Healing and growth through intuitive art
The house was at the end
When you started to climb
you needed to be very daring
You didn’t know
that if you fell you’d float
And then you saw
that every adventure
came from a belief that you had
The big view
the open view
the view of eternity
was the only view that helped
Every step was scary
and then funny
And the house at the end
how can you live in a house like that now?
4:40, early morning.
I don’t know when it started. From that point on, I had the same dream all through the night, till now.
The White House exploded and burned down.
All the people who worked there came to work in my living room.
There was place for all of them but it was crowded. They rearranged the pillows on my bed and this made it possible for them to sleep there. Trump said to a reporter that they did not need that many people, that all those who left, only made the White House work better. “We don’t need that many people, he said, it is a simple thing to run a country.”
I think this dream touches on my getting rid of a big part of what I kept before, and how having stuff that conflicts with your freedom to be who you are, is slowing you down or even preventing you from being you.
And this connects to having mental habits that don’t support your free flight.
In the last period of my sleep, most of the pains in my feet subsided and if I was careful enough I could keep it that way and get some sleep. Only one pain seemed to stubbornly menace me. It woke me up and I sat up in my bed. The people from the White House were not in my bed any more, but I still was under the spell of the dream. I felt that unpleasantness of having uncomfortable things that fill up all the space.
I tried the stronger ointment on the top of the right foot. This will take care of it, I thought. I cannot use this all the time but now it is okay.
The pain did not stop. I put the ointment again.
The pain started to subside but the parallel place in the other foot started to hurt. I treated the new pain with the stronger ointment too. Now both feet hurt. It was a hard-to-live-with pain.
Nevertheless, sitting in bed, I fell asleep and started to fall. I woke up abruptly and avoided the fall.
This pain too, in the context of this writing, has to do with thought patterns that block flying. Have you ever considered that pain is a thought? We will have to talk about it some other time.
I went to the kitchen to make some coffee.
Long ago in this continuing fight with the pain, I made up my mind that I won’t succumb to suffering. If the pain keeps me awake, I’ll do something pleasant.
On my way to the kitchen, a bit more awake, my mind started to think with some coherence.
The thoughts that came to me were about the trauma. There was that time long ago, when I felt that I was succeeding in becoming like my father. For some reason, habitual most probably, I still consider that little sweet boy to be me, even though the only thing that we truly have in common is this infinite consciousness, who has always witnessed us from inside.
I was three and a half. I climbed all the way to the top of the structure in my new kindergarten. I stood there, at the top, and knew that I had made it. Now I am like him. This kindergarten was my new place. All the kids were older than those in the kindergarten that I left. It is happening, I thought. I am becoming my father.
He was in the war in the Galilee and in that same day he was killed.
My mom was shocked and did things in strange ways. Without talking or hinting at any reason, she brought me back to the baby’s kindergarten that I just left a few days earlier. I talked with her about it many years later and I know that she wanted me to be closer to her workplace so she could come during the work-hours and see me, in case I needed her. But in those days, in a child’s way, I understood it differently: By wanting to take my father’s place and by succeeding in being like him, I killed him. He had to go. There was only a place for one. My mother knew, I thought, even though I did not tell her (I believed that people could see each other’s thoughts), and did not want me to take my father’s place. She wanted him. What a disappointment. She knew I was dangerous and putting myself at danger too. People will know what I did and will come to kill me. I had to be protected against them and prevented from any further success. This was my understanding in those distant days. And indeed I understood it also to be a punishment for following my dream, not to mention the punishment of not having a father any more.
I did not talk. I did not feel anything accept for some resistance to this predicament. I accepted my punishment as just. My subconscious was quick to learn that he had to prevent me from succeeding. I also learned to be careful not to anger Mom, as who knows what else she could suddenly do? Every time I had the feeling that I succeeded in something, my subconscious interfered and some form of blocking appeared. I did not feel these blockages, Just as I did not feel anything in the beginning. The whole air around me was making it impossible for me to be able to evolve as I wanted. The air did not let me succeed. I only felt my resistance to the air in my back and the back of the neck, as if I was pushed backward to a wall and wanted to fight my way out of this.
This is how, in my child’s mind, I paved for myself a life of struggles and some significant failures. Today I look at all this as an admirable invention of a very talented mind. But I don’t want to jump far ahead so quickly.
Everything that started to feel like success, the sky stopped. I would discover that something shocking had happened again, only too late, when the failure had already happened, and I would turn to be emotionless. Sometimes when I thought that I succeeded in something, I started to see in my imagination an angry crowd coming after me to shame and punish me violently.
