Doodle Your Way to Clarity: How Mindful Art Fuels Your Focus

• Why Taking Breaks Boosts Productivity – The common myths about productivity and why pushing through exhaustion isn’t always the answer.
• How Creativity Plays a Role in Peaceful Productivity – My personal journey of burnout, rediscovering creativity, and how it became a key pillar of my approach.
• Jodi’s Introduction to Mindful Art – How Jodi combines art therapy and mindfulness to help people access inner clarity and calm.
• A Simple Art Exercise for Processing Emotions – A guided practice that involves drawing your emotions, stretching, and reflecting on the messages that emerge.
• Why This Works Even If You’re Not an Artist – The power of creativity as a process, not an outcome, and how it can support your mental well-being.
• How to Incorporate Creativity into Your Daily Life – Practical tips for making mindful art a part of your routine without adding more to your to-do list.

“Calm the body to quiet the mind, to tap into that wisdom place, and that’s our reset into peacefulness and being more present.”

“We quiet the mind and playfulness so that we can tap into our wisdom.”

“We don’t usually think that, especially when we have pressing deadlines, that it’s okay to stop and do those things, but it is so powerful.”

“The dialog technique is just a great, powerful technique when you have challenges or lack of clarity, but it also speaks to another part of our being as related to the mind-body anatomy and yoga philosophy.”

“Anything that you’d like to do that gets you in the body, but especially anything that involves bilateral movement—walking, swinging the arms, using both hands in the creative process—these are really legit neuroscience ways to engage the parasympathetic nervous system and reset.”

ANNE RAJOO

If you’ve been feeling stuck, stressed or like there’s never enough time, this episode is for you. Maybe you tell yourself, “I don’t have time to pause or take breaks”, “I need to keep pushing to be productive.” Or “if I’m not working hard or achieving, I’m failing.” These beliefs, though common among entrepreneurs, can leave us emotionally burned out, creatively drained and disconnected from the very inspiration that fuels our work. In today’s episode, we’re exploring a different way, a way to step off the hamster wheel of overwhelm. We’ll talk about simple, mindful art practices that can help you reset your body and mind in just five minutes. You’ll hear about how activities like drawing or doodling can process emotion, calm your nervous system, and even uncover wisdom you didn’t know was there. And by the end of this conversation, you’ll see how pausing even for a few minutes can create powerful shifts, allowing you to regain focus, creativity and calm in your day. 

Welcome to the peaceful productivity pod. I’m your host, Anne Rajoo, and together, we redefine productivity and find your sweet spot where performance meets happiness. 

2023 was probably one of the hardest years in my life. I was burnt out. My marriage was hanging on by a thread, and I came so close to shutting down my business completely; it felt like I was spinning my wheels, getting deeper into overwhelm and exhaustion. That’s when I made a commitment to myself to change things. I wasn’t going to let myself live in survival mode anymore. And that commitment became the foundation of what I now call Peaceful Productivity.

And Peaceful Productivity consists of three pillars. 

The first one: productivity tools and techniques. 

Second: mindset shifts. 

And third: creativity. 

That year, when I was deep in the trenches, I made creativity my personal theme, or word of the year. I used to have so many creative projects going on, always crafting and sewing and DIY, but I had become too busy to do anything creative, unless it was designing a graphic for my business or something like that. I was really missing my hobbies and the healing and nourishing feeling they would provide to me. I know that when I allow myself to create for the sake of the creative process, not the outcome that somehow may generate an income, like designing a graphic or posting on social media, it clears my mind. It opens up space for new ways of thinking, and honestly, it makes me so happy. And that happiness ripples out, it helps me to be more productive in ways that feel light and joyful and not forced and draining. 

So I’m excited about this particular episode, which is slightly different than my normal format, but it’s going to be absolutely great. Today’s guest is Jody Rose Gonzalez, nature-based artist, art therapist, yoga teacher and social entrepreneur. Jody joined my community for a workshop on mindful art and productivity, and it was such a powerful experience. That day, I showed up stressed and frazzled. I was having major tech issues for most of the day, and the workshop felt like one more thing on top of an already long list. And Jodi started the session with guiding us through a simple yet profound exercise. We began by drawing what would link our current emotion. My first image was chaotic and messy, full of zigzags and frustration. Then we did some stretching and breathing exercises to calm our nervous system, and I could feel my body starting to let go of all the tension. When we returned to the drawing, we created the second image and followed it with a guided art therapy exercise, dialoguing with the drawing itself, messages like “you’ve got this” and even “you’re loved” started to emerge for me. And it created this tangible shift in how I was feeling. 

