I could.

My daily practice usually starts with my non-dominant hand. I sit quietly. It’s like in meditation. If you watch your breath and slightly suppress it, your body will breathe on its own. And you can do the same with your hand. You can sit and wait, and at some point, maybe it’s just a muscular reaction or something, but you get started. Then I just allow the hand to go.

I allow it as much as possible, just watching it. If I get too much in my head thinking about what I’m doing, or what I’m drawing, or why I’m drawing, I shift attention to the senses. I notice how tightly I’m gripping the pencil or how hard I’m pressing against the paper. I use that as a way of refocusing. It’s like the Shinzen Young “see, hear, feel” noting practice. You’re just noting the sensory inputs, and that helps the drawing get going again.

The unconscious mind, especially when you work with the non-dominant hand, has something to say. The non-verbal part of your brain has a lot to express, but it can’t do that with words. Stuff comes up. You might end up making a drawing and realize, oh my God, that’s a feeling I had. You recognize it. I had this feeling, or this thing I saw, and it was suppressed. And now it comes up.

The unconscious mind, especially when you work with the non-dominant hand, has something to say. The non-verbal part of your brain has a lot to express, but it can’t do that with words.

How has drawing as meditation changed you?

Scott Snibbe: You’ve been doing this a long time as a practice, let’s say 25 years or so, and longer as a general artist. Since this became a formal practice, how have you seen your mind change over the years and decades from working in this specific way?

John Simon Jr.: It’s a lot of self-knowledge, self-acceptance, and kindness. When I said, I guess this is what I’m interested in, these wisdom traditions and insights, it sounded like I was going to gain something. And there were parts that talked about healing. I thought, I’m not interested in healing. I’m fine.

But it turned out there were a lot of buried things, regrets and all kinds of stuff I had chosen to forget. Over time, when I get open and allow, those things emerge. And because it’s a strong mindfulness practice, the muscle is there to let it happen. Then it opens and self-liberates, or it lets go.

One of the greatest things has been the inner calmness and peace that grows. You allow thoughts and feelings to emerge that you didn’t even know you were keeping from yourself. I love to see and encourage people to let themselves express. I think it’s more than just healthy. I really think it’s necessary.

And I think people who don’t actively pursue a creative practice still act creatively in some way, even if they don’t say, I’m doing something creative. Choosing furniture for a room, arranging it, making dinner, deciding what to wear, these are all creative decisions, and people make them all the time. It’s one of the healthiest things, to recognize how much of your world you’re constructing.

Choosing furniture for a room, arranging it, making dinner, deciding what to wear, these are all creative decisions, and people make them all the time.

How has drawing as meditation helped with delusions such as anxiety?

Scott Snibbe: In our culture, especially in American culture, we often frame it as choices you’re making. But it not only makes more sense, it’s more beneficial to think of all the decisions we make in life as creativity, as expression. There’s something really powerful about reading a book by a friend, by someone you know, because often they reveal things about themselves that you didn’t know.

You have to wait to read their book to find out. And you’re really honest in your book about your own struggles with ambition, ego, anxiety, competitiveness in your career.

Can you talk a little about how drawing as meditation helped you deal with those difficult feelings, what we call delusions in Buddhism?

John Simon Jr.: The turning point came in 2009, when I was drawing these cycles. I was so invested in them. The cycles were these sets of shapes I called fyma-gons—squashed cubes. That shape became persistent in the work. I always paid attention to persistent symbols in the work.

I started thinking about the shape that the gons made, the interior shape. And then one set of them looked like a portrait. I began to wonder if the drawing was really about the internal shape. I had gone to all this effort, but maybe it was the negative space that was trying to express itself. When I saw the portrait, I realized the emptiness of self. The person we construct is really just all the stuff we surround ourselves with.

When I saw the portrait, I realized the emptiness of self. The person we construct is really just all the stuff we surround ourselves with.

Scott Snibbe: Unpack that for a sec. That’s a big sentence to say.

John Simon Jr.: It took about two years to integrate something like that. That’s when I started working with a teacher, because it was really unsettling to see. This was the day before.