Every time my mother was a little upset, and later, when my wife was in such a mood, I feared that I was about to be punished and blocked.
So when I thought about the dream that continued all through the night, I felt that it was as stubborn as this disaster-bringing-fear that blocked me so many times, and also like the pain that presented similar characteristics.
On the other hand, the insistent dream forced me to experience the discomfort that is felt when you have a blocking thought pattern that takes over the space of your mind.
So what do you do?
The first thing to know is that you cannot change the situation, as long as you remain on the same level of consciousness.
This means that you can’t win against what you understand to be a war against you or against a fear that you have. You have to let go of the whole struggle, even if it feels like losing. Lose. Let the issue rest, no matter which way it falls. It will make you freer.
We need to go to a deeper state and witness the experience from there.
This is usually enough, when you deal with all minor problems. I wrote abut it in the past. But this one here is a major one. At least from the perspective of a normal human being, like you and me (as long as we see ourselves as such).
I wrote in the past about this deeper state as a child-like consciousness. Being flowingly curious without a practical reason, loving everything, playing with the reality about us as a natural expression of who we really are, and more things like these, including of course being in a creative flow. Creative flow includes all of these characteristics together (which is the real value of art making for everyone).
This child-like state feels so much better than the state in which we suffer, that naturally, looking from this state, we choose not to suffer. Yes, suffering turns out to be a choice, when you look at it through a child-like eyes and heart. It just feels bad, and you choose not to go that way. Instead, you choose to do something that feels better. The old habit comes back later several times, but after a while it just dies from disinterest in it.
But this case is more difficult because at the time that the trauma occurred I was in a child-like state. If I get into a similar state now, I won’t be able to see the difference between my good state now and the child that I was when the trauma happened.
So we need to go even deeper than the child’s state. Only from that deeper state it will become clear that this suffering was a choice too, and the deeper state that we are in feels so much better, that we naturally make the choice not to suffer. Then again, it comes back and because we are not interested in it any more it becomes weaker and weaker, and dissolves completely eventually.
What is the state that is deeper than the child-like state?
Being absorbed in who we really are. This state is the basis, out of which the child-like state arises.
We cannot even be aware of our choices if we are in the same state in which the choices were made.
What can I say about this absorption?
When in it, you know beyond doubt that you are deeply and permanently loved. Nothing can ever change this. All your choices are supported and appreciated. All possibilities are open before you and you can choose differently than that choice that you suffer from now.
In a way it looks as if a mixture of different “I”s are involved in what I wrote.
We have the child, The “I” that I am now, and the deeper “I”, the infinite witness from within. It is perplexing, but all these become one, when you choose to live in the physical world with a deeper perspective.
In the moment I finish it I know I want to use some colored pencil on it. I know where and how. I wait for the drawing to dry. I listen to the radio. The music is beautiful. Then I look again and the drawing is dry. And it is beautiful as it is. It is poor in terms of colors. Only one. All that it does was accomplished with the yellow color alone.
But it has endless variations in the way the lines are made. Thin and fat, close to each other and far, straight and round. Sometimes they touch each other and become one line. The expressions of the lines are different. Each little part is different from all the others. The spaces in the drawing are very different too: Closed and open, narrow and wide, pouring into the next space or keeping to themselves.
The whole thing starts from a line that is like some ground. One side of the drawn shape goes up. The other starts going up and then turns around and goes down. The right side is listening to the left side, and when the left one makes a left turn, the right one also starts to turn left. Maybe the right side is more burdened and this is why it cannot go as high as the left one?
Are they one thing with varying sides? And what is that little something at the very right edge? Maybe the right side part stopped going up because it wanted to look at that little thing? So this side is independent, making its own decisions, even though it is obviously connected to the left side. The left one must be independent too. It is just like us, having the ability to make independent choices and at the same time being an inseparable part of the all.
That little shape at the right edge, is it coming or going?
Why did the left part turn back down?
Are they playing?
They have the spirit of playing, don’t they?
Do you need any more than one color?
Is the yellow gold, warm light or straw?
Where does the whole thing stand?
If you happen to walk near it, what will your relative size be?
And if we are left with questions only, is this a good thing or not?
Fear.
This is the subject of this painting.
