Healing and growth through intuitive art
All the questions that we have
Lead us to one final question
And all the power that our questions have
Comes from leading us to this
The question is: Who am I?
Or what am I?
And there is no answer to this question
Because we are the freedom
To be as we wish
Or as our heart yearns
And it is, in the end,
To be ourselves.
I close my eyes
And let the not-body see
My body can be found afloat
among the houses, tables, pencils, thoughts
Emerging from the ground of all
I move between my feelings and my pen
As if I fly
From dream to dream
Myself has turned to air.
I let everything go. My attention goes to where it usually is, which is everything that has to do with seeing. Seeing seems to be the strongest attraction and if you try to feel where you are, when you close your eyes, most probably you’ll find that your attention is somewhere where it feels that seeing happens: Somewhere inside of your head in the front part. The place where thinking happens is maybe also as strong. But this is only a habit. You can move yourself to another place. Or you can shift your inner listening to another mode. You can settle yourself into an energetic attention. This is what I did here. I found myself just attending to the field of awareness.
In the beginning it looks empty. Then you feel that it is alive. Then you start knowing that it is eternal, and you may start knowing more things. In this specific case I started seeing colors. The painting was some expression of that. The reason for seeing colors may have been my expecting this to happen or even just wanting.
And when you find your body, your thoughts and emotions or your experiences, in this context, Then this is what the poem describes. The sense of beauty is inherent in this state.
Your experiences will be unique to you, if you try this. Don’t take this writing as a guidance. My teacher of meditation would say: “Let go of imagining altogether. See what is there already.” What is there is awareness that you can experience. And beyond this there is nothing. That nothing you can’t experience. You just experience that there is nothing. And this nothing is you.
Things that I drew many times before, appear again in this drawing.
The drawing is dense with shapes, especially on the right half. This drawing asks for colors that will help define the shapes, the background and the background of the background. The first background is the environment. The second is eternity.
What are these things doing together? They are flowing. They come into being and they move on, leaving their place in our awareness for other things to come, with the flow of our thoughts.
When you look at details, you may find that even shapes that seem to block the flow move, together with everything else.
All the things that I love move. They are not now what they were before. Mainly, everything shows to me how everything changes. Like watching a parade, I watch my life passing by. There will always be something to watch. My thoughts will make everything more and more beautiful. The sky will turn into the infinite heart. My home will recline on the back of my cat and both will float as clouds over the land, spotted with things I have not come to know yet. The village of my youth will undulate with little waves, while a simple bug will fly away from the big pine of my youth to its own new perceptions.
Then, when you think of it, only thoughts and perceptions change.
To end, since the drawing begged for colors, I gave them to it.
I saw blue. I made the drawing. It is an interpretation, as all channeling is. The reading will be an interpretation too.
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The first result:
Childhood memories
It is a cloud that seems to be everywhere, but more dense, in the kind of density that clouds can create, above me. Maybe it is more like fog. I know that there is clear, beautiful sky, beyond this fog. Just three years ago I stood in my crib, looked at this beautiful sky through the open window in the living room and admired it. I did not have the fog yet.
The fog is only for me. Other kids around me do not seem to have this fog all over and above them. They seem to be fearless, compared to me. They speak freely, sing freely, play freely. Only I have this fog.
The fog makes everything that I want to do difficult. I move through viscous caution. I speak, sing, even think, through this fog that only I know about. Others do not see it, except for women. Some women have the ability to see it. I know that my mother sees, but she never says anything about it. I have to be very careful with women. As long as I am doing what they approve of, I am okay. But I can never be sure. I may do something that will anger them, and they will punish me. Women can punish. I am never safe. What will I do without my mother, if I anger her?
I don’t have words for all that I am describing to you now. I feel all of this and I can’t explain it. Even if I could, I would not dare to create words about it. I don’t even dare to look at the fog. I act as if the fog does not exist. It seems that most people do not notice.
Somewhere, in a deep and hidden place inside of me, I know that I have given up my freedom. But since I know that I cannot have it, I make myself numb, so I will not feel the despair. Despair and fear make the cloud.
Not as I usually do, I knew what I was drawing before I started. Usually, as you can see in most of the previous entries, I allow what wants to come to show up, and then I read it or relate to it in another way. This time I experienced the fog and wanted it to speak. You saw what it said.
I still have it. I have broken through it numerous times. Sometimes I broke through it many times in one day. At times I stayed above the fog, so to speak, for days, weeks, and months on end. But it is still here. Especially when I am about or already in the process of breaking through the fog in an even greater way. The mere readiness to face some new frontier is enough to provoke the fog, even if it was dormant for a while. So I am having this conversation with my infinite being, through the drawing and the reading.
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Now, even as the blue lines wanted to tell that story from my childhood, there are many other ideas that showed up in the drawing, and I am going to write about them now.
Here is what can be noticed in the drawing.
There is a stream with waves and there are some less flowing shapes above and below the stream that join the stream. Also, the stream starts from the left, where it is less flowing. It starts from a place that almost does not move.The lines there are heavier and clumsier. If you follow the flow from the bottom, there is only one line that goes from the bottom into where, after some hesitation, the flowing starts. There are two more lines that come into the picture from the bottom. They come together and just point up but do not join the movement.