Scott Snibbe: Okay, that’s what sparked you. So this is the day before. For anyone who’s listening, it’s an an image that looks sort of like circularly stacked uneven tiles with a kind of geological start and a hole in the middle.

John Simon Jr.: It was this weird shape, and I started to think, what if the drawing is really about this shape? I’m going to all this length, but what if what needs to be expressed unconsciously is really the shape itself, and that’s how it finds a way to come out. The hole. The negative space. And then the next day was that one.

Scott Snibbe: It’s quite powerful, because it’s not that complicated of an image. It’s almost like a wreath. But it’s the inside. The collar is in the shape. It’s like the shape of a head or a face. And then, looking back at the image, it sparked this realization. You’re kind of everything except what you thought you were.

John Simon Jr.: Exactly. This thing you call your ego, or yourself, is really just this elaborate construction of the universe. It’s this vortex or a temporary stability in the flow of your parents, nature, the history of the universe, nutrition—all these things coming together to form, for a temporary time, your existence. Then it comes apart again.

This thing you call your ego is really just this elaborate construction of the universe. It’s this vortex of your parents, nature, the history of the universe, nutrition that have temporarily come together to form your existence.

What was really there was all those things together. I saw that in the center of this vortex, in the center of this circle. That’s a central realization in Buddhism. I saw the truth of it immediately. Then it took a long time to realize that a lot of people had seen that before, and to understand what it meant and where it fit in.

Scott Snibbe: What you’re saying is that the realization happened not while you were drawing, but later, looking at the drawing. Is that right? This is something my closest teacher, Venerable René, was telling us recently. He says the realization often comes between the meditation sessions. There’s some integration and discovery that you don’t quite understand during the meditation itself, and later, when you’re analyzing it, that’s when the realization happens.

John Simon Jr.: I have that experience in the daily practice I describe in the book. There’s a whole process: choosing your drawing technique, practicing it, and then what I call reading the drawings. That’s when you come to those moments where you make up stories, try to integrate, and tell yourself what it’s about. That’s when realizations start to happen.

That’s why I always make the drawing and post it every day, and then I write a little bit. Sometimes it’s just a caption, sometimes a whole story. That’s part of the reading process. Once I started doing that, it really moved things forward.

I think it’s because you have that moment of reflection. You have to take this nebulous, sketchy set of lines and bring it into a few words. You have to decide, this drawing is about this. Of course, it’s about everything, but at that moment, you choose the word that defines it. And then when you look back, you can see where your mind was. It helps you understand what you were thinking, what you thought it meant at the time.

What is the art work trying to say?

Scott Snibbe: There’s an incredible sophistication in how you approach meditation and drawing in your book. Something many people don’t realize is that there are many types of meditation. What struck me was your openness to your own work, going back and asking, what was I trying to say? What did I discover? What did it mean? What did I think it meant at first, and what do I think it means now?

Can you talk a little about that process?

John Simon Jr.: The experience that started it was back in college. I was a freshman at Brown, taking a class called Art 10. I hadn’t had much art training in high school. In Louisiana, there wasn’t a lot of art being taught. I was also really focused on science and math, but when I got to Brown, I decided to take an art class.

I signed up for Art 10, and on the first day, there was a nude model in class. I was this 18-year-old guy from Louisiana, and it was a bit of a shock. I tried to learn the proportions of the figure, the edges, the shading. I really tried to make a good drawing. Those drawings were of the figure. That was their meaning. I was learning to draw the figure. That was the subject.

Then I packed everything away, went home for the summer, and came back later and brought all the work back out again. I was getting ready for the next year. I’d look at the drawings, and by then I’d gotten older, had more experience.

I didn’t see a picture of the nude model anymore. What I saw was a vulnerable 18-year-old.

Scott Snibbe: You saw yourself.

John Simon Jr.: Yeah, I saw who I was. I realized that was also recorded in the lines. The whole history of who I was at that time was there. I realized how much gets encoded.

