What We’re Doing to Make the Getty Museum a Space of Well-Being and Connection

When I take walking breaks amid a busy day and stroll through the Getty Museum’s galleries, I listen to the quiet hum that feels almost like breath.

Light moves across marble and canvas. The building stretches, settles, and everything seems to exhale. In these contemplative moments, the Museum feels less like a place to pass through and more like a sanctuary, a space for reflection, rest, and renewed attention.

Over many years in museum education—and through my parallel work as a yoga instructor and mindfulness practitioner—I’ve started to understand that my role as an educator isn’t simply to teach with artworks, but to create the conditions for people to soften in museum spaces. The skills I rely on in the yoga studio—helping others ground their breath, inhabit their bodies, and find ease—are the very same ones that often guide my work in the galleries. In both settings, the practice asks something of me: to slow down, listen closely, and help others meet art not just with their minds but with their full, embodied attention. The hope is that visitors may arrive with the day’s weight and leave a little lighter, even after only 20 minutes of slowing down with a single artwork. The shift is subtle but unmistakable: shoulders drop, voices quiet, eyes sharpen. These are the embodied signs of attention and intentional presence returning to the visitor.

In recent years, mindfulness practices and wellness-based programming have become more integrated across Getty’s museum education offerings. Our aim is to show how pairing art with mind, body, and breath transforms what a museum can be. By weaving mindfulness into tours, teen programs, educator initiatives, and digital offerings, we’re contributing to the growing conversation that expands the museum from a place of learning into a place of grounding, connection, and restoration.

Art in breath and body

When our education department began offering mindfulness tours in 2016, our intention was to gently shift the pace of a visitor’s museum experience from the common hurry of daily life to a slower, more attentive mode of engagement. Many visitors arrive at museums still carrying the pace of the outside world, moving from object to object in a limited amount of time. We wanted to create an alternative rhythm that encourages depth over speed and supports visitors in settling into a more spacious way of looking.

The Breathe Tour offers 20 quiet minutes of presence, inviting guests to regulate their breath through focused looking. The Art & Nature Tour expands that awareness outward, pairing artworks with Getty’s gardens, water, and seasonal cycles to help visitors feel the continuity between inner and outer landscapes. A meditative Garden Walk offers slow movement and sensory grounding in the living environment itself. And the newest addition, Memento Mori, creates space to reflect on life’s brevity through a gently guided meditation and close-looking practice with a single artwork, an invitation to pause, honor impermanence, and notice what rises for the visitor in stillness. Keep an eye out for new tour scheduling on our website.

I bring these approaches to a Moving Mindfully tour, where, standing before Auguste Rodin’s Christ and Mary Magdalene, our group practices box breathing while noticing the tension between polished flesh and rough stone—feeling weight, lift, and the emotional charge carved into marble. Moments later, Paolo Troubetzkoy’s Dancer becomes an exploration of balance and energy, the bronze surface seeming to move as visitors make the smallest shifts in their own bodies. What I love about these tours is the reciprocal conversation they spark between the artwork and the self, each piece asking, in its own way: Where do you carry heaviness? Where do you find buoyancy? What does care feel like when it moves through you?

The group laughs as I pose them in front of Joseph Ducreux’s Self-Portrait, Yawning (often called “The Yawning Man”) and Franz Xaver Messerschmidt’s The Vexed Man. I tell them, “These objects are asking you to do something—what feels natural?” Then I watch as they sometimes shyly and sometimes boldly mimic what they see. One gentleman said, “That feels pretty good to stretch like him.”

Teens and the gift of stillness

Our Art Impact Mindfulness initiative invites teen participants to embrace stillness. Developed and supported by the education department’s teen programs team and gallery educators, Art Impact, at its core, is a multi-session museum education program that engages teens in mindfulness-based experiences with art. The curriculum introduces foundational meditation skills and encourages students to integrate mindfulness not only into their encounters with artworks but also into the rhythm of their daily lives. Program activities center on mindful looking, contemplative pauses, and reflective conversations, giving students tools to notice their own awareness, deepen connection, and experience art as something that lives through both mind and body.