What if the stream is transparent? What if it is a strong stream of unseen substance, that, when it moves through physical things, it draws them into the flow. Do they want to move? Probably not. They want to continue being the physical things that they are. But the stream wins. It pulls the physical things into itself, and now we can see the movement because it seems that the physical things are what the stream is made of.
The physical things can also be thoughts that have become persistent. They too do not want to change. But the stream takes them on its trip and they gradually dissolve into its better feeling.
And there are two separate shapes above the stream that fly independently up there. They seem to have a smooth flight. Why are they looking back?
I am going to jump to the words that come to me now.
It is like a description of a whole life. Its essence is an unseen stream that seems to attract to itself some reluctant physical things or habitual thoughts, and they end up moving along with the stream, as it goes all the way out of the picture. There is no doubt in this drawing that the stream continues, after it comes out of the frame. Still within the picture, its flow becomes more flowing. Maybe it is moving faster and easier in the right side of the picture, as it has less things to carry; or the things that it carries get more streamlined.
Did I mean to draw all these things? No. I thought about the cloud but did not know how I will draw it. I just felt that a line wanted to be here and another one there, and I agreed to draw them accordingly. Why? Because it felt good to do so.
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This good feeling is the sign, for me, that I am drawing what my deeper part wants to tell me, based on my state of mind. The good feeling is from the energy of my deeper part. My state of mind was that I wanted to be free of the fog. The first thing that came was the painful story of the habit of thought that a childhood trauma has created. (This is just a way of saying, but the truth is that I have created everything.) The second is the bigger picture, not as it is seen through the eyes but as it is felt as the energetic reality. From this, deeper view, the drawing tells me that I am getting freer from the fog. The way I am getting freer is that, because of experiencing the bigger picture; meaning being aware, the weight of the stories of life becomes lighter. If in the beginning of this life the stories were heavy and clumsy, now they let themselves be carried along with the unseen current. They cannot stop the flow because I chose to go with it.
What is the flow? It is who I really am. A part of the infinite flow of everything.
And what are the two birds above the waves? They are me too, on another level. It is the level of being able to see the bigger picture. People call it awareness. In the past, the bird still looked backward, based on the understanding that the past was important for the present. Later, the bird still looks back, but less. This is the development.
The stream is free of the stories. I know this. All the stories end up melting into it. What will happen to the stories of the past? What will happen to the bird?
Well, it is not the stories that melt. It is how I relate to them that is losing ground. They will stay. My brother will still have his eighty years birthday in a few days. My children will still be in their middle age years, and they too will make choices every day, about joining the stream of who they are or resisting a little bit more. My relation to all the stories will come only from my true essence, from my steam that flows forever.
And suddenly it was finished.
I was still trying to see more colors in the two upper leaves on the right side, as the knowing that the painting was finished started to occupy some space in my being.
This also was the time when the name came. You cannot give a name to a piece before it is finished. Well, maybe in most cases.
Sometimes you know the name even before you start. It is a strange thing, the name. It is the “what is it about” of the piece. Sometimes it happens when you recognize something special about it. In other times it is an interesting feeling that you have even before you start, and are curious enough to explore it with the art.
In any case, what has given the name immigration to this piece?
For me it is this strange line that crosses through almost everything else. Here you have this plant or whatever is depicted as the main subject, and with no logical reason, in comes this beige line, wrapped in orange, and dares go through the leaves that have color, the thick beige trunk and the empty leaves, as if it has grabbed the right to come in at the level of its choice and disregard the prevailing order.
You could even say that this stranger has cut through the old and established areas and it is aiming at the most vulnerable but alive green. Isn’t that green the best of all places in the plant, where life is experienced in its strongest impulse to grow, and its boldest claim to the adventure of being a body in space? If you had to choose a place to experience life, where would you go?
And yes, the plant was just all right without this beige and orange intrusion. Everything was just working fine. But coming in, as this new line did, has just given the most interesting and the most intense experience to this old plant.
It has introduced drama to the composition. How poor would the composition be with only all that is okay in it? Now something is breaking the routine. Something is happening, sweet, tasty, maybe even spicy.
You really need to look at immigration from a composition point of view, to see what it means to everything that is involved.
A delicious drama, this is what it is about.
The lines say don’t
Please do not come here
We will fight against you
The wine says full
Says wet
Says heavy
The green says upward
Home and trees
The white says open
Free and fly
All things are watching me
But the bird is eying endlessness
With no intention.
With all his knots
he found himself flying
above the landscape
He was a line who wanted to flow in curves
he was a thought that wanted to open up
to thoughtlessness
Then, a feeling in the middle of the body
turned into a mountain range
with trees
And emptiness
as it has always done
held its breath.
Maybe you wonder who is this little line in the picture that I called, in entry #301, the baby with the orange light?
He represents, for me, awareness, which is always newly born. Right now it is looking at the rest of the painting in 301, where there is some struggle. But he is from endlessness, which is free from the difficulties.
Just the fact that he looks heals what he is looking at, because he looks in a way that only awareness can. He lives inside of every one of us. But we need to bring his view to our normal consciousness, so that it too will heal.
