I try to take every day a few minutes to draw how I feel on the spot without analyzing too much. The idea is to let my emotions and thoughts flow into the garden sections and to let the drawing emerge on the template.

It takes me about 10 minutes using a pre-printed a A4 (European “Letter” size) 30-page photobook with as only picture this drawing on each page:

View and download the high-resolution template here

There is no order in which I draw in the five areas. Sometimes I start with the body because it is the most vocal after a bad night’s sleep and influences all the rest, or I draw first in the heart area because I had dinner with friends the evening before and still feel the interaction we had. Some days it is an elaborate picture like this one that emerges::

All sections seem to be flourishing in large tropical plants in colors that reflect the 5 areas. Body is usually in different tones of blue, the mind in reds, the soul is purples the heart, of course, pinks, and the psyche yellows and oranges.

I remember drawing that one in a hotel room in Krakow and feeling overwhelmed by the visit of the city and shaken by its history.

The mind and psyche in particular seem to expand and reach out to their neighbors. The mind is all about rational thinking. It is the part of me that thinks and coordinates, prioritizes and makes conscious decisions, it plays chess and reads books. The psyche here represents the appetite for life I am feeling, how hungry am I to live, to do things, to go forward, to look back? The 2 parts interact a lot, they make decisions together and feed of of each other.

On other days it is just a few lines and a couple of words such as this one:

The template takes care of the recurring work such as drawing the initial garden structure or figuring out along what sections I should draw. That frees up my mind so I can focus on putting on paper what is in my head and body with the guidance of the 5 sections.

The body section is probably the easiest to differentiate and the most measured by wearables such as the ring I wear and apps on my smartphone. I like to write down the statistics of my previous night’s sleep as you see above: Seven and a half hours of sleep but eight hours and forty minutes in bed. I must have spent over an hour reading, probably news sites on my phone. My average heart rate was 57 and the lowest rate was 50, a bit high for me, maybe due to the intensive

I start by using the center of the page, inside the ring formed by the 5 words, and draw things that show how I feel in those 5 areas.

Going to the outside of the ring, I then look at how those inner feelings and thoughts influence what I did or want to do and draw or write them in the 5 outside areas. I sometimes link the inner feelings to these external actions.

There is another possible direction, going from the outside inwards: What are the events and interactions that happened recently that change how I feel inside myself along the 5 areas? The garden now shows how I feel, how that changes what I will do, and how what happens around me influences me today.