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In this guided meditation and drawing practice, artist and teacher John Simon Jr. leads us through a series of exercises designed to connect inner awareness with mark-making on paper. Blending Buddhist principles with intuitive art, this session invites you to notice your sensations, thoughts, and environment while allowing your hand to move freely. No art experience is needed, just a willingness to observe, let go, and explore.

Practice #3: Marking Practice

John Simon Jr.: Welcome. Scott’s asked me to lead some meditations and a few specific ones from Drawing Your Own Path.

The first one we’re going to do is called marking practice. It’s exercise number three in the book, and it’s really about connecting the mark-making we do with our hand to what’s going on in the mind. If at any point you get into it and want to continue or pause, that’s totally fine.

I’ll talk you through it as we go.

It’s based on a practice called noting practice, where we quietly reduce the input to what we see, hear, and feel. In this moment, you might feel yourself sitting on the chair. You might hear sounds from the street outside. You might feel the pencil in your hand. You might see the piece of paper.

As I pick up the pencil and move it toward the paper, I’m noting the feeling in my hand: how tightly I’m gripping the pencil, how my arm is resting on the table. When I push down, I feel the pressure of the pencil on the paper. As I move it slowly, I can even feel the texture of the paper.

What we want to do is sit and note. Hearing, if we hear something, we can make a mark that represents hearing.

Note feeling. Make a mark. Seeing. Hearing. Feeling.

As it goes, we can make different marks or repeat the same one. It doesn’t have to be any particular shape or path. Just when a sensation arises, we note it by making a mark.

I say in the book: let your hand move freely. Allow forms to arise without examining or reflecting on what you’re drawing. Let a hodgepodge of lines form in their uniqueness.

A sound is not just a sound, it carries information about where it was created in relation to your body and the materials that collided. A sound can also evoke emotional reactions. For instance, the grinding of a garbage truck may carry irritation or relief. The sound of rain can be soothing or anxiety-inducing.

When those come up, just let them loose. Notice that you hear something, or that you see something, or that you feel something, and continue to make a mark in response.

You can carry on with that for a few minutes. And then, when you feel like you’ve reached the end, leave it.

Come back to it later and see if the marks and shapes hold some meaning, or if there’s some reaction. See if you remember the states of mind you were in when you were making the marks.

Practice #6: Noticing Awareness

This is practice number six: Noticing Awareness.

I start by focusing on a tiny portion of a chosen subject, maybe the edge of a leaf, the place where the handle joins a cup, a little divot in a rock. Find an object that you might want to draw, and start by just noticing it. Just noticing a tiny portion.

Take a deep breath, exhale, and slowly broaden the focus of your attention until it’s as wide as possible. Imagine you’re a video camera backing up, still looking at the subject, but becoming aware of as much as possible in the entire field of view.

Try to take in everything at once by pretending the whole field is just an image being reflected in a mirror, as though you’re standing in a huge mirrored hemisphere. Everything is a reflection.

As the field of view starts to recede and look like a separate place, seen through a mirror, awareness will come to the foreground. Just imagine your whole field of view as a reflection, a big picture mirror.

It’s not hard to make this happen, but don’t force it. Allow it to happen. Be sensitive to what’s surrounding you.

You may find you can cause a shift by seeing each object as an outline, by noticing how the flatness of the scene fits together like a jigsaw puzzle. So just looking at the table here, I see a pencil sharpener, a drawing board, a pencil, and I imagine it all as shapes, as a completely flat thing.

It may also help, when practicing awareness, to have a pocket mirror handy. Gaze at the scene in the mirror. In the mirror, everything flattens. If you look at the mirror simply as a surface, it’s all flat. It’s an easy way to separate that world.

Practice this shift, from seeing things as your mind constructs them in 3D to just seeing this kind of flat world in front of you. It won’t take long. Just look. Don’t try too hard. Relax your eyes. Shift back and forth from depth awareness. Your mind saying, this is a world, this is a chair, to simply seeing the flat image.

