Sarah Brayer: Art as meditation

Sarah Brayer is a Kyoto-based artist working across painting, woodblock printmaking, and washi papermaking. Her practice explores light, impermanence, and the inner life through meditative mark-making. In this conversation, she reflects on four decades of integrating meditation with art-making and the launch of her course, Art as Meditation. The episode offers a quiet, considered look at how stillness, curiosity, and creative practice can become truly inseparable.

Show Notes

Key takeaways from this episode:

• Meditation expands your creative range. Sarah shares how a regular practice loosened the "tightness" in her approach, opening her to colours, subjects and ideas she once resisted.

• The inner critic becomes a familiar, not a foe. With sustained awareness, resistance and self-criticism can shift from blockers into recognisable signals – something to notice, name, and move beyond.

• Releasing outcome unlocks the work. The course is built on exploring without attachment to a finished result, building a transferable muscle that carries into your broader creative practice.

• Simple acts are profound starting points. Whether noticing the light outside your window or bringing flowers to your desk, Sarah reminds us that beauty and stillness are always within reach.

• Finishing is its own creative act. Contrary to the open-ended spirit of the practice, Sarah celebrates completion: "It's like a birth… all this energy just coming together, and then there it is."

During the live interview, we shared some images of Sarah’s artwork. Since you’re listening to the podcast version, we’ve made these images available for you below. 

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Explore the images from this episode: