Jamie W. Johnson, Ph.D., CZT
Abstract
Created by Maria Thomas and Rick Roberts, the Zentangle™ method is a fun and easy-to-use technique to create beautiful patterns with a focus on staying in the moment and mindfulness.[2] Thousands of adults have been trained as Certified Zentangle™ Teachers (CZT), offering classes to students and practicing the art form all over the world. While Zentangle™ is promoted by companies selling supplies and workshops, including the official Zentangle™ headquarters, as meditative and stress-reducing, I set out to investigate how practitioners themselves view their Zentangle™ practice. My main research questions were “Do Zentangle™ practitioners view their experiences as spiritual?” and “How do online communities contribute to their Zentangle™ practice?” Utilizing an online questionnaire, I surveyed 82 “tanglers”—people who practice the Zentangle™ method—about their artistic practice, its personal meaning for them, their online habits, and their own spiritual or faith practices. Overall, my research project found that 99% of the respondents described Zentangle™ in terms of their emotional well-being. Words such as self-esteem, satisfaction, pride, relaxation, calm, and peace appear repeatedly. Many participants reported that they viewed Zentangle™ as a spiritual practice in which they engaged to maintain that sense of calm throughout their lives. Even more than that, some people indicated that their Zentangle™ practices had wide-ranging, transformative effects on their lives, from living with physical pain to coping with the death of a loved one. As a transformative spiritual practice, Zentangle can best be understood using functional sociological frameworks. As sociologist Nancy Ammerman describes in her introduction to Everyday Religion: Observing Modern Religious Lives, “We do not assume that religion is always about ‘eternal truths’ that divide the saved and the damned. Nor do we follow rational choice theorists in positing that religion is always about ‘supernatural rewards’ . . . . religion is bigger than the theological ideas and religious institutions about which typical surveys have inquired.”[3] There was, however, a distinct group of responders, about a quarter of participants overall, who rejected the spiritual notion of Zentangle™, seeing that idea in conflict with their own, more substantive, definitions of religion. This parallels the larger trends in American society, with religious manyness and secularization not only encouraging a wide variety and definition of spiritual activities but also creating discomfort for those with more traditional views of religion.
[1] Jamie W. Johnson, “Zentangle™ as Spiritual Practice: Surveying a Community,” Hartford Seminary, unpublished paper, December 19, 2019. The author was awarded the Hartranft Scholarship for this paper at Hartford Seminary’s commencement, May 15, 2020.
[2] “What is it?” Zentangle, https://zentangle.com/pages/what-is-the-zentangle-method [accessed December 3, 2019.]
[3] Nancy T. Ammerman, “Introduction: Observing Religious Modern Lives,” Everyday Religion: Observing Modern Religious Lives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); 5-6.
