Effect of Mindfulness and Mindful Art on Beginners and Experienced Meditators
arXiv Preprint Archive – August 24, 2023
Source: arXiv
Summary
Regular meditation practice yields deeper relaxation, but newcomers can catch up quickly! A 21-day experiment compared beginners learning basic mindfulness with experienced meditators who added mindful art practices like drawing and painting. Remote sessions tracked vital signs and relaxation levels. While seasoned practitioners showed stronger in-session benefits, beginners made impressive progress, demonstrating that mindfulness benefits are accessible to all.
Abstract
Mindfulness meditation has been proven to be effective in treating a range of mental and physical conditions. Mindful Art is a type of mindfulness meditation that comprises sessions of drawing, painting and sculpturing with mindfulness for a given length of time. To date, the efficacy of mindful art has not been systematically studied. In this paper, we describe an experimental pilot study on two groups of participants, a beginner group of 21 participants and an experienced meditation group of 9 participants, who had previously practiced mindfulness meditation for more than one year. The beginner group was instructed in mindfulness sitting and moving meditation, while the experienced group was instructed in mindful art making in addition to mindfulness meditation. The instructions were delivered remotely over Tencent Conference and WeChat. The sessions were of 90 minutes duration each, twice per week, with 45 minutes of home practice daily and the length of the study was 21 days. The blood pressure, pulse rate and breathing rates, as well as the subjective degree of relaxation were recorded at every session. At the end of the study, the experienced group reported higher average difference in breath rate and relaxation within each session, while the beginner group reported a greater degree of improvement in breath rate and relaxation over the period of the study, although their scores were lower on average than the experienced group.