Sequential Artists Workshop

DHPOD Episode 2: Listening Now (body awareness practice and guided meditation)

If you’re just starting to listen to your body, it’s gonna hurt. Why? Because your body has been trying to get your attention, crying out in pain or numbing out in helplessness. The first thing you’ll hear, when you start listening, might be aaaaaaaallll that pain at once. It takes strength and patience to face that pain, and hear it, and feel it, and keep coming back. So this is a practice to build your strength, to start with acknowledging the pain, and to not shame yourself for how hard it all is.

Join me for a gentle, guided meditation to connect with your body, tune in to what it needs, and tend to those needs as best you can. This practice is all about expanding your awareness and beginning to cultivate a kinder relationship with your body.As with any Drawing Health practice, get comfortable, take what feels good and supportive for you, and leave what doesn't. Reflection questions:- What is one small action you can take, in this moment, to tend to your physical needs?- How does it feel to tune in to your body's signals? - Did you notice any changes—physical, mental, emotional—while listening to this meditation, or after?

Get comfortable. Really, really cozy. Don’t hold back on comfort now — it’s your first resource of strength to face the discomfort of feeling.=If you loved listening to this episode, or if it stirred something new in you, I'd love you to leave us a review. Sharing your experiences is a gift to yourself and others, and definitely me. I love learning how my offerings land in other people, and it really helps the show to find those who need it. If you want to connect with myself and others who are practicing Drawing Health in community every Saturday, just go to drawinghealth.com and sign up for the weekly live class.

This is the Drawing Health podcast, a resource for your well-being and inspiration. I’m offering you ways to connect your creativity and your body, so that your health is never at odds with your art. Every Sunday, a new episode, alternating between graphic medicine interviews and guided audio practices. Listen, subscribe, and most of all: give feedback. Tell your stories, and experiences, by leaving a review or comment or sending an email. What I say doesn’t matter nearly as much as what you hear, feel, and learn about yourself. Your story matters, and sharing is a gift!

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Music acknowledgement

Our theme music is Magic Hours by Aaron Comeau made for the Main St. Music Library. The Main St. Music Library hosts instrumental music created with simple parameters, with scores and instructions for listeners to recreate the music themselves . Musicians, artists, & listeners are encouraged to borrow freely from the library and return the materials in a different form than they found them. Find out more at mainstmusiclibrary.com.

Disclaimer

This podcast is for information and exploration purposes only and is never intended as medical advice. Every viewer and listener is encouraged to seek medical attention at their own discretion. This podcast and the guided practices are tools for listeners to support their whole health, and should be used with care.

Tom Hart and I have been working together for years, and as Founder and Director at SAW, Tom is the reason this podcast exists at all. What better way to start than to hear us in conversation, as we often are, but with microphones this time, discussing what Drawing Health, and our passion in graphic medicine, is all about.

Topics include: Can comics heal? Do I hate making comics? What if I don’t understand what’s happening in my body? What if I draw the feeling? Drawing, sudden death, disability, capitalism’s grind, the importance of noticing our health when it’s GOOD, and more.

Reflection questions:

* What is YOUR definition of health?

* What would it be like for you to draw with some simple constraints?

* Are you interested in learning more about graphic medicine, with support?

Episode links!

SAW’s website: www.sequentialartistsworkshop.org

Tom’s favourite book: https://bookshop.org/p/books/blossoms-and-bones-drawing-a-life-back-together-kim-krans

Georgia’s book, Dumb: Living without a Voice: https://www.fantagraphics.com/products/dumb

Graphic Medicine Summit 2025 Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6nZBKexfhvvSR2esA0uDSgCPCPRXSFXn

Maureen Burdock’s Graphic Medicine Deep Dive course: https://www.sequentialartistsworkshop.org/graphic-medicine-deep-dive-with-maureen-burdock

Graphic Memoir & Medicine Working Group: https://www.sequentialartistsworkshop.org/memoir-medicine-group

Music acknowledgement

Our theme music is Magic Hours by Aaron Comeau made for the Main St. Music Library. The Main St. Music Library hosts instrumental music created with simple parameters, with scores and instructions for listeners to recreate the music themselves . Musicians, artists, & listeners are encouraged to borrow freely from the library and return the materials in a different form than they found them. Find out more at mainstmusiclibrary.com.

Disclaimer

This podcast is for information and exploration purposes only and is never intended as medical advice. Every viewer and listener is encouraged to seek medical attention at their own discretion. This podcast and the guided practices are tools for listeners to support their whole health, and should be used with care.

#creativity #health #personalgrowth #graphicmedicine #comics #drawing

Tom Hart and Georgia Webber want to help comics creators by helping the people around them understand what they do. This first of four episodes is very informal, Tom and Georgia gathering their thoughts. Think of it as listening in as two professionals meet to try to improve their industry.

In this wide-ranging talk, we talk about the Canadian grant system (they have grants there!) and jury assessment tools

We get into teaching visual literacy in comics editing and fair compensation for artists and then a little bit about audiences and impact and a digression into Graphic Medicine.

Free-ranging. Come join in!

Other topics, according to the Zoom Bots:

Canada's Artist Grant Evaluation Criteria

Improving Comics Grant Assessment

Comics Creation Process Understanding

Challenges in Comics Editing

Understanding Health Through Cultural Lenses

Comic Creation and Medical Collaboration

Graphic Medicine and Comics Review

Fair Artist Compensation in Grants

Thanks for being here!

In episode fourteen and our finale of this season of Comics Karma, we welcome back Michael Aschner after MISSING his deadline and quitting another project, but after lots of processing and discovery. We talk about those artistic and personal discoveries on this episode. Plus Michael shows us how using AI to be silly helped him turn agony to laughter.

Give it a listen !

This is the end of this season!

In episode thirteen of Comics Karma, Lauren tries real life, and then we talk with the amazing Dante Gabriel Hookey who asks what comics mean, why are we telling stories, are we connecting at all, and what does empathy have to do with it?

This one goes deep!

Give it a listen !

And come back for more.

We’ll be answering a different student each week for a few more weeks! Recorded at SAW on Zoom

Thanks for listening!

As always, you can participate live, by joining us in the COMICS FLOW + PUBLISH section of SAW Comics, or just visit us at sawcomics.org

In episode twelve of Comics Karma, Lauren talks about an editor helping slash away at unneeded parts of her memoir. Then we invited Falling expert, Jim Hamilton to talk about social media, and finding one’s audience and being seen. I think we settle in on: do the thing that’s working and don’t worry about the thing that’s not working! Meanwhile, you’ll hear stories about life and death, about broken bones, about Nascar and more!

In episode eleven of Comics Karma, Lauren is finishing up her 2nd to last chapter and we welcomed SAW member (and EISNER NOMINEE!) Pam Wye, who has been working on a stunning memoir, Water I Have Loved, a project that has been serialized in Mutha Magazine for may years.

Pam wanted to talk about traumatic sense memory in comics, and we discussed the difference between a feeling and a narrative memory, and we discussed the role of adult and child, and her she serves both roles, as her main job is art teacher in New Jersey high school. And how learning how to handle the teens there has helped her help her childhood self needing expression.

In episode ten of Comics Karma, Lauren is back from her art adventures and finds herself in balancing art and “real life.” (Hint: cleaning toilets isn’t that bad.)

Then we welcomed SAW member Michael Aschner. We talked about finishing our work, about why Michael has loads and loads of unfinished work on his computer, and we talked at length about adult diagnoses of ADHD.

Give it a listen !

And come back for more.

We’ll be answering a different student each week for a few more weeks! Recorded at SAW on Zoom

Thanks for listening!

As always, you can participate live, by joining us in the COMICS FLOW + PUBLISH section of SAW Comics, or just visit us at sawcomics.org

In episode nine of Comics Karma, Lauren calls in from Yaddo, where she is in a totally intense headspace and is finishing a chapter with the luxury of not having to worry about daily, ordinary tasks. We caught up with her for an hour to talk about this experience.

Then we welcomed SAW member Janice Goldberg, to talk about imposter syndrome, and about when it’s ok to take a break on a very intense, personal story. This led to a discussion about “telling our story” vs daily therapeutic aspects of drawing and writing, about catharsis, about improv, about personal transformation, and about all the things we go through when tackling intense situations in our art.

Give it a listen !

And come back for more.

We’ll be answering a different student each week for a few more weeks! Recorded at SAW on Zoom

Thanks for listening!

As always, you can participate live, by joining us in the COMICS FLOW + PUBLISH section of SAW Comics, or just visit us at sawcomics.org

In episode eight of Comics Karma, Tom and Lauren talk to Robert Danberg, who has been a student for so long, practicing and growing for so long, he wants to know, What is my path from Student to Author?

We really explored the usual path of becoming published. Turns out the MFA Poetry World has more gatekeepers than we do in comics. Robert is hitting that point where he knows when something is finished, now he just needs to make the thing, put it into print, bind, it post it whatever, and build a network. We give him lots of tips!