Mindful Patterns

About this coloring page

Most "mindfulness coloring" is ordinary pattern work with a calming word printed on the cover. These sheets are designed backwards from a situation instead. There is a page for the ten minutes in a waiting room, made of small self-contained islands so an interruption costs you nothing. There is a page for three in the morning when sleep has not arrived, weighted toward dense dark areas because that is what the hand wants at that hour. There is a page with very large fields and generous outlines for hands that shake, or for eyes that are tired, or for a first session with someone who finds a busy sheet intimidating. A spiral is segmented to the rhythm of a slow breath so that tracing it paces you without a timer. A quilt grid gives each block a different motif, intended for memory work — one block, one person, one thing you remember. One sheet deliberately never resolves into a focal point, and one deliberately stops halfway across the page and is meant to stay unfinished. Care workers, therapists and anyone running a group will find these easier to justify than a generic pattern book, because each page states plainly what it is for.