You can see that it is dark. The lines quiver and are afraid to move. Trying to come together and collaborate, they can’t. Fear is like a cloud that covers the open sky of possibilities and free choice. No, you can’t do this, fear says, and you get constricted. You don’t see farther than your immediate confrontation with the thing that frightens you. It seems there is no way to avoid or escape it. It is hard to see anything anyway. This is a very narrow point of view.
Naturally, the relief from fear happens when somehow you manage to open the sky of more possibilities again. How about infinite possibilities?
Within our system of who we are, there is the open sky viewpoint, already a part of us that never leaves. All we have to do is enter the state in which we can experiece this openness. Making art is one of the best ways. (Meditating, Dancing, singing, remembering what you are thankful for, these are some of the other ways.)
So imagine: Something triggered your fear. Perhaps you started to uproot a belief that you had held for a long time, and used to think that it was very important for your safety. Now you start to see how this belief stops you from flourishing and you want to change the situation. The subconscious refuses to change, and suddenly you are afraid. It is as if you think very quickly: What am I doing? I am taking away my protection! A dark cloud covers your open view. There is nobody there to help and it is you against your fear. What to do?
Draw or paint the fear, if you like drawing or painting. Where do you feel the fear? How does it feel? How can you describe in visual effects the way you feel? Ask your intuition to paint for you. Be the hands and eyes of intuition. Whatever ideas come, do them. After all it is just a drawing.
As you paint, you pay attention to how you feel. And you can detect where in the painting your description is true to your experience and where it is not exact enough. So you correct yourself to make a good description, as only you, looking from inside of yourself can know.
From being totally engaged in a confrontation and a fight for life, you change your state to being curious, playing with effects that you invent as you go, and trying out expressions. You pay attention to what feels true and not. Inevitably you start feeling good as there is joy in following your intuition. You start paying attention to the composition, which indeed is a wider view of everything, and without any effort, you are already in a deeper state, a calmer state, a wiser state, a loving state.
Fear cannot stay in such an environment. Fear is the vibration of being cornered by danger. It cannot keep its strength inside of a loving, playful, and curious environment.
And while you are still in this loving state, which is your true nature, ask yourself: What do I really want to do now? What does my true nature want to do?
I am sitting in the big guestroom and the wall of the other side of our street looks at me as I look at it. Here:
This ‘other side’, as everything else, is created by thoughts, and thoughts are independent entities, capable of self-reflection, which makes it possible for them to rethink who and what they are and what they are doing here in my experience. When I do self-reflection my experience of everything in my life changes.
Do you want an example?
Wherever you are, ask yourself: Let’s see what can I love now? And see what happens to everything around you.
So things are only a kind of a mirror, reflecting me. And ‘me’ is a constantly changing thing, based on what I think. Basically I am free to change myself, as I wish for different experiences. The only thing that makes me seem like a stable being is the big, mostly ancient collection of previous choices of how to think about things. These old thoughts think themselves so quickly when I am not aware of them that they take over my life. They make it seem that they are my choices now of what I want to be.
I am breaking the stream of thoughts. It is time for some quiet, to let all the thoughts of the previous paragraphs get digested. Maybe I’ll stop this entry here, and you, please make sure to take some digestive enzymes.
You may be thinking: What has happened to Giora? There may be a resistance to accepting my thoughts. Good for you. Don’t accept them. Take them as my opinion. You really don’t have to accept anything. It is just my fun to write them. I am not even trying to convince. I am a thought. I can only convince myself to be a different thought.
But you wouldn’t be reading this if you did not have some invitation to these thoughts in you… I am part of your world, and I am responding to your wish to have different experiences.
Before we close I want to make sure I say this: Being a thought is only a partial state. It is a limited view. The complete me is everything, with no boundaries. You too.
I have learned so much. I have painted so many paintings and read them. But I’m going to skip all of that and be current. I don’t like going back.
The last two paintings are about being fascinated by things that block the mind, the imagination and the openness. I am showing here one of them.
They tried hard to teach us this kind of attention in the meditation retreats. They would say: If you experience being blocked (which is what the subconscious does sometimes, to protect itself against change), do not fight it. Instead, become interested in what is in front of you. Look at that blockage. See what it is made of. Examine. Touch, smell, and experience without language.
It is not easy to do, when you feel being blocked. All you want is to break trough and this cloud is in your way, obscuring everything.
But how about using art?
