intuitiveflow

I did not feel them for some fifteen years.

For a long while there was only the pain. Well almost. It did not leave me day and night. It went closer to the skin and became stronger and harder to take. I thought it would go away in a day, two days, three.. but it stayed for three or four weeks. Today I had a two hours break. For three nights I could not sleep. During two of these nights I drew these drawings on my little hand-held computer at night. I keep it near bed. As you can see, the pain got different. It was not any more concentrated in specific places. It was everywhere between the knees and the soles, all over the skin. Yes, specifically stronger where it always was, but almost as strong everywhere else, where it has not been before at all. It became a mood, an atmosphere, an overwhelming-throbbing-and-moving-in-unexpected-waves condition.

Maybe these drawings do not look like pain at all any more, but like confusion, or like a cloud, a colorful cloud sometimes.

During this time I took one session of Access Bars, which left me totally exhausted. The Bars are spots on the head that you touch lightly and release energy from mental formations that block your freedom. Then I took an eight hours class in doing these Access Bars. I got two new clients too. It is a miracle that I could even do sessions without enough sleep. Five minutes into the sessions I start feeling energized and sharp, as if I am in wonderland. Then, when people leave, there is nothing that I want more than to have some sleep.

Several times I draw in watercolor early in the morning or earlier, when it is still night and every time the drawing tells me that I am OK, that I am developing, that all is good.

So I decided to show you the little pain drawings that are different from all the pain drawings from the past. There is almost no composition in them. There are eight in the first night and four in the second night, but I’ll only show a few. And then, one of the morning watercolors and its going-in-with-words. Take this as a report from the road, where I do not yet know where I am, I do not see where I am going, but in spite of the strong and unbearable pain, somehow everything is OK. I can’t walk, I can’t sleep, I can’t sit and yet I do all these, shaking uncontrollably again and again. Somehow it feels right. Not from the point of view of guilt and having to be punished. This feeling has almost completely gone by now.

It does feel all right. I know it is alright.

Pain

Pain

Pain

Pain

Pain in two feet

Pain

Pain

Now comes a morning watercolor from November 25^th.

Lines are getting rounder

And the words:

I loved this mysterious blue

It was all ease and flow

For the four years old of me

I could not have enough of it

I was old and dark not long before

And suddenly I was a baby and a child

When blood came after me

I started flowing underground

But look

Light is everywhere already

And the lines are becoming rounder.

This is the first drawing.

The wounded farmer

The mountain of resistance (that we saw in the previous posting) has become the farmer, walking away from his fields. He has a jacket and a bag and has one leg. The other one is cut off. His fields have become his shadow. He has a wing that is heavy. The wing is connected to his fields. If he wants to flap his wing, he will have to flap all his fields with it, which is very hard to do. His horizon is sadness and lack. He is trying to walk away from his past, but the past sticks to him.

When I drew this I did not realize that I drew a person. I just did one line at a time, listening to suggestions from within, being dedicated to fulfilling my sense of beauty’s instructions.

The next drawing got me closer to the person.

Anger

I found tremendous anger. Colors change on the surface like the color of some octopuses when they are in danger, or about to attack.

Dark parts are parts that have become dead. The only thing that moves is anger, fury, clenched teeth, hostility. And now that I look at it I can feel the resistance too, as if it is saying: I am not moving from here.

But there is life in the hair. The hair shows some imagination. If it was a therapy session and the patient was immersed in sadness and anger, I might have suggested going into the hair, to give the patient some feeling of being alive. But I know that already and I am on my way to see in what way the resistance will change, if I just see it closely, again and again.

I drew once more.

Sad

There is softening. The anger turns to tired sadness. Remnants of beautiful colors appear and move through everything, as if saying: Look at what was lost. The figure, which suddenly looks like a bee, is bent as if it carries a heavy burden and there is a threat in the air, above the figure’s head. There is painful feeling in the chest. Gloom. Depression. Being a bee brings to my mind the way the bee has to die after she stings.

Maybe suddenly he starts to have these questions: What am I here to do? Why did I come here? I am sick and dying.

Some vigor remained in the lower parts, in the groin and in one thigh. Maybe it is the bees memory of the power she had in stinging. And there is a weak leg.

There is still some feeling of being stubborn, but the figure does not seem to be energetic enough to move far from where he is. Maybe he is destined to be on a slow, permanent pilgrimage? Maybe he will die? I find that many trips into the depths of our emotions and imagination reach death. Usually we are afraid of getting there, and quickly turn around to escape. But if we go all the way and agree to experience death, we discover freedom right behind it.

Here is the next one.

Trauma and the way nature goes on

The world is split into two parts. On the right is violence, blood, rain and soaked earth. On the left there is something like a bird on a bough. And there is green, maybe cultivated green, living in these two worlds. When trauma happens, nature continues to be alive and beautiful as if nothing happened. This seems to be a split for us, because we do not feel calm and natural while having trauma. We cannot understand how nature can be so peaceful.  What is interesting is that the figure has disappeared. Now there is only seeing. Maybe there is a teaching in it. The universe is always teaching. Maybe it says: The solution is here. Look at the natural world. Be natural. Be who you are. All the troubles start when you deny yourself the natural state of being who you are. Or maybe it says: What has just happened to you is natural, just as the bird, standing on a bough is. Everything happens because of the laws of the universe and everything is just as perfect. As such it is peaceful and harmonious too, even though it is hard for you to perceive the peace and harmony in it, because your mind refuses to accept it.

And then comes the next drawing:

Flowering

All is plants now.

They grow healthily, spread seeds, make colors, live fully.