Over the course of the program, we dim the gallery chatter, invite breath awareness, and ask students to sit with a single work longer than they may have thought possible. We see the ripple effects in discussion: more nuance, more empathy, more curiosity. One student noticed how their own posture—the way they stood, the way they held their hands—changed what they perceived in the artwork: “The painting spoke to me so much. It told me to keep going. I don’t know how I knew what it was saying, but the message was so clear.” Another student noted: “I enjoy art so much more. I experience art with all my senses now instead of just visually.” That simple sentence feels like a thesis: attention isn’t just a mental act, it’s physical.

A day for educators, a lift for communities

As a former classroom teacher, I know how much educators carry—every day, for months, for years. The brunt of this weight became even more apparent after the pandemic. Upon the museum’s reopening, our teacher programs team shifted our focus with educators from being primarily about arts integration, classroom resources, and professional development to meeting teachers’ emotional and social needs for connection. Getty’s annual Wellness Day for Educators is our way of saying: You deserve a deep breath too. Each year, we welcome more than 500 educators to a day of guided meditation, sound baths, yoga sessions, watercolor, aromatherapy, crafts, nature walks, and creative play. Between classes, educators linger under the sky, talk with colleagues they’d never met, and take in the views like oxygen.

In our post-visit surveys, we have received overwhelming notes of appreciation from teachers, such as:

• “Having a day fully dedicated to teachers’ wellness with a variety of activities and refreshments truly honors our profession and the depth of work that we do.”
• “The gift of time in a place of serenity, beauty, and art is extremely valuable. As an educator, I appreciate that the Getty pours into me so that I can serve my students.”

In museum education, we constantly talk about learning outcomes, but sometimes the most important result is the simplest: a body at ease. When we offer restoration to those who teach, we offer it to entire communities.

Voices in the galleries—and beyond

Through the new video podcast OMMM: Our Museum Mindfulness Meditation, cocreated with Getty’s communication teams and gallery educator Lilit Sadoyan, listeners can practice breath, mindfulness meditation, and visualization inspired by works of art from the Getty collection. The episodes are short by design—portable refuge—for listeners at home, in classrooms, or wherever they find themselves. The podcast will launch on June 16, 2026.

Additionally, the department has experience with—and aspires to continue partnering with—researchers, conservation scientists, hospitals, and mental health professionals in exploring the possibilities of art and wellness in new interdisciplinary and community-centered ways.

Societal benefits, one quiet moment at a time

All these efforts share a belief: museums are for societal well-being, as well as for information. When we treat museums as spaces for healing and connection, we invite people to bring their whole selves: the curious mind, the feeling body, the tender heart.

It’s tempting to prove the value of wellness in museums with numbers, charts, and studies. There’s a place for that. But most days, I believe the case is made in small, human moments: a visitor’s slow exhale in front of a sculpture, a teen choosing stillness over scrolling, an educator realizing they feel rested for the first time in weeks.

When museums embrace wellness, they become community anchors, places where empathy is practiced, resilience is nurtured, and creative attention is a shared resource. The benefit isn’t abstract, it’s embodied. We see it in how people stand, how they speak, and how they carry the experience back into their lives.

An invitation

Next time you visit Getty, try this: pause in front of a single artwork. Take three slow breaths. Ask yourself: Where do I feel weight? Where do I feel lift? Then notice what changes, on the wall, in the sculpture, inside you. If you’d like company, join us for one of our mindfulness-based tours, listen to the mindfulness podcast on your way, or if you’re an educator, keep an eye out for our next Wellness Day.

Getty is many things: collection, architecture, landscape. It is also a place to reset, reconnect, and remember what attention feels like in a busy world. We’ll meet you there.

For any questions about Getty’s mindfulness programs, please email Museum Education.