In this painting I described a vague anger that I felt. I was taking some medication against the pain, so I could meditate (so I could sleep too). It was not a first solution. I meditated and worked with the pain without medications for many years until it became too strong to bear. The medication made me dull and vague. I could not dive deep. I did not feel the subtleties of the energies. And I was frustrated in this vague way, as everything was vague. Painting this anger became my way of coming out of vagueness. It is not that it is important to know exactly how the anger is experienced. It is the state of being interested itself that made the difference. To be interested, to be curious, is to participate in a characteristic of the true self, and this is what made me feel better and this is what opened a window in that inner blocking cloud, to let some fresh air blow in. Now I became aware of the space. I had a chance to make it my home again and what was in front of me became beautiful to me.
What is important in the painting is how the movement goes. It is slow and sticky. It does not burst out but bends and looses power by having parts fall off it.
A lot of my stuff is still in the living room. Another collection is in the studio, in boxes, piled up seven layers, and on the floor everywhere. I still don’t have access to all my instruments and paper.
I use what I have access to. So this one is made with watercolor on canvas. Some canvases are made to take watercolor. I did the drawing on the wrong side, which is coarser, by mistake. I drew it late last night. And I used the softest pencils I have, Prismacolor. They are almost like oil pastels.
In a lot of my recent art there is a person there. I think it comes from the experience of living nowadays. Every experience that I have of the physical world is seen through the body and creates a response in the body. So the body is of interest. In this one there is also a sense of a place with some trees and fields. Everything become the same in importance. All are experienced and everything is viewed by the true self. You can slide lightly into the true self and be the true self for a while. You are extremely sensitive. You feel every little physical appearance. You feel the excitement of a child, wanting to touch everything. Being in a quiet awe, loving everything, wanting to see more, to play with it, to enjoy the good feeling of the person and everything in his world. All that appears looks like a miracle.
The physical world itself does not seem to have a lot of depth. It is just some shapes, some movements, in a shallow layer, doing all the miracles of the physical world, while floating above an infinite space. That’s where you really are. All of it and all that appears in it is you. This is where the depth is. Relish. Play. There is no better feeling than meeting with yourself.
I skipped number 277 by mistake. I’ll keep this number for something in the future. And for now I’ll just continue with this entry.
Describing a body
Of a man, standing
In profile
But turning his head and gaze
To us
He is just passing there
And it is his business
To be there, walking
On his territory
And we are the transgressors
Who should apologize
And leave with the promise
To never do this again
And since there needs
To be some earth
For this story
I tried my hand
At making it
Some dirt
Some grass
A tree
And a passer by
All freshly made.
I really felt there was a person there, before I started to draw. I can show you what he would look like, had I drawn him as I saw in my imagination.
Here, I made a quick sketch of that.
He has on some kind of a raincoat. You can see he’s not dressed up. And of course he wonders what we are doing there.
So how come this view changed to the drawing at the top?
I remember my years at the art academy in Jerusalem in the end of the sixties. Students with easels, standing around a model, and everybody is drawing. I assess the work in front of me, consider the model’s size and placement on my paper, imagine the arrangement of the main lines and volumes, and I start.
From the ear the line goes down through the chin to the collar, to the shoulder, and now comes the long line of the curved back. As I guide my hand to follow that line, there is another voice in me that tells me not to follow that line of the back. Don’t go down, but to the right, this voice says.
It is not a voice really, but a very strong and compelling feeling, like a longing, that almost takes hold of my hand and pushes it to go right.
I did not understand why I had this different voice in me, but I trusted this voice.
Now I know.
The representational drawing describes the experience of the senses. This is how the eyes see. Of course it is influenced by emotions and ideas, but the cementing substance in the drawing is the physical shape, as the eyes perceive it.
The abstract lines in the first drawing describe the experience of the energy. The energy of me and the energies of the things that are described. I don’t see that energy but I feel it. So the lines are a translation of that feeling. I feel different intentions, different emotions, ideas and beliefs that create that person within my infinite field of energy. And in fact, all of these are mine. They are my intentions, my feelings, my ideas and beliefs. I am creating this person in my flow, in response to these experiences in me.
When my ideas and beliefs change, this person will change too.
And, is there anything out there to disprove that this person, these experiences and me are really one thing, experiencing itself?
When I say the word HEALTHY, there is a rush of energy developing in my being, and moving through it to unknown depths.
The same thing happens when I only think the word.
If I do it a lot, and experience the vibration of the word many times, this experience starts to take roots in my being, and there is movement in me, to become the expression of this vibration.
Try this: When you feel not so good, ask yourself, in your mind: How can I feel good now? And watch how you feel.
