About eight years ago I started a meditation practice of drawing or doodling that I call “inklings” —as it gives glimpses both inward into one’s self and outward into connection with others, the earth, or the great unknown. I do this by putting ink to paper. For the first year, I focused on drawing chalices over and over again, which grounded this practice in Unitarian Universalism for me. At other times, I’ve drawn as a method of prayer or meditation, focused on other people or myself, to send energy for healing or comfort. The benefits of doing a drawing or doodling spiritual practice like this are a lot like the benefits of any spiritual practice. It calms me when I’m anxious. It focuses me when I’m scattered. It connects me to my faith and to a sense of something larger. In times when the world feels out of control, it gives me a sense of order and places something small within my ability. And in a time of change, it gives grounding.

Here are the steps for a simple inkling practice of creating a prayer for the self. There are no mistakes, no wrong decisions, and no rules—every step is adaptable to your own wishes. This is not about creating great art. I will describe what works for me, but you will know what works for you and adapt it to fit into your location and available materials. It is also flexible in that it can be done with full attention or with divided attention. (And it is more socially acceptable to doodle in a meeting than to play a game on my phone!) The basic idea is to translate a spiritual practice— a prayer or meditation or worship service or ritual—into a doodle format.

Spiritual practices often begin and end in very specific ways. In Unitarian Universalism, we often light a chalice. So I often begin the inkling process with creating a sense of the sacred around the drawing process— lighting a candle, saying some words, or just finding a special place. And then the process is about focusing thoughts on the self or another person or idea and doodling about it. I do this in a few easy steps.

First, I begin by drawing something on the page to represent the focus of the practice. This might be a circle or a written name, but in this instance I used a circle with a moon in it to represent myself. (“Cynthia” means goddess of the moon.) Then I draw a circle or spiral or petals around the circle. These will be spaces I will fill with the things I am praying for. Anything can go in these spaces, but I often focus on things like love, hope, faith, family, health, friends, and home. And re member, none of these shapes have to be perfect. This is about the process, not the product.

An Unfolding Inkling

If this were a worship service, this next step would be the sermon—it’s the heart of the practice. I fill in the spaces with words, patterns, or images, or a combination, to represent the things I want to increase in life, attract into my life, or just to contemplate more, like health or happiness or love. I like to use a combination of written words and patterns that are meaningful to me. I often draw spirals, a symbol connect ed to the Goddess, and to labyrinths, and to feminist spirituality. When thinking about hope, I draw feathers, from the line from Emily Dickinson, “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers / That perches in the soul.” But what is most important here is to meditate or find a sense of peace while drawing. When I draw a pattern I like, particularly simple ones, I can get lost in the repetition of it for a while. Conversely, Celtic knotwork is beautiful, but I’ll think more about drawing the knot than about the meditation subject, and this is not about creating great art.

Every worship needs a closing, and so lastly, something I do if I’m still not feeling the energy flowing to me that I was hoping for, is to add arrows, directly linking the concepts to the symbol representing myself. The arrows represent the hoped-for flowing of energy. Or if I’m feeling full of good energy, I can direct an arrow out of the circle towards another person or the community or the world. And then, for a closing as I’m finishing the inkling, I just add things around the edge and inside the patterns that I like to draw—spirals, dots, springs, leaves. Some people enjoy doing shading, or adding color, and coloring can be its own spiritual practice. Remember, there are no rules to this!

I invite you to try this process and find ways to make it your own. And if you’ve enjoyed this process, you might find it interesting to delve into two methods that inspired me when I got started, Maria Thomas and Rick Roberts’ “Zentangle” process, and Praying in Color, by Sybil MacBeth. There are a lot of different ways to create your own artistic spiritual practice, and it can be rewarding to try out different ideas and concepts. For me, putting patterns and shapes together to make a bigger image gives me just an inkling of how our 7th principle works—each little thing I do is a part of the larger picture, and each action we take contributes to the interdependent web. Through setting pen to paper, I hope that not only am I centering myself, I’m adding peace to the world.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110223045/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/21_02/03.m4a