Drawing Prompt on Doodling

from upcoming book Creative Awakening: Journal and Workbook

Goal: To Make Images that Please Only You

Doodling is an experience of being totally engaged in a task or activity yet completely detached from the result. There are no accidents in doodling, and you can’t do it wrong. Nobody is going to grade you. There is an inverse relationship between your level of judgment and your level of creativity. If you’re not clouding your head with the lower vibrational energies of judgment, analysis, critique, there is more energy and clarity to create. You cannot create and critique at the same time. 

When you are without judgment, you don’t waste energy seeing things from only a right or wrong perspective. When you no longer focus on finding the ‘right’ answer, you can instead create powerful solutions. 

Great designs, poems, songs, dances, and stories come about when you’re goofing around, playing, and just enjoying making. Feeling your fingers doing something without a plan. Playing with forms and repeating patterns. Then, toggling back and forth between inspiration and discernment. 

Squiggle some kind of shape onto a paper with a pen, pencil, or paint. Just make some marks.

Move your tools around with no story. See what happens when you are not trying to please anyone but yourself. You’re just playing, looking to please yourself. 

See if you can expand it, enhance it.

See if you can find some design there. See if you can find patterns. 

Ask yourself, “What would happen if I repeat that somewhere else?” 

See the colors or rhythms and reinforce them.

Repeat the themes, patterns, and colors, only if they please you. 

Stop when your body says, “I am Pleased!”

You may feel a rush of breath of escape, a softening in your belly or a desire to do another one, or something else entirely.

Doodling is an excellent way to prepare for a period of creative work. Try it for a few minutes before you begin to work for the day. It will slow you down, get you in the zone and make you feel happy. It also reinforces the idea that when you make for yourself and outside of the strictures of judgment and criticism, you create something as unique as you are.