But just see the shapes, as if it’s a flat picture. Also notice that when you’re not trying to flatten the view, being in the scene feels normal. But when you do flatten the view, the feeling shifts to being an observer of the scene. So give that observer some space. See how long you can view a flattened scene from that perspective.

Sit for a few moments in this awareness, looking through your eyes, but knowing that all you see is just what’s passing through to the brain. There’s a world out there, coming through in light, coming through in electric impulses, and then being reconstructed into this picture you’re simply watching from a distance.

Be that awareness that’s watching.

Practice #21 Noticing Intuition

This is exercise 21. Scott picked some of the best ones. This is the basic practice. It’s something I could do for hours on end. It’s really the whole basis of getting your mind set to allow a drawing to arise, which I call noticing intuition.

Because if you’re allowing something to arise, then it’s your intuition that’s guiding you. You’re riding on that layer of feeling as you watch things happen.

I’ll read some of it, and we’ll start to practice noticing intuition. Like I said, this is the core of improvisational drawing, learning how to just let go. How to let your hand draw. It might seem ridiculous, even silly, but if you can really do it, you’ll discover a lot. And trust it. Just trust your hand.

You can’t stay out of the way for too long anyway. Your mind is going to come in, and when it does, that’s the important part. When it comes in, it gives you something to notice, and that noticing helps you let go even more. So we’re basically just watching our attention. We’re turning it toward our discerning mind, opening it into an open field, and trying to witness the intuitive process.

We take as our basic instruction the words of the Diamond Sutra: Let the mind arise without fixing it anywhere. Allow any thoughts to appear and pass away without trying to do anything.

Basic meditation instruction: let it come up, watch it go. Don’t interact.

So for a moment, sit quietly with your eyes shut and just watch. See how the mind, when you close your eyes, naturally begins to settle down. Just watch that. And then, when you feel thoughts pushing forward, let them go.

Let them pass by. You might want to take a minute or so just to settle, then turn back on and be in this open state of awareness.

Slowly open your eyes, pick up a pencil, and let your hand move. This is what I do. It’s funny sometimes, but I have no judgment about it. I just let the hand move.

In the beginning, every day feels like: How can this happen? How can this be? But there it is. Just let it move, a walk for a walk’s sake.

Each time a new line appears, pay attention to any feelings: harmony or discord, balance or imbalance, simplicity or complexity. Not judgments, just small nudges that happen. You like it, you don’t like it, you’re neutral about it.

Just watch those feelings go by, letting the sensations pour through without guiding what you’re doing too much. Just let it happen.

Can you refrain from judging?

Try to isolate and observe the sense of incompleteness that compels you to keep adding lines one after another, as well as the sense of completeness that tells you to change what you’re doing or stop drawing.

This is good intuition. I’m drawing these lines in parallel, making them a little jaggy, and then I think, maybe I should make another one, or go a little out of bounds. I’m talking about it and noticing changes. You’re just watching yourself make these little judgments.

Sometimes they’re about the line you’re drawing. Sometimes they’re about what you think you’re doing. And sometimes they’re about things you haven’t thought about in a long time, just letting those things come through.

We’re noticing taste. An intuitive sense of what resonates, a sense beyond like or dislike. A sense of rightness, correctness, completeness. A kind of certainty about the way things should be.

Like if you’re placing furniture in a room, you don’t put everything on one side. You feel it should be spread out a certain way. That’s intuition you’re starting to notice. Something arises and tells you it should be one way or another.

It’s difficult to talk and write about how to improvise, because it’s equally difficult to describe intuition.

How do we describe what is beautiful? What looks right? What feels interesting?

Our taste is so ingrained. By the time we reach adulthood, we’re not usually aware of how we know when a room is clean and in order, when furniture is arranged just right, where pictures should be hung, or how we prefer the dishes arranged in the cupboard.

But we know immediately when something’s out of place. We know when it’s not right. And we know when it looks right.