Scott Snibbe: They say that about writing: you can’t help but reveal yourself. But I think it’s the same with drawing.

John Simon Jr.: Right, they say every drawing is a self-portrait.

Every drawing is a self-portrait.

Art without the labeling

Scott Snibbe: You were talking earlier about what you call your marking practice. Your book has 33 practices in it, and one of the early ones is this marking practice. I actually did it with my daughter on the plane on the way here, and we both really enjoyed it. It really connected with her. She was reflecting on it and even describing it to other people we met this week.

It’s the idea of directly conveying what you’re feeling into a mark, without labeling it, without thinking about it. I wonder if you could talk more about that. In some ways, I wish I had known about that practice earlier. I grew up with parents who were artists. I was always drawing. I loved drawing and abstract art, and I learned a lot about it.

But this made me realize how much I wish I had been exposed to this practice sooner. To just completely let go and translate your experience into marks is very powerful.

Can you talk more about that practice?

John Simon Jr.: You described it really well. If you feel uptight, and then you let that uptightness guide the pencil, or you try to relax and move that feeling through the pencil, the feedback is quite good. Sometimes when you’re angry and you do it, it’s just funny to see the marks. It expresses the feeling. It gives you a way to be heard by yourself, or to say something to yourself.

You can also do it when you don’t know how you feel. Then you look at it and go, oh, I look confused, or whatever it is.

“Good” art vs. “bad” art

Scott Snibbe: You talk a lot about the importance of not caring how “good” your drawings are. I remember Chuck Close came to campus and spoke when I was at Brown. He said that in grad school, he was making very “good” work—copying abstract expressionists and similar styles. His professor told him, if you’re making good work in grad school, you’re doing the wrong thing.

Can you talk a bit about why it’s important not to care how good your work is, or even to make bad work?

John Simon Jr.: I think Chuck Close has a quote. He said, If it looks like art, it looks like someone else’s art. There’s this whole level of conditioning from society about what art is. There’s a whole value system in society that we have to navigate. But creative expression and knowing yourself exist on a different plane; judgment and expectation can interfere with that.

That said, I do sometimes sit down and draw a thing. And there’s nothing wrong with that. There’s nothing wrong with making a realistic drawing or trying to make it look really accurate, which tends to align more with what society values in a drawing. I see that as more like a concentration practice.

Realistic drawing can be a kind of meditation. It’s not about letting go in a broad, abstract sense. It’s about focusing closely: breaking an object down into shapes, then breaking the shapes into textures, and the textures into lighting. At Drawing Your Own Path, we say the only bad drawing is the one you don’t make. Every drawing has value. Every drawing can be meaningful to you. But if you don’t practice, that’s where the problem is.

The only bad drawing is the one you don’t make.

Scott Snibbe: Now, all this said about the nonjudgmental approach to drawing, and drawing as a way to get to know yourself, you also talk about good drawings. You even talk about realizing the folly of all the time you spent trying to make an automated computer drawing machine. The difference between you and the machine was that you wanted to make a good drawing. What’s a good drawing?

John Simon Jr.: First of all, you love what you’re doing. You’re having fun, or you’re fulfilling a need—maybe a need to do it. I call that the upside. Then you can start to weave elements together. You can look for what I’d call resonance among composition and material. It’s a kind of resonance or simultaneity that happens when your meaning, your marks, and your materials all start to talk to each other. They’re not the same, but they align in a way.

Like Wayne Thiebaud, he paints a cake, and he applies the oil paint to the canvas the way you would frost a cake. So the meaning, the materials, and the textures are all in this beautiful alignment.

Scott Snibbe: The medium is the message.

John Simon Jr.: Yeah, they talk to each other. Is it a cake? Is it a painting? Those kinds of overlaps. You want to find those resonances in your life. You’re drawing a picture of something, and it turns out that the thing, which might have been chosen arbitrarily, has a deeper meaning. Those are good drawings.

What’s the source of creativity?

Scott Snibbe: One of the most common questions I get as an artist (and I bet you do too) is, where do you get your ideas? I think in many ways these practices answer that. This is where the ideas come from.