My second drawing looked completely different, lighter or smiley, and by the end of the workshop, I felt like myself again, grounded and ready to move forward. Now, Jody is going to walk us through some mindfulness-based art therapy techniques. If you are able, I encourage you to carve out about 30 minutes, grab some plain paper or notebook and some colored pencil markers and follow along, pause the episode when needed. These exercises aren’t about creating the perfect masterpiece. It’s about processing your energy and your emotions and acknowledging what’s happening in the moment and giving yourself the space to reset. But if you’re not quite in the place where you can fully participate right now, it’s okay to keep listening. You will still learn valuable concepts and hopefully feel inspired to prioritize your creativity, and when you’re ready, you can revisit the episode or watch the full workshop recording, which is available in the show notes, and dive into the full exercise. 

Let’s step into the conversation with Jodi and explore how mind art can be the bridge to both creativity and productivity.

JOSI ROSE GONZALES

I love the topic of art-based mindfulness and and obviously had a really wonderful conversation about the mind-body connection and creativity and how that can inform Peaceful Productivity. And this is a lot of science behind it. So I teach art-based mindfulness, it’s a fusion of art therapy, of positive psychology, and yoga philosophy and, trauma-informed neuroscience. And specifically, it follows the assumption of non-dualism, which is that the mind and body are not disconnected. So we believe the mind and body are connected and yoga philosophy offers us a wonderful model that brings us together. That once we understand that it’s like really powerful and really gives us permission to think outside the box, to play a little bit, to give ourselves some sensory breaks, and this is what fueled and clear, and really helps with the mental like burnout overwhelm that can happen when we’re really fast oriented. We’ll talk about calmly calming the body to quiet through kind of playfulness so that we can tap into our wisdom. And why do we want to be operating from our wisdom? I mean, I think we can all, we can all sort of surmise, like operating from wisdom is more intentional and better, but this is going to be a great, a great hands-on experience.

Anne brought herself back to a peaceful place. Jenny brought herself back to presence through just 10 minutes of light, scratching and the doodling on the front and back end really gives us powerful visual evidence of a shift that we can do intentionally when we take the time for ourselves. The dialogue technique is just a great, powerful technique when you have challenges or lack of clarity, but it also speaks to another part of our being as related to the mind body, anatomy in yoga philosophy. And so this is where the yoga philosophy comes in. There’s a wonderful model of the mind and body that is connected. So when we go to the doctor’s office, we usually see like a map of your skeleton or a map of the cardiovascular system, but you don’t really see the mind involved in that. And if you go to a therapist’s office, you might see little icons of moods or a picture of the brain, but you don’t really see the body connected to that. So yoga has a model called the Kosha. So, and it’s essentially five layers, and it brings these together in such a beautiful way. Think of this as like Russian nesting dolls. There’s not a hierarchy, but there’s like one layer and then another and then another. So the first is the physical body, and of course, that’s like our tissues, our bones, our teeth, our eyelashes, our hair. The second is the systems body, so it’s the next level up and the systems body moves energy. That could be energy in the form of oxygen, moving, you know, through your circulatory system, most absolutely like the nervous system, the adrenal system. It really focuses on all of the systems, literally, within the body. Then, the third is the emotional body and the emotional body is just exactly what it sounds like, it’s the state of our emotions. It also holds our imprints from past experiences so it’s from the emotional body where we might misunderstand people or project onto people. It’s a very reactionary, changeable thing, depending on what’s happening around us, and we tend to often confuse who we are as people with the emotional body. You know, we’re just running around sort of in reaction to our feelings, our moods, and to what’s happening to us throughout the day. The next body is the insight body, and that’s more of what we call the true self body, like our personality, our values, and our true self wisdom, is housed here. And then lastly, we have the bliss body, which is our experience of I like to describe it as our experience of connection to the world, to others, to ourselves. There’s the joy and contentment that comes from that place. It’s not like something we ascend to; we might have leading moments here and there, and then our wellness practice, we try to bring ourselves to more experiences of that connection, and joy or bliss. 