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Why drawing and painting are good ways to dip in our larger aspect, which is usually called awareness?
Other art forms are also good for this. But drawing and painting leave marks on paper or other materials that we can look at after they have been done.
This gives us the opportunity to understand (by reading the art) with our narrow style of consciousness, what our aware state has already known.
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Let’s look at why we are not in the deeper state all the time.
Our consciousness is made in such a way that we are very focused. We think only one thought at a time. We concentrate on only one thing at a time. For us this is the way things are, and we do not even consider a different way of experiencing.
We never see a wider picture of our experiences (unless we shift into awareness, which we actually do, spontaneously, many times).
While we live with this narrow way of observing, there is something that keeps making the choices for us about what we are going to concentrate on.
It is what we call the subconscious.
Based on our experiences of the past we have taught the subconscious what is important to us. Now it brings to our attention only those parts of the whole picture that it knows are important to us.
Of course it is a wonderful thing, not to have to examine our experiences whenever they emerge, and decide again what, among all of them, is important. On the other hand, because this is how the human mechanism works, we are prevented from experiencing a wider version of our experiences.
What is so good about the wider version?
When we observe with a wider, more inclusive perspective, we become relieved from the worries of the narrower view.
The subconscious still gives us its usual alarms that were created with the narrow view. But since we are in a more comfortable place, we don’t care about these alarms that much.
This is just one benefit. Observing with the wider view is so different from observing with the narrow view that it is really impossible to explain it while using the narrow view.
We can only talk about one aspect at a time. But awareness is a multi aspects thing.
So I’ll point at a few characteristics of awareness, but remember: It really does not do justice to it.
The wider view is the only way we can experience beauty. Beauty has to do with a complex relationship of many parts. We all can experience beauty in our unique ways. It is different for each one. But we all can experience what is beauty to us.
So it means that we all are making use of our awareness.
When we are in nature, for example, which is so filled with details and multiple kinds of relationships, the subconscious does not, usually, have any special instructions about the view.
It may have some warnings about snakes, crocodiles, bears, tick-bites, etc. But just looking, when there is no immediate specific danger, does not, usually, come with instructions.
This allows us to slip into the deeper, wider, relaxed view. We see beauty. We feel good. We become activated in a much fuller, more rewarding way.
So being in awareness feels good. Holding a narrow awareness is stressful in comparison.
When we feel good, instead of being weary of others, we love them spontaneously.
Instead of feeling pressed to fix this or that, we feel like playing. We feel like children. We laugh easily, we imagine whatever we want and we can even feel being taken care of.
All these are healing states.
So now imagine making art by following your individual sense of beauty as your only guide in the art making.
As soon as we give our attention to our sense of beauty, to watch whether what we make is beautiful for us or not, we slip into the state of awareness. There is no escape for us from using a wider attention, to perceive beauty.
This is (awareness is) the fundamental condition that is the only one that can heal our emotional and even physical suffering. There is no way to heal us without entering awareness.
So this is the instruction: Make art just by choosing, step after step, to do only what makes your art more beautiful to you. Stop when you feel that adding anything to your art will not feel beautiful any more.
Be loyal to this and see how it makes you feel.
This is an easy access to what all the meditation teachers call awareness.
I’ll end here with something that my Chinese meditation teacher said once (not precisely in these words): Keep being aware and awareness will keep you.
If you want to have one practice that is simple and will make you freer and freer, this is it. Develop the habit of awareness (in whichever way you choose to reach that state).
They are dancing and I want to dance too. You see, it is about being together, loving and loved. Somehow this protects you from sliding into the fire.
But I am isolated. My skin is screaming. My mood rolls into itself and as a stone on the road it lets the little monsters play on its top.
This is all okay indeed. It’s just a story among the multitudes, except for the light inside, the light who does not care about a thing, and the light who cares about everything.
“They” are the brown and the ochre
“I” am the blue line with yellow inside
“Sliding”: Everything slides, the whole story. All the characters are in the same story and they all are about to fall. The light of the fire is already seen on the edges of things. It is also a part of the story.
“My mood”: the purple
“The little monsters”: Fear ideas
“The light inside”: You know what it is. It is the only thing that you cannot invent.
The truth is inside out.
A reading of the drawing:
Bye…
I’m on my way folks
With a horse’s head, with a bandaged foot
Stepping off my pedestal
While trees still give away their leaves
To the barren earth
Don’t think too much, land
Allow the dark cow jump off and fly
The black and blue will disappear
In time.
Note:
I am not leaving the blog. This is just a reading of a passing mood as it presented itself in the drawing. You can read the drawing too, in your own way, and it will be true for you. It is fun.
Here are some of my interpretations of the poem’s lines:
Horse’s head – intuition
Bandaged foot – Still hurts
Trees giving away their leaves to the barren earth – Everything continues
Barren earth – not real
Don’t think too much – An advice to the people, made of earth
Allow the dark cow jump up and fly – observe from beyond the thoughts, and the cows will fly
The black and blue will disappear – All wounds will heal.
In time – Only in time can anything heal. Where there is no time, there are no wounds.
