Pick up a pen. Fold a plain sheet of paper into eight rectangles. Then, instead of drawing the thing that made you angry, the birthday cake that makes you happy, or the rainy window that matches your mood, try drawing the anger, the happiness, or the mood itself, using nothing but lines, shapes, shading, and the arrangement of forms on the page. That is the whole of Mind with Heart's six-minute video, "Creativity, Abstract Art Emotions," published on March 3, 2021, and it is one of the cleanest invitations to inner work we have come across: a small, low-stakes art activity that quietly asks the maker to become curious about what an emotion actually is before deciding what it means.
The video opens with a plain instruction. "All you need for this art activity is one pen that works well and a sheet of paper," the narrator says. The downloadable sheet from the channel's website, titled Abstract Art and Emotions on the organization's site, provides a template, but the video makes clear it is optional. "If not no worries simply take a plain sheet of paper divide it up into eight equal rectangles and we're ready." Eight boxes, eight states of mind.
Notice how much the setup asks of you. There's no palette to choose, no brush to load, no canvas to protect from a bad first stroke. A single pen commits you to line. The eight equal rectangles are a container, and containers matter in practices like this one. They tell the mind that the work is bounded, that each emotion gets its own small field, and that you do not have to resolve the whole of your inner life on one page. The narrator also asks you to settle first: "giving yourself some good quality creativity time in front of yourself." Before any line is drawn, the exercise begins with the posture of attention.
The first emotion in the sequence is anger, and the questions the narrator poses are precise enough to function as a small inventory of form. "Is anger long lines or short lines, organized shapes or chaotic shapes?" Then comes the turn: "how is calm different from anger, what would calm look like if it was a series of shapes and lines?"
This is where the exercise reveals its logic. Anger and calm are not opposed as subjects; they are opposed as textures. One might be a tight cluster of short, hard strokes, and the other a slow, unbroken curve. Neither needs to resemble anything. The drawing becomes a kind of translation exercise, in which you convert a felt state into the grammar of marks: density, direction, weight, rhythm, spacing. Because there's no picture to get right, you are free to notice which marks your hand reaches for when you are not thinking about how they will look.
The same grammar applies to the other states the narrator names. For kindness, the questions are "is kindness many shapes or few, is it curved lines or straight lines, is it dark or light shapes?" For depression, the prompt is more open: "can we try to describe being depressed in a series of shapes and lines?" Each question is a doorway into the emotion's qualities rather than its causes.
The narrator defines the term with unusual directness. "That's what we mean by abstract art," the video says. "We're not drawing a picture of anything." The example offered is joy: "we're not drawing a picture of a birthday cake or something that makes us happy or joyful. We're just merely drawing shapes and lines and shading and an arrangement of forms that for us communicates the experience of joy."
That distinction is the hinge of the practice, and it is worth slowing down on. Most of us, when asked to express a feeling, reach for a story: the argument that started it, the person who caused it, the place where it happened. The video calls this looking at "the thing that made the emotion in us." Abstract drawing asks you to set the story down. The narrator says so plainly: "the trick or the challenge with this abstract art and emotions exercise is that rather than looking at and describing the thing that made the emotion in us, we're actually turning in and looking directly at the emotion itself."
"We're actually turning in and looking directly at the emotion itself becoming curious about actually what that emotion or that state of mind is." (Mind with Heart, "Creativity, Abstract Art Emotions," YouTube, March 3, 2021)
The phrase "becoming curious" carries most of the weight. Curiosity is a different posture from judgment. A person who is curious about their anger is not trying to justify it or fix it. They are asking what it is shaped like. That shift, from the causal narrative to the sensory form, is small on paper and large in practice. It turns emotion from an event happening to you into a phenomenon you can examine.
The video is emphatic on this point, and it is the part most likely to ease a reluctant participant. "There's absolutely no right or wrong way of communicating depressed," the narrator says. The exercise is not a test of artistic skill, and it is not a diagnostic. It is closer to what the narrator calls "can we try to describe" a state, the word "try" doing a lot of quiet work. Nothing is being graded.
For many people, the most useful outcome of an exercise like this may be discovering that a feeling they had only as a vague heaviness has a specific shape on the page: a cluster of tight verticals, a cramped corner, a single slow line running off the edge. The drawing does not make the feeling disappear. It gives it a form you can look at from slightly outside, which is often the first step in relating to it differently.
Midway through, the video shows a second example, "not using the template but just using a blank piece of paper," as a way of getting you into the creative spirit. The template is scaffolding. Eight rectangles help you pace yourself and keep the states distinct, but the underlying practice does not depend on them. Once you have translated a few emotions into marks, the boxes can become unnecessary. You may find yourself moving from anger to calm to something the video never named, such as restlessness or relief, and the blank sheet accommodates that without instruction.
The final prompt in the sequence hands the choice over entirely: "pick an emotion or state of mind and see if you can communicate that state of mind in the shapes that you use." This is where the exercise graduates from a guided activity into a personal practice. You are no longer answering the narrator's questions. You are choosing your own subject and deciding what counts as its language.
The last stretch of the video departs from instruction. The narrator's spoken lines give way to a repeated chant: "it's all about the breath, no distraction." The phrase recurs, with lines about thoughts that insist "you're never good enough," and the reminder that "a thought is just a thought." The video closes with the words "awareness now."
There is a reason this pairing makes sense. The drawing exercise asks you to attend to an emotion without being swept into its story, and the breath, repeated as an anchor, is a familiar way of doing exactly that. The chant reads less like a separate segment than like the same discipline in a different register: stay with what is arising, notice its form, and return to the breath when the mind wanders. Whether you come to the chant as a meditator or as a skeptic, the arc is consistent. Look directly, without the narrative, and let the look be enough.
The practical path is short. Take a sheet of paper and divide it into eight rectangles, or download the template from the Mind with Heart website, where the activity is titled Abstract Art and Emotions. Settle for a few breaths. Choose a state, perhaps angry or calm, and draw it without drawing anything recognizable. Ask the questions the video poses: long or short, organized or chaotic, curved or straight, dark or light. Move to the next box. Repeat until the page is full or you are finished.
Do not evaluate the result while you draw. When you are done, look at the sheet as a record of attention rather than a painting. Notice which states came easily and which resisted. Notice where your hand hesitated.
The video also invites a further step. The description asks participants to photograph their finished work and email it to info@mindwithheart.org, where it may be exhibited online. Whether you share or keep it private, the act of making something from an emotion, rather than about it, is the exercise's real offering.
Watch the video once through, then set a timer for twenty minutes with a single pen and an eight-box grid. Start with anger and calm, the two states the narrator uses to demonstrate contrast, and let the marks answer the questions about length, order, curve, and darkness. Then pick a state of your own and see what form it takes. If you want the printable template, look for the Abstract Art and Emotions sheet on the Mind with Heart website, and if you make something worth sharing, the channel has invited participants to send their work along.
