A Peek Inside Our Meditation Stones Workshop
Last month, our sister company Creative Health Collective hosted our first in-person workshop since March 2020. We gathered on a Saturday morning to make meditation stones. If you’d like to take a peek behind the scenes of our art making and learn a bit more about these stones, read on.
What are meditation stones?
In their physical form, they are glass stones shellacked with collaged images and words. As an art object alone, they are beautiful, but they also have several uses:
A meditation stone with a word or motto can be kept in your pocket to touch in moments when you need to feel grounded
A set of stones with emotions can help you find the one that labels how you’re feeling in the moment.
You can use them like tarot or oracle cards--close your eyes and choose a stone from a bowl, take a look, and see what connections, feelings, or memories it brings up for you today.
If you’re interested in purchasing a set of “feeling stones”—meditation stones labeled with emotions—to use in your personal life or wellness practice, visit the Creative Health Collective shop for available sets or custom orders.
There’s something magical about being back together in person, especially after such a long time. I had created a set of stones alone and found the process to be very meditative and introspective. But together in a room with others, there was a lightness. Something begins to crackle when you make art in a room with other people. The collective unconscious makes itself known. I glanced over at the person next to me and saw we were both making stones with images of eyes. Another two workshop participants realized they’d both made stones with an illustration of a hedgehog. It felt strange, at the end of the morning, to divide these stones that were in conversation with one another, taking them on our separate ways.
Making meditation stones requires an element of trust. As you layer Mod Podge over words, images, and then the back layer of the stone itself, the things you’ve chosen are momentarily obscured by the glue. Everything goes white and blurry. It’s easy to think you’ve ruined it. But then, the shellac dries. The images come clear again. The word you’ve chosen shines through the round side of the stone, and you hold in your hand a vision that has gone, then returned to you.
Meditation stones are almost like making micro-collages. And like all collage work, the artmaking process tends to have a mind of its own. Sometimes you can be intentional about the words you’re writing or choosing, but other times it feels like the images are in charge. An image will speak to a word, or a word will call to a particular picture. You’re there--you’re choosing them--but something magical is present, too.
It’s that magic that leads to the flow state, which dropped everyone’s jaws when we realized what time it was. Where does time go, in a state of communion? We lose ourselves in the tactile sensations of the scissors, the paintbrushes, the glue. We lose ourselves in conversation and laughter. We emerge feeling healed, in some small way.
If you’re local to the Northern Virginia area, we hope you’ll consider joining us for our next Creative Health Collective workshop on December 18th. For this workshop, we’ll be trying the Zentangle technique: a drawing style that allows even those with no art experience to create intricate, meditative images. We’ll be announcing future workshop dates and information in our newsletter--you can subscribe at the link below. We hope to see you soon.
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