In this 1.5-hour session, you’ll explore how art and mindfulness combined can support your mental health – helping you turn toward both your inner world and the world around you. Whether in a museum, healthcare setting, or in your daily life, engaging mindfully with art offers simple, powerful ways to foster presence, resilience, and connection.
Discover the Power of Mindfulness in Art
Across cultures and centuries, in Buddhist teachings and other contemplative traditions, art has been a practice of care – offering inspiration when we feel stuck and standing as a companion in both joy and sorrow.
Today, a growing body of evidence confirms what traditions have long known. The World Health Organization (Fancourt & Finn, 2019) synthesised more than 900 studies demonstrating the role of both active and receptive art engagement in improving health and wellbeing. Neuroscience further shows that our senses play a crucial role in how we regulate stress and overwhelm. By anchoring awareness in colour, texture, sound, or form, we return to the present moment – helping to calm the nervous system and broaden our awareness of the world.
In this workshop, you’ll explore how art enriches our mindfulness practice. It complements attention and inquiry with accessible gateways into presence, inviting us to turn toward what’s here, to stay with experience, and to curiously explore all we encounter. In this way, engaging mindfully with art becomes a living practice of cultivating the pillars and attitudes of mindfulness.
Alongside Jolien, you’ll reflect on how this approach can support both individual wellbeing and collective flourishing, whether in museums, healthcare, education, or community life. All practices are guided in a trauma-sensitive and neuro-informed way. No art background required – only curiosity and openness.
Please bring paper and a few coloured pens or crayons.
Please note: This event is included, at no extra cost, as part of the Oxford Mindfulness Members’ Programme. Non–members are welcome to join the event at the relevant fee band.
If you’re a fully-trained mindfulness teacher, you may be interested in Jolien’s upcoming branch training, giving you the skills to deliver your own mindfulness-in-art programme. Starts March 2026. Find out more.
What to expect from this event
This event lasts approximately 1 hour 30 minutes and is open to all personal learners and trained teachers with a keen interest mindfulness and art. It’s for you, if you’d like to learn more about the evidence base for a mindful approach to art in support of our wellbeing and mental health.
You’ll be guided through a blend of evidence, practice, and reflection. This includes a short Art Viewing meditation, a Mindful Marking practise and time for Q&A.
What others have said about this workshop
“Mindfulness in Museums is a thoughtful and innovative contribution with real potential for scale and impact. It opens up an innovative and inspiring way to engage with art and mental health – with great potential to grow and reach many more people.” – Willem Kuyken, Ritblat Professor of Mindfulness and Psychological Science, University of Oxford
“Mindful Marking is Insight Dialogue in another language – where implicit learning and explicit insight meet.” – Anne Speckens, Professor of Psychiatry & Director, Radboudumc Expertise Centre for Mindfulness
What you can do after this workshop
You’ll leave this workshop with insights and renewed curiosity about how art can be a pathway to wellbeing.
If you’re a fully trained mindfulness teacher and wish to go further, consider the upcoming Mindfulness in Art branch training, designed to help you develop your own arts-based programme. Find out more.
Entry criteria: who can apply for this course?
This event is open to trained mindfulness teachers and personal learners of mindfulness who’ve participated in an 8-week mindfulness-based course and who have a regular personal practice.
About Jolien Posthumus
Jolien is a mindfulness trainer and teacher, trailblazer in Art & Mental Health and the founder of Mindfulness in Museums (MiM). With a background in applied arts and working as trauma-sensitive mindfulness trainer in psychological care, Jolien bridges the transformative power of art and mental health.
She was appointed as the first Mental Health Programme Manager in a Dutch museum: 2022 EMYA winner Museum of the Mind. She also played a key role in the Van Gogh Museum’s mental health initiative ‘Open up with Vincent’, challenging stigma that surrounds HIV and AIDS through dance – working for Dance4Life and advising the pioneering Dutch project ‘Museum on Prescription’.
Today, she consults cultural and healthcare institutes worldwide on the societal challenges in relation to (mental) health. Jolien develops and integrates Art & Mindfulness-based approaches in mental health strategies and trains teams on working with a focus on mental health and in a trauma informed way. As a sought-after speaker, she shares insights on the intersection of art, mindfulness, mental health, stress reduction and post-traumatic growth.
In 2017, Jolien founded Mindfulness in Museums and developed Mindfulness in Museums programmes and Art Meditations in The Netherlands and abroad. She developed the Mindfulness in Museums method and implemented it in mindfulness programmes and art meditations for the public, young adults, people with mental health challenges (stress/trauma, anxiety and depression), health care professionals and caregivers of people with dementia.
In 2023/24, the first 12 mindfulness trainers completed the Dutch Mindfulness in Museums teacher training.
“I’m absolutely thrilled with the way Oxford Mindfulness brings mindfulness to us all and creates space for us all. Being a Guest Trainer with this innovate organisation means learning from and co-creating with leaders in our field.”
Jolien Posthumus
Teacher, Trainer, Supervisor & Practitioner
