Practices and practical resources
Contemplative collage practice
Beth Berila
Category / branch (in the tree of contemplative practices): Creative – contemplative arts
Contemplative expressive arts are accessible and inspiring ways to access deeper knowing, build community, work with what is, and co-create collective visions. There are many forms of expressive arts contemplative practices, of course. This piece will focus on collage, as it can easily be done without any creative background.
The workshop[1] I facilitated for the Contemplative Practices Summit (2025) used collage to explore inclusion and belonging: what is, what we long for, what blocks it, and what we collectively vision. Depending on the time you have available and the group you are working with, each stage of the prompts can take longer or shorter, but it is powerful if there is time to move through all the prompts. This collage practice can be adapted to a variety of topics and explorations.
I advise sending people the workshop purpose and framing along with some journal prompts prior to the workshop. The journal prompts should include an invitation to find 8-10 (or more) images that represent what they journalled about or discovered in their journaling (Alternatively, you can send a recorded guided meditation or visualization). But the idea is to help participants begin their reflection journey prior to the actual workshop and also to bring several images that are meaningful to them, so they don’t have to spend time actually looking during the workshop itself.
For the actual collage making, how you go about it will differ based on whether you are facilitating it in-person or digitally. If in-person, have many different art supplies available, such as glue, scissors, magazines, decorative paper, paint, stencils, etc. If digital, use a tool like a whiteboard so participants can easily add images. (Some tools allow participants to participate anonymously, which may be important, and you want to make sure you prepare participants if they need an account beforehand or can just join your account). If doing the event digitally, allow a few moments to give a little tutorial about the technology for people for whom it is new.
The beauty and magic of collage (and most expressive arts modalities) is its ability to tap into our intuitive, deeper knowing and longing as well as our creativity, so we want to set that tone for the practice.
For the workshop I facilitated, I started with some short centering breaths, and since we were doing our practice digitally, I invited people to offer kindness and compassion to someone else on the screen on their exhale and receive it on their inhale. There are other ways to facilitate connection digitally, and some element of that would be helpful, especially if the participants may not know each other–some way to facilitate a sense of connection before asking them to co-create and even be vulnerable with one another.
Then I gave a little context and framing about the topic of the workshop, in this case, a combination of contemplative expressive arts, belonging, and inclusion. We want the bulk of the time to be for the practice.
Framework for a collage workshop
- Opening/framing
- Centering or connecting practice
- Any content necessary
- Visualization practice
- Collage practice
- Reflection on experience
- Discussion
- Closing
The collage practice
To move people into the contemplative collage practice, I guided them through a visualization about a felt sense of belonging. You can adapt the visualization to what you want to explore, but the idea is to support participants to drop below their thinking mind to access other forms of knowing in their being and to dream beyond what currently is.
Inviting them to keep their felt sense alive, you can offer the first prompt and encourage them to begin creating. Depending on time, you can guide them all through each prompt in order, or you can make them all available simultaneously and they can move toward what calls them.
The prompts I offered in this workshop were:
Layer 1 — Root
Add images/words/patterns that represent where you feel grounded — your sense of origin, strength, or connection to land, lineage, or embodied self.
Layer 2 — Relation
Add images/words/patterns that represent the communities or relationships that shape you — chosen family, mentors, cultural roots, social movements, neighbors, ecosystems.
Layer 3 — Fractures
Include images/words/patterns to express the complexities — moments of exclusion, migration, loss, ruptures, or tensions. Can we allow them to exist in the same space as the roots and relations?
Layer 4 — Becoming
Weave in words, images, or symbols of the belonging you’re growing toward — visions of justice, inclusion, healing, and interdependence.
After they have had time to create, bring this iteration to a pause and allow some reflection, perhaps journaling first, and then discussing. It can be helpful and hopeful to end with what we collectively want to create, so there is a forward-looking energy and a kind of commitment toward co-creation.
Community discussion and what to expect
One beautiful element of contemplative practices is that whatever arises is rich with meaning and, in fact, is the work. The same is true in this practice. Work with the “meta” aspect of it. Rather than thinking, “oh this didn’t work;” or “oh, I should have anticipated that and made sure it didn’t happen,” we can lean into what arises as precisely what needs to be addressed. Of course, we need to work to create some degrees of safety and community in order for that to be possible, and attend to power dynamics in the room. But when we do, the process is very rich.
For example, here are some things that can arise, and ways to explore it in the context of belonging and inclusion (which, of course, can be adapted to your focus/topic):
- “There’s no more room for my image. I don’t feel like there is space for me.”
- “Someone put their image on top of mine, so I feel erased.”
- “Something is wrong with the technology so my image keeps disappearing. I feel excluded.”
- “Oh wow. Someone made their image smaller so there was room for me.”
- “Wait, I see someone trying to find space for their image. I actually don’t need to take up so much room with mine. I can make mine smaller and still feel present and seen.”
- “All the slides are full, but we have more we want to add. How do we collectively handle that?”
As hopefully is evident, all of these situations and more are already present in our attempts to find and build belonging and inclusion. People already feel there is no space for them. They feel excluded or wonder how to relate to others present. So when they arise in the practice, we can work with them. We can discuss, as a community, how we want to address those issues and what would move us closer to more holistic belonging and inclusion. (Having space for what we long for, what blocks our belonging, and what we want to co-create so everyone feels belonging invites that exploration).
We can facilitate the discussions of these “meta” issues in a few ways. As participants in the Contemplative Practices Summit (2025) noted, we can establish some community agreements prior to the practice. We can prepare participants for sitting with discomfort, as that can arise when we feel excluded from belonging in the practice. We can ask participants how they want to handle when these moments (these potential ruptures of belonging) arise. Depending on the participants, what is really beautiful is how often people will course-correct during the practice (without necessarily having to prompt it), such as when someone made their image smaller so someone else had room for theirs. This can lead to a dialogue about how we need to be together in community to facilitate belonging.
In the workshop I facilitated, I named prior to starting that we want to be conscious of not writing over or covering over someone else’s contributions. When making a collage in-person, people might layer their images, tear them, paint over them, or juxtapose elements so parts can no longer be seen. That is very powerful in an individual collage but it can result in erasing other people’s contributions if we do that in collective collages. So we can have a discussion about that, either preemptively, in the moment when it happens, or after, depending on what will best serve the particular participants. The point is that those challenges are precisely the work–what arises is what needs to be explored.
We can also layer the collages over time. We could revisit it at various times in the semester (if in a course, not a one-off workshop). We could integrate different elements each time we revisit it or consider what else we notice when we return to the collage over time. We can also have artifacts to take with us. For instance, people could make an individual collage first around the theme and then create a collective one, if there is time.
Contemplative expressive arts, in this case, collage, are fun, creative ways to explore a theme and access deeper knowing. I find students and participants have a lot of fun and that the process of creating collages builds community and connection which continues throughout the other class sessions. Have fun creating!
Related content
- Read more about what community building is, and strategies for building community in the classroom
- Another arts-based collage practice: Kintsugi collage – the art of repair
References
Berila, B. Connecting it all: Expressive arts pedagogy for community, inclusion, and belonging. (2025). Contemplative Practices Summit. Concordia University.
- I will use the term “workshop” in this article, but this practice is well-suited to classroom space as well. Timing and how the sections flow would be adjusted based on the length of time available and how often you meet. ↵