If I ask, beore I start to draw, to have my drawing show me my experience of feeling good, then I’ll spend the time of making the drawing feeling good, and even go into it in a deeper way than just thinking. So my body will feel good in a deeper way than just by thinking, and the experience will last longer.
My subconscious will take notice and will start to realize that it has to learn how to create this feeling, as it seems that I, its owner and commander, am interested in being this way.
Then the subconscious will start producing this feeling of being healthy on its own, every time there will be any association to this coming up in my being.
And with such a competent couch within myself, what do you think will happen? With me feeling healthy all the time, how can I ever be sick?
So I set out to draw how it feels to me to be healthy.
The first drawing even includes the word ’healthy’ in Hebrew, my mother’s tongue, and the strong energy springs out all around it.
The second is about how the body feels strong and capable.
The last is about how the energy moves in my body when I feel healthy.
At the beginning of the third drawing there were only the heavier lines without the lighter pencil lines and the colors. At that time the drawing was really successful in describing the flowering of the energy inside, arising and opening up. Then I wanted to add the lines and the colors, and the whole art became heavier. The energy almost does not move any more.
It is not what I wanted. But it has beauty so I decided to show it anyway. It srill shows the shining, the power that pushes things up, and some sense of a struggle to arise. The struggle is mental and energetic. All is true in this drawing as to my feeling at the time. Maybe this is why it is beautiful.
But can I change my thinking, and can I teach my subconscious how to create a different feeling?
Everything is changing in my world.
I am dismantling my studio. I am not doing art therapy any more. The studio will be rearranged, to support what I’ll be doing next. The free flow, that is who I am, has discovered at last that it had invented ways to stand in its own way. I hug it now, but who is hugging? My computer, what I need for making art now, what I need for writing, and a few more things will move to a temporary place in the apartment, for a while.
Here is a painting from a few days ago, and what I had written about it.
The drawing was ready for two days. I did not want to do the next step until I knew I’d have all the time needed to finish the painting.
I looked, and different possibilities ran through my imagination. Something was missing in all of them. The best thing is to do the colored shapes right after the drawing is done, as a continuous event. This did not happen in this case. But I found a way to experience the drawing freshly. I got closer, as I described in the past. I came so close, that my nose almost touched the paper. This did it. A new, trustworthier stream of ideas started to flow and I went along with it till all the shapes were there. The choice of colors came too as a stream, one after the other. Something in me knew what to do. Guess what part it is.
One thing that jumped to my attention is that in this painting the stronger part of the painting finds it easy to go out of the paper to the left side. In the beginning of the blog most or all of the drawings never went out through the left edge. The left side was usually left empty, and there was a lot of tension about this side. And here there is no problem at all. The right side of the painting goes out through the right, but it is the weaker part of the artwork and it feels hesitant.
So we have a change.
Lets take another issue. There seem to be two people in the painting. Both have a blue body. And around or close to their heads there are circles of colors that can be felt as light. It just came to me, as everything else came, as parts of the flow. My reaction to having the impulse to draw these halos was to avoid doing it and find something else to draw instead of them. But my dedication is to trust what comes. So I went ahead and did the circles of light.
When I was on my first meditation retreat in 1990, I had a dream, in which I saw myself meditating on the top of a mountain. The mountain and I were shown as silhouettes. Behind us was an orange light that became more and more intense. I woke up in the middle of the night and discovered that I could make my mind go totally quiet just by telling it to do so. I said: Enough! And it calmed down.
I have a feeling that both the people in the art are monks. They walk their path alone. They may be versions of the same person. The one on the right embodies an idea that has been let go of, and the bigger one on the left is acting now with a new choice. The word pilgrimage comes to mind. The direction towards which this figure is moving is the true ’I’, which moves all the time, so you cannot really reach it. But you certainly can be it.
There is a story in the bible, the Hebrew bible, about Saul. He is the one who would become King Saul later. At the time of the story he worked as a herder of donkeys. Today it would be like a parking garage attendant, who takes all the cars to the gas station every day. All the donkeys ran away from Saul that day. He ran after them in vein. But on his way he met with the prophet Samuel. Samuel was there because God had sent him with some oil to find Saul, pour the oil on his head and let him know that he was chosen by God to be the king of Israel. Politics was messy then too. To Saul this was quite a shock, I believe. But for the people who told the story, this was a chance to invent a saying: He looked for donkeys and found a kingdom.
Aren’t we all like Saul? We always aim for the less important things and the best happens to us as if it was side effects. Luckily, we pay attention one day to that part of us that is true and always awake, and eventually get it.
intuitiveflow 