Our story
It came through lived experience first, a real life, with real difficulty,
and the discovery that making something with your hands
could quiet what thinking couldn't reach.
Where it came from
The Present Project began with a simple observation: art-making does something that words can't quite reach. When you're working with colour, water, or mark-making, your attention doesn't wander in the same way. Something settles.
That experience — available to anyone, not just trained artists — became the foundation of a program that uses art not to produce art, but to produce presence.
The program was built around that question. And it was designed to answer it not through talk, but through making.
What makes it different
Most anxiety and mindfulness programs are built around understanding — reframing thoughts, building habits of mind, learning to recognize patterns. That approach works. But it has a limit: the mind can't think its way out of what it thought its way into.
The Present Project works differently. It uses the body, the hands, and the unpredictability of materials to create presence that doesn't require willpower or discipline.
Glass print, blind contour, watercolour, none of these can be controlled or repeated. The paint lifts differently every time. The hand moves without watching. The water carries colour where it wants to go. You cannot perfect these practices. You can only show up for them. That is not a limitation, that is the whole point.
The philosophy
The program draws from several traditions, not to layer on complexity, but because each one illuminates a different corner of the same truth.
Rooted in MBSR (Jon Kabat-Zinn) and Zen pedagogy — with particular attention to the Tao principle of no-telling: you don't instruct presence, you create the conditions for it.
Practices are designed to build genuine neural pathways, not just insights. The goal is not a good session — it's a different life, arrived at one small practice at a time.
Art is one of the few human activities with no external measure. No score, no ranking, no correct answer. You are safe to express yourself any way you want. Your work is yours alone. What you see in it, what you take from it, how you move forward, that belongs to you completely.
The program structure
The program unfolds across four stages. There is no fixed timeline, only the invitation to return regularly.
Consistency matters more than pace. Each stage is complete when it feels complete, not when a schedule says so.
Notice without judgment. Become still enough to see what's actually here — in the body, in the room, in the mark you're making. Art practices in Stage 1 are designed to quiet the noise, not to produce anything beautiful or meaningful.
Turn inward. You've seen the reaction — now what is it showing you? Stage 2 practices invite participants to sit with what they notice, and to begin making meaning from it without rushing to fix anything. The mirror, not the answer.
Find your own way. Not a prescribed set of techniques — a personal toolkit. Participants explore different approaches and begin to recognise which practices actually work for them, in their own body, in their own life.
The practice becomes the life. Participants bring what they've discovered into everyday interactions, with family, colleagues, strangers. Relationship as mirror. Ordinary moments as the practice. The program invited you in. You practised.
Now you live it your way.
The wisdom you are looking for has always been inside you.
This program creates the conditions for you to discover it.
The founder
The Present Project didn't begin with a curriculum — it began with a practice. A personal discovery that art-making could create the kind of stillness that talking about stillness never quite reached.
That discovery, refined over time and tested against real experience, became the foundation of a program designed to be genuinely accessible — not clinical, not intimidating, and not reserved for people who already think of themselves as artists.
The program is currently being refined through real practice, research, and user feedback, based in Calgary, Alberta.
Artist, graphic designer, and program creator based in Calgary, AB. Working at the intersection of visual art, mindfulness practice, and wellbeing.
The Present Project is built on the belief that the most accessible path to presence is through making — and that everyone who wants to show up can.
Daily practice