So often in our lives, when we’re not peaceful in our productivity, we’re operating from the emotional body. And so where it’s peaceful, is when we’re more intentional, and that’s when we’re operating from the inside body, the wisdom place. And so what we just did in this exercise is we explore not only that interplay, we started that first drawing was coming from the emotional body, and the second one was from the insight body. And so what we did, the whole idea behind art-based mindfulness is, number one: calm the physical body, to quiet the mind so that you can get to this like wiser, more peaceful state of being. And so what we did was we calmed the body through stretching and through using the systems body, which was the control breathing exercise and we worked with the physical and the systems body through connecting breath and movement. So that brought us into a calmer state of mind, which then we had this beautiful second image come out. And so when we interacted with that second image, that wasn’t the expression of the image, it was the expression of the insight body. So Jenny is asking, we said physical systems, emotional bliss, insight is the one between the emotional and bliss, like insight, self awareness. Now there are Sanskrit words for that, but I figure like this is not the time and place to be teaching Sanskrit. 

So I wanted to give you like, this is all well and good, but how do you how do you work this into your own day? And so I think the number one thing is to like, recognize how powerful you can shift back into a peaceful or present place by getting in the physical body. And so even if it’s just stretching, but as we talked about and it could be going for a brief walk outside, and the more you can get your senses involved. So the senses, that’s the systems body like, the more effective it is to, like, get around or to process out through the emotions. So like, walking on grass with your bare feet, or we’ve talked about going to the beach and feeling sand. Sometimes if you have to stay in the office, it’s like, we’ll put on a particular playlist, or get up and shake or just dance for a few minutes. 

We don’t usually think that, especially when we have pressing deadlines, that it’s okay to stop and do those things, but it is so powerful this there’s like tons of this is neuroscience research behind it. When you calm the physical body, like the emotion, the mind quiets down, and that’s when you get that reset. Questions Anne or discussion items and having sort of brought things back around to the place that you really wanted me to hit, which is like, what? How do we do these activities? But there’s some different things that we do. They do have a little list here of tips, but I wanted to just sort of give that summary of calm the body, to quiet the mind, to tap that insight body, that wisdom place, and that’s our reset into peacefulness and being more productive from a peaceful place. 

There are so many things like, even with without having to do a practice like this that took maybe 30 minutes, there are things you can do in five. So just a couple of tips or things that we can do to help reset. Just think about anything that you’d like to do that gets you in the body, but especially anything that involves bilateral movement. So that could be walking, it could just be standing, swing the arms in the creative process. It might mean doing something that involves both hands at the same time. So even just like moving both hands across grass or across sand, you talked about loving to go to the beach like those, these are like really legit neuroscience ways, again, to get really into the body, but to call up the parasympathetic nervous system, so again, the system’s body, and that’s related to rest or digest, and so that’s where it sounds right as well to just breathe, but the breathing exercises really, really are helpful. 

ANNE RAJOO

I hope this episode inspired you to see creativity as a powerful part of being productive. It’s not just about getting things done; it’s about how you feel while doing them. When we embrace creativity and mindfulness, we create space to reset process emotions and tap into clarity and joy. 

So I want to invite you to explore this further. Go to your calendar and schedule five minutes for a micro mindfulness reset, whether it’s a stretching, deep, breathing, doodling your emotions, or even taking a mindful walk, these small moments can restore your focus and energy, making your work more effective and intentional. 

Second, if you’re facing a challenge, an emotional situation or love, engage in creative activities like the art practices Jody shared. It’s such a wonderful way to process what’s happening inside you, uncover new ideas and bring sense of likeness and flow into your day. 

And if you’re enjoying this mindful aspect of peaceful productivity, I have a free resource for you, my peaceful productivity prompts, these are 24 insightful prompts and reminders to help you focus on what matters most, make decisions with confidence and ease, recharge your energy while simplifying your day, rediscover joy and live more intentionally, stay grounded and present in the moment. With these prompts, you’ll have simple tools to apply more mindfulness to your way of working. Just click the link in the show notes, or visit my website, www.annerajoo.com you will find a special section that tells you about the prompts, and you can just put your details there and download the PDF and get it straight into your inbox. 

And don’t forget to tune into the next episode, I’ll be joined by a special guest to talk about why listening to yourself is the ultimate productivity strategy. We’ll dive into how being your most authentic self, redefining success and tuning into your body can transform the way you work and live. 

Until then, take a little time for creativity. Lean into those micro mindfulness moments and be peacefully productive. I’ll catch you next time!