John Simon Jr.: That’s the whole question in the beginning, what’s the source of creativity? Could I go back into myself, like the source of the Nile River, and find a spring I could hook up to the computer and just make drawing after drawing?

But it doesn’t come back to a single spring. It opens to an ocean. Every element of your life comes in. Where does it come from? It comes from absolutely every experience you’ve ever had. Every interaction, every sensory input somehow adds up to the thing you want to draw. All the choices you make, the textures you like, the materials you use, what you think you have to do, and why you want to make a drawing—they’re all part of this interwoven story.

Scott Snibbe: There’s a spiritual dimension to it too, for lack of a better word. My friend Dan Levitin, you might have read some of his books, he’s written about neuroscience, music, and creativity, had a TV show where he was talking to Sting. He asked Sting what it is about his brain that makes it capable of coming up with such original songs and melodies. And Sting said the question itself made him uncomfortable, because he didn’t know. He was nervous to even ask himself the question, afraid that if he did, it might go away.

He also interviewed Stevie Wonder. Same thing. He asked Stevie what it is about his brain that creates these original patterns, and Stevie said it’s a gift from God.

What would you say about that mystery, that unknowableness of creativity?

John Simon Jr.: I love that. Sometimes a dancer will say they’re not dancing, they’re being danced. There’s a feeling that I’m not drawing, it’s just coming through. I get that question a lot when I talk to people. I say, if you learn mindfulness and drawing, you might discover your voice or understand what you have to say or why you’re making art. And people have a lot of fear around that.

I’ve been through that desert where you feel like you know too much. But the practice carries you. And where does it come from? That’s a great question. But the question itself assumes, in some way, the solidity of the self, which we were talking about earlier.

I’ve been through that desert where you feel like you know too much. But the practice carries you.

If you don’t see that, or if you see the emptiness of self, or how the self is a construction, it becomes clearer. It’s the confluence of how my parents valued art, how my grandparents introduced it, seeing art in the home, being taken to museums. That creates a sense of value: why you should do it, what you learn from it, the conversations you have. It’s all the threads that come together to make this thing.

And one of those threads is (whatever you want to call it) consciousness, or the ground, or God. If the universe is an aware thing, and we’re part of it, then it must be aware because we are aware. Or at least, we think we are. We have this sense of awareness. The specialized cells of that awareness want to know itself. And one way it can do that is through us. We make marks and look at the marks. We make a sculpture and look at the sculpture.

Scott Snibbe: Like Carl Sagan said, “You are a way for the universe to know itself.”

John Simon Jr.: And when you embrace that in your drawing, it’s easier to let go. There’s nothing wrong you can do, because this is what the universe is doing. This is how it has to go. The feeling that arises is part of that same flow. When I really learned to let go into that, I expanded into a much broader field of subject matter and materials. I was just comfortable letting it arise.

Software art and computer coding

Scott Snibbe: I do want to talk to you a bit about computers, since we’re both software artists. You had some great insights in your book. One thing I loved was the connection you made between computer code and literature. You wrote that a computer program is words that do what they say. That’s such a beautiful way of expressing it. I fell in love with that idea as a kid. I just loved my Apple computer. I thought it was the closest thing to mind, computer code, because it’s dynamic.

Can you talk about that magic, how computer code works? And also some of the problems, like having to describe images using words through code?

John Simon Jr.: That quote is from Friedrich Kittler. The surprising thing about writing in its binary form is that it does what it says. He also talked about the word “implementation.” In software, when we say implementation, we usually mean someone has written a piece of software. But it’s also a tool, like an implement. I thought that was a fun connection.

You break into new avenues, whole fields of visual possibility that I never considered before. I find myself putting lines together automatically in ways I hadn’t thought of, or making simple gestures that open something up. The hard part is that it can be difficult to be specific. You’re really just exploring. You accept what comes and then see if you like it or not. But it can be hard to get your own expression through.