How do you know what food do you love to eat? How do you know what people attract you? Somehow, experience builds that intuition.

So sitting and watching a drawing appear, mark by mark, you may pass through many thoughts and feelings. This shows you the flighty, context-sensitive nature of taste.

Cultivating personal taste means getting in tune with joy and following what resonates most. Watch more and more closely what you like and don’t like about the drawing, but without judgment. Just allow it to keep happening.

Move through the work by making choices based on this balance, always asking: What feels right? It’s a kind of discernment that’s needed not only in drawing but also in relationships, in business, and in living a good life.

So spend some time drawing, finding what resonates for you, what marks resonate for you, and continue to amplify that.

Practice #22 You Are the Universe Drawing

Okay, this one I really like, Practice 22: You Are the Universe Drawing.

I usually do this one at the end of workshops. It’s probably the most general improvisational drawing instruction. In it, we try to break out of the idea of you drawing. We start thinking about all the forces that come together to bring you here, with a piece of paper and a pencil, and what it means that you’re sitting here, doing this.

The most general instruction for improvisational drawing is: just draw. No need to say more.

Our everyday physical and mental conditions are the limits within which we improvise our lives. How we’re made, and what we think about, we make our lives from that. When I mindfully let go, drawings emerge.

You can use this practice as a powerful way to know yourself, if you let yourself just draw anything. There’s another territory to visit, an orthogonal axis to explore, a way to turn the view away from our lives and look deeper into the source of creativity.

Instead of improvising by noticing and reacting to our limits, in this practice we get out of the way entirely.

Imagine that we are serving as a channel for the forces responsible for creating and holding the universe together. The energetic forces of the universe are going to speak through us.

In this improvisation, we imagine ourselves without free will, in service to these unnamed, universal forces.

So we’re just going to channel the energy of the universe through our pencil. Open yourself and allow these forces to be in charge.

First, sit in silent meditation for a short while, relaxing and slowly bringing your attention back to this. Just this. This place where we are, this moment, here and now. If you want to pause for a moment and get centered, do that. We’re just going to be right here, in this very moment. Then we’ll touch the paper and begin.

What do I say in this? Paul Klee talked about the cosmo moment, that when the pencil touches the paper, it creates an entire universe. Every drawing that includes that mark is within that universe, and every drawing that doesn’t include that mark is outside of it. Every mark you make further refines and defines this universe.

Imagine the Big Bang, the beginning of the universe, when all energy was released and the material world sprang into being, creating all the matter and energy we know. Every atom we have has been recombining, gaining complexity, evolving into planets, stars, life.

Picture the countless stars that were the source of all the elements on Earth.

Think about the atoms in our bodies, how we are made of that primordial energy. The atoms formed in stars now form the cells in our bodies. Can you appreciate how inseparable we are from the universe? The air we breathe, the atoms we’re made of. We’re all made of the same stuff.

Our planet and all living things have emerged entirely from within, and as part of, the flow of this huge, ongoing process. This physical remixing that we, our brains, and our bodies are part of.

Does that mean the larger process is awake? Yes, it’s awake because we are awake. And we are not separate from it.

Imagine that through us, through each mind acting like a cell in the universal body, our practice becomes a channel through which the process knows itself. When we draw and observe the result, we play our role in how the system changes.

So sit quietly in this view. Draw freely. And imagine that whatever you’re motivated to draw, for whatever reason your hand turns one way or the other, that is the only result the system could produce. The outcome of this movement is what all of this process leads to at that moment.

You are the awake representative of the flow, feeding your sensory-filtered view back into the continuum. As you draw, you see it. And as you see it, it influences what you draw. Then you see that and it influences what comes next. It feeds back into the whole continuum.

This life, this moment in time, as you touch the paper with your pencil, exists for the mark being made. Exists for the universe to draw as you.

Continue to draw. Continue to let loose. Continue to explore.

All the best to everybody.

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