Community Film Art and Media has started our #Mindfulnesswith Mehndi online sessions via our Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/CommunityFilmArtMedia
These will include:
Pen Sketching & Water Colour sessions with Maryam.
Dance with Varsha
Henna with Hema
Upcoming online sessions for your diary:
Mindfulness With Mehndi: Dance for Fun, Fitness & Wellbeing: Sunday 18th April
Mindfulness With Mehndi: Let’s Sketch & Paint: Thursday 22nd April and Thursday 29th April
See https://www.facebook.com/CommunityFilmArtMedia/events for details
Is art good for your health and well-being?
Engaging in the arts seems to be growing in popularity as a way to improve wellbeing. Participating in the arts can enable people to deal with a wide range of mental health conditions and psychological distress.
The best part is that it helps people to improve their health and well-being through creativity. Making art is helping many people express themselves, without having to use words. An All-Party Parliamentary Group on Arts Health and Wellbeing published an Arts Health and Wellbeing report in 2017 summarising the findings of a two years’ worth of research. The report demonstrates that visual art improves psychological and physical wellbeing in a number of ways.
Evidence has been compiled exploring the potential of the arts to impact on health and well-being in a variety of social contexts.
The most common ways people engage with the arts in health are: music; visual arts; movement-based creative expression (e.g., dance) and expressive writing. Other forms of engagement with the arts include drama classes and storytelling.
The arts have also been found to be effective tools for mindfulness, which is effective for managing mental health.
Being mindful is being aware and conscious of your thoughts and state of mind without judgement. Art has been shown to be an especially effective tool for mindfulness, activating different parts of the brain from those taxed by logical, linear thinking. Another study found that visual art activated distinct and specialized visual areas of the brain.
So, the arts create conditions for mindfulness by accessing and engaging different parts of the brain. Research suggests this is not an experience exclusive to artists: it is simply untapped by those who do not practise in the arts. There is a wealth of studies on the relationship between the arts, flow and mental health, and flow-like states have been connected to mindfulness, attention, creativity and even improved cognition.
Art is to console those who are broken by life, Vincent van Gogh
I fight pain, anxiety, and fear every day, and the only method I have found that relieves my illness is to keep creating art. I followed the thread of art and somehow discovered a path that would allow me to live, Yayoi Kusama
I think that personal feelings, sentimentality and those sorts of emotions, are not art but that universal emotions like happiness are art, Agnes Martin