Mindfulness&Calligraphy Challenge

Aims of the tool

The aim is to facilitate the learning of a few mindfulness exercises, which the participants can use in their everyday lives.
Mindfulness is a powerful concept in non-formal education, as it contributes to the personal development of the participants, by promoting non-judgemental and compassionate awareness of the thoughts and personal experience of life.
Calligraphy as a non-formal education method can be used in graphic facilitation, creativity and artistic exercises.

Description of the tool

The tool contains a printable document with 26 sentences regarding mindfulness, for each one of the letters of the alphabet. Each sentence contains a highlighted letter, that is written with a modern calligraphy font. The facilitators should print the sentences and cut them into small pieces of paper, (containing only one sentence) and put them in a jar. The participants extract the sentences from the jar. According to message that they have extracted, they are supposed to do the mindfulness task written on the paper and practice the highlighted letter of a different piece of paper or personal notebook. Through this exercise they will learn a mindfulness exercise and a certain modern calligraphy letter. After the first round they can exchange the pieces of paper in a few more rounds, so that they can learn different mindfulness exercises and letters.

Calligraphy is a simple way to experience mindfulness (full awareness of the present moment, the state when we are living "here and now") because through simple writing exercises we focus our attention only on the present moment, on the writing instruments, the paper and the beautiful letters.