And like we said before, the set of rules is the set of rules. It’s hard to break out of them and be surprised. You work with some little automaton, and it surprises you. Then you reach its limit, so you rewrite it, and it surprises you again. But is it saying exactly what needs to be said? It’s saying something, but is it saying what you want to say? Is it rich enough? Resonant enough?

That’s when the subtleties come in. You really have to bring yourself back into it in some way. When I made pen plotter drawings, I often worked on top of them by hand. When I make the big sculpture works, I leave room for the hand because I think some part of the transmission needs a direct mark somewhere.

Thoughts on using generative AI for art

Scott Snibbe: When it comes to words that do what they say, we’ve now reached a major expansion of that with artificial intelligence. You don’t write about this in your book, but we’re at a moment in history where it’s hitting the art world hard. I wanted to get your reflections on that.

I know you’re experimenting with AI in your work now. I’ve experimented too, and I came to a kind of disturbing conclusion. The way generative AI translates words into images can be very literal. But in essence, what makes visual art powerful is that it often expresses things that can’t be put into words.

So I started having this opinion, which I think is too strong but still useful. I began to say that what generative visual AI creates might be a subset of images that aren’t art, because they’re direct translations of words into pictures. And if they can be fully expressed as the words that produced them, maybe they’re missing something. I know that’s a bit exaggerated, but you’ve been thinking about this and working with the tools.

What’s your perspective on that relationship, maybe even a problematic one, between words and images in the age of generative AI?

John Simon Jr.: I think the last time we talked in New York, I was pretty aligned with that position. We kind of came to a consensus on it. What I call the push-button method, or the prompt-to-image method, has those problems. A lot of art has that issue when it has to filter through words. If meaning is assigned from the start, and if the words are defined by a dictionary or the model’s training, then they can’t escape that.

A lot of those works end up being what I call averaging. You’re averaging all the training data into some space. I’ve been trying to break through that and work around it.

Conceptual art and contemplation

Scott Snibbe: I want to come back to the connection you make between conceptual art and computer art. I really enjoyed that part of your book. You draw parallels between art, computer science, and programming by saying that understanding only comes through doing. I love that.

I’m a big fan of Yoko Ono, John Cage, and Sol LeWitt, some of the first algorithmic artists. All of them made art that consisted of instructions to be carried out by others, or by the viewer, as the art itself.

Can you talk more about the connection between conceptual art, following ordered instructions, and contemplation? It’s a wonderful connection you make.

John Simon Jr.: I saw LeWitt’s work and loved it. I got to meet him and talk to him. It felt like perfection to me, especially as someone with a computer background. I could reach the highest levels of the art world. My egotistical success could be complete, and I could use a computer (one generation after LeWitt) to do his kind of work. But LeWitt’s systems were designed to be carried out by humans. That meant there was a limit to the complexity of his instructions. He couldn’t say, “Draw 50 million lines.”

So I saw an opening to extend LeWitt’s ideas with automation and explore conceptual image spaces that a computer could render, but a human couldn’t. I made a piece called Combinations, after LeWitt’s Combinations. It was a little interface on my website where you could draw lines, and it would show you all the combinations of those lines. Sandra Gering, my dealer, put on a show where we included drawings by Hannah Dobro, another systematic artist and a daily practitioner.

And then I had my combination drawings, and we had gotten LeWitt. He allowed us to do a drawing on the wall. We hired one of his installers. It was arcs and straight lines. The wall was probably 12 or 14 feet, maybe even 20 feet long. They painted it black, and then used chalk. It took about two days to complete. And when it was done, I stood there, overwhelmed by this drawing.

The concept just meant nothing at that point. It was the presence. LeWitt was using concept to create presence in a physical way. The physicality of it, the way it manifests in space. The waxiness of the crayon. The difference between my size and the scale of the wall. The instruction could have said anything, like “draw four lines on a wall.” That wasn’t the point.

It was the specific thing that got completed. That was another resonant thread in the process. It was beautiful that it had this sense of completion. The system was beautiful. He had created a concept that was perfected, and then it made a piece. It was like running a program. But the presence of the piece was something else. I realized there is something about art and physicality that you cannot separate.

