Making Our Marks - Meditation and Spontaneous Expression

Join the Consciousness Explorers Club's Avi Craimer in this half-day meditation retreat focused on contemplative drawing!

Consider this scene: A child holds a crayon, clumsily perhaps, pressing it to a clean white sheet of paper. In an instant there is a waxy red gash across the page. Not just any line, but the line that encodes the precise shape of the path through space traveled by her hand. The movement of the hand in turn was not random, but the result of an inner process, her desire to draw bubbling up through a spider’s web of motor-neurons firing to trigger electrical impulses in the muscles and BAM!—onto the page.

The newly drawn-upon paper is now a piece of external reality, which embodies the inner process that generated it. In its exact form, it re-presents the hidden realities of the child's mind, brain, and body as a bold and visible mark. No sooner is mark created, than the child looks at her page, moving seamlessly from action to perception. In seeing the mark, she optically receives a fragment of the invisible, unfathomable processes unfolding inside herself.

Her psyche is changed by this act of perception, reflexively knowing itself, folding around itself via the external expression. As the psyche touches its own subtle edges, it is transformed and energized, vibrating excitedly. The energy released in this spasm may, if conditions are right, generate, you guessed it, a new impulse to act, a new stroke of the crayon, a new mark. So the process continues iteratively, unfolding more of the countless layers within.

In this urban retreat we will employ mark-making together with meditation as a method of self-inquiry. No experience with art or drawing is needed, only a willingness to move a pencil or crayon and see what happens!

*If ticket cost is a barrier to attending, please contact consciousnessexplorersclub@gmail.com to access PWYC tickets