Who made them?

In whose mind where they created?

For what witness do they show their full life force?

Do you see anybody?

 And now I can stop, because I know that the next one will be an empty page.

I do a drawing.

A mountain of resistance

I listen to an interview with Sandra Anne Taylor. (Look her up on the web)

What I hear makes sense to me. There is a place to put a question in, like in a chat box. She will answer some of the questions that will be put to her.

I write. I know she will answer me. “Why does the pain not leave me, in spite of doing so much healing work on it?”

I am the third person whose question is being answered.

She connects with my energy, she says. She sees that I am a farmer in some previous life. I have a vineyard. She sees a cart, full of grapes, rolling out of control and crushing my foot. From that point on, in that life, I can’t work and my life is miserable till the end.

Go into meditation, she says. Imagine that you see that cart rolling. This time, escape it and be safe. Go through that life again and make it a really good life. Reach an old age and be satisfied. In this way you will change the memories that you keep. Then there is more to do, and it will come on a CD that I’ll send you for free. In it you’ll find how to make your cells open to change back to their original way of being.

All of this is a wonderful gift.

The next morning I look at the drawing and write down a few lines:

Strong and delicate

A warm living mountain in the middle

A broken stone ground turning into trees

Hot giraffe clouds stretching their necks into thin air

Trees of another kind

All elements seem to go clockwise around the mountain but the mountain does not move.

The mountain is like many people, standing together, with a common cause.

Unified front. Facing left.

 It is not a poem. Just a collection of lines.

Suddenly I know: It is resistance. Everything moves but this collection of bodies or the mountain refuses to move.

Two questions appear now:

1. What is this resisting? It seems to be looking left toward outside of the paper. Can I go to the left of the paper and see what is there?

2. What does it protect?

Then I suddenly know: It is that cart, rolling fast and out of control, coming straight from the left and about to hit who I was in that life.

It is all stuff of the past, but amazingly the resistance is still alive today. It still experiences the danger, the horror of being hit and the pain that was caused and ruined a life. There is a refusal in me to let this experience go. This is what happens after traumas. The fear that it will happen again stays. Then, what we fear comes to us. This is how the universe works. Lester Levenson used to say: “Fear it – appear it”

The three purple lines on the left stand between the mountain and what is coming from outside. They shake with fear. Is this fear the reason for my pain?

Since everything is clear now and the only thing to relate to is the feeling of refusing to let go of the horror, I decide to draw the resistance again and again and see how it changes, and what it will change into. This is how I deeply listen to it.

Will my pain leave now, as soon as I release this feeling of refusal to let go of the fear?

There were five drawings of this feeling that I made that day. I will present them in the next entry.

Thought bubbles

I watch thought bubbles

And water waves

Over

Green land.

I watch holding clay

In my mind’s hands

Thinking into being

Clouds over the mountains

Relaxed and flowing.

It is the late evening of the first day in November.

Before I go to bed I draw the pain.

Pain before bedtime

It is a night with many waking hours. The pain just does not respond to all my tricks and I do not fall asleep. I meditate so as to get into a state where the body relaxes completely. At least there will be some rest for the body. When the pain is so strong The body convulses. The thighs contract, the buttocks contracts, the area of the stomach contracts, the chest contracts and there is a push of energy up, that is blocked at the base of the throat. Who is doing it? Is it the body, naturally, not wanting to have this pain? Is it I, employing old, historical responses to not wanting pain? The nervous system quivers with no control, the legs shake. A lot is going on with the body and the mind, even thought there are hardly any words in the mind.

I start paying attention to one of the tensions and it calms down. I move to the next and this one calms down too. After I calm the whole body I leave the pain alone and sink into spaciousness. This is when I usually fall asleep. But this night I don’t. So I do the whole process again. Then again. I don’t know how many times. I am tired, but I do not feel bad. In fact I feel empowered. At 4:30 I am too awake. I go to the kitchen and make myself a cup of Ginger tea.

At 5 I do this drawing.

Connecting or disconnecting?

The paper is some rare French paper, which is sized heavily, and therefore does not absorb the water but let the pools stay wet until they dry as they are and all the pigments remain on the surface. Also, because the paper does not absorb the water and is quite textured, the lined become “eaten”, as if the space ate in tiny bites into the lines. This makes for “hungry” lines.

I lay the drawing on the table in front of me, still wet, and write what I observe.

The fire is underneath

Then there is space

Then comes a troubled collection of lines

That maybe is in the process

Of straightening out

Connecting with pieces on the left and the right

Or maybe disconnecting from them

To resolve itself

From being a bunch of conflicted forms

To become a feather in space

And then space itself.

Then I write in green what comes to me to say about every line.

The fire is underneath—this is the pain

Then there is space—created by observation

Then comes a troubled collection of lines—the embattled thought patterns of: Why? Don’t want it; it is too strong; I can learn to accept it; etc…

That maybe is in the process

Of straightening out– simplifying

Connecting with pieces on the left and the right—being a part of a bigger chain of connected events, enabling the deepening understanding of its origin.

Or maybe disconnecting from them—by living in the moment

To resolve itself—in the field of awareness

From being a bunch of conflicted forms

To become a feather in space—less overpowering, observable in peace

And then space itself.—to perfection, to freedom of choice.

Then I go to bed again, and after some periods of short sleep among long periods of shaking and tensing, followed by giving attention to all the tense places, all the painful places and to what is not the body but is.

At 6:40 I do another drawing of the pain.

Pain before breakfast

And another one, where, after delineating where the pain is (the green marker lines with red in them), I start to play:

Playing with pain