Scott Snibbe: Probably the longest-standing form of ordered instructions we follow is ritual. One of the biggest impacts on human beings is the power of ritual. One of the problems in society right now is the lack of rituals. The manifestation of ritual, the physicality of it, is what makes it so powerful.

John Simon Jr.: There’s a Terence McKenna quote. He quotes Whitehead, saying something like, “It goes through the formality of actually occurring.” That’s what I think about when I sit down to draw every day. It’s about going through the formality. The drawing that appears today is the one that went through the formality of actually being. That’s why I treasure it no matter what. If it’s two marks on a page and that’s all I could do today, then that’s what formally occurred.

Scott Snibbe: Ideas really are cheap. People sometimes say, “I had that idea,” and I say, ideas are actually pretty cheap. You can say “flying car” or “world peace.” It’s easy to have a great idea. The challenge is to actually manifest it.

It’s easy to have a great idea. The challenge is to actually manifest it.

John Simon Jr.: It’s the whole work. The whole world is in the details: how the pencil is tipped, how hard you press. All those things come into play. All those stories and layers come into play. And you miss that with computer art. Even with NFTs, people buying JPEGs and all that, it never quite engages at that level. But it’s its own thing, and I love it. It’s beautiful. The fact that you can have an artwork that’s algorithmic, that changes and moves—that’s its own quality.

A lot of the work I did with software pieces, I kept making them more and more sculptural, more and more physically engaged, just to bring in that material aspect and presence. When the pieces shifted from being strictly on screen to becoming structural, physical, sculptural objects, that’s when they started to sell. That’s when people really engaged with them.

Scott Snibbe: You have to see the hand of the artist.

John Simon Jr.: And there’s something about the material. The presence. I think it’s about how you make a work that’s really present.

One simple drawing exercise to do now

Scott Snibbe: In the episode that follows this one, we’ll have you guide a couple of the exercises from the book. But to close this episode, if someone wanted to try drawing their own path right now (since now is a good time) what’s one simple, no-pressure exercise they could begin with as the episode ends?

John Simon Jr.: Mark making is so simple. Just make a mark and notice how it feels. If you want the simplest mindfulness drawing exercise, just grab some paper. It doesn’t matter (an envelope, a paper towel) and anything to draw with: a crayon, a pencil. You could even do it on your iPad with your finger.

Take a moment and make contact. Feel that contact, and then some movement. See what comes up. It’s as simple as that. It’s like in Zen when they say, follow your breath. That could be ten years of work. Just notice what’s coming up.

Scott Snibbe: If you’re listening, try that. I think we all have a lot more time in the day than we realize, time we could take back from social media and everything else. Try this for five minutes if you’re not driving, and see what comes up.

John, thank you so much. You’re one of those people I could spend all day with. It’s always interesting and illuminating. Thank you for taking the time to talk so deeply about your work and your book.

John Simon Jr.: It’s a pleasure to find someone who’s interested, who’s read the book, and who has thoughtful things to say about it. Always great to talk.

Thanks for joining me for this interview with artist John Simon Jr. about his book and practice, Drawing Your Own Path. John has a community that meets every weekday to do the exercises from his book. You can find more at drawingyourownpath.com.

If you’d like to deepen your meditation practice and connect with a community, exploring the ideas we talk about in this podcast visit our website. There you can sign up for our newsletter and join our Train A Happy Mind community, which offers weekly lectures, meditations, classes, and discussions.

You can also purchase my book, How to Train a Happy Mind: A Modern Non-Religious Approach to Buddhist Wisdom with a Forward by the Dalai Lama. It’s available in paperback, ebook, and audiobook.

If this podcast has been a benefit to you, please consider supporting our nonprofit mission. How to Train a Happy Mind is a project of a Skeptic’s Path to Enlightenment, and we rely entirely on the generosity of our donors to keep our podcast and programs free and ad free. To contribute, click here! We accept cash, credit, Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other cryptocurrencies, and your donations are tax deductible in the us.

Credits