Archive for the 'meditation' Category



275. Side effects

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.

Changing

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.

273. Cuing you in on a good moment

freezing fear profile

This is a person too.

You can see him dancing, even though not anatomically correct.

But when I sat down to paint this, I did not know that this would come.

I was thinking about how the energy in my body moves when I feel the fear.

So what is the fear?

It started when I was three and a half. I did not have the language to describe and explain to myself what happened and I could not choose what to do based on my story. Instead, it was created energetically, unexplained. There was a crude understanding, as children do, and it was all wrong.

So I just let my mom do with me whatever she decided to do. She was hurting and never knew how to share her feelings or ask you about yours. You can say she was a logical and practical person. She thought about what made sense to her and did it. I wrote about it in the past. It is about the death of my father in the war and how I came to think that I have caused it.

Usually, I am very good at detecting inner events like feelings, sensations, thoughts, even those very fast and quiet thoughts, that we usually are not even aware of. I am really good in catching them all. You can say, in a way, that I live partially in my subconscious.

But this fear used to overwhelm me without me noticing it. Suddenly I would be frozen without any feelings, except for finding out that I was not doing anything in spite of having decided to do something.

That something had always to do with trusting my heart and doing something independently, something that I really wanted to do.

The event that brought about that trauma also started with me, while I was, so innocently, following my dreams, and sensing success.

So many times throughout my life, when I would start moving in the direction of my dreams, this fear would freeze me and I would not feel anything for a few days.

It happened again these days. And I wanted to draw/paint how my body felt.

The color shapes give a feeling of dancing. But if you look closely at the character of the drawing lines, you’ll see that they have the energy of wanting to grab something, they struggle and they feel lost and hopeless.

But in some ways the situation is better than in the past.

There is also an expression of pain, and one of the places of pain is the area of the feet. The body tries to get up and dance, but it can’t because it is wounded.

Also, if you check where the center of gravity of this body is, you’ll see that it is slightly under the middle of the page, and because of it, it feels as if the body is too heavy to fly up. Just this, the sense of heaviness, shows the desperate state, the disbelief in the possibility of arising. Also the lines of the drawing are expressions of feelings.

So there is more expression of feelings this time. It is good. There is no freezing any more.

Then there are the yellow lines and they are the light and the freedom that are in me too.

The blue lines also look as if they do not belong with the feelings that the rest of the body has. They are a little more relaxed, colder and freer than the body. Maybe the blue lines are like the surface of water and the body is coming out from the water.

And here, maybe, you can catch, like a detective, but in this case don’t forget to be a loving and maybe even a laughing detective, why the pain was developed and kept in the body system. The fear that freezes was in danger of disappearing. You know how careful and inventive the subconscious can be when it believes one of its programs is in danger. I meditated a lot and was getting to deep places and to different energetic environments, such that would make the fear disappear, as it cannot be in such environments. So the subconscious gave me an explanation why I won’t be able to do anything, and gave me a convincing story, to prove that I need to keep the fear. I just can’t, with this pain, do anything. The degeneration takes away more and more of the body and I’ll die one day, without flying. That’s what the subconscious says, just because I had taught it to protect me in this area.

I got you in on this moment of change. There is one solution to all problems, psychological and physical. It is: Go deeper within yourself.

 

271. Diving among thoughts and feelings

diving 2

Go deeper

Though you will find

Some human shapes

Go deeper

Though you will see

An orchard

Or a forest in the fall

Go deeper still

Though you may find

Flowers of the field

Go on

Pass them

Into the depths

And continue through the earth

And the whole milky way

Pass the fields of thoughts

The clouds of feelings

The pictures in your mind

And find

That you have arrived

Into yourself

That has no end

No beginning

And no name

From this

Make your body first

And know

That the world will come

For you

To play.

 

diving 3

This is a small painting. Small ones are much quicker to finish. This one took half a day. It is one continuous process, even with its inner changes, from beginning to end.

This painting was done to describe a certain meditation. There is a meditation that goes like this: with closed eyes, I see what experiences are happening now. There are bodily sensations, sounds, I feel the air on my skin, thoughts, feelings, all these happen without effort. Effects are created and noted, the subconscious responds to all of them and brings about new thoughts and feelings. Then new things happen. And I watch.

When I look at all these, I end up catching my subconscious as it responds to what appears, and I don’t follow its ideas. The energy that I could give these ideas, by following them, is not given and without this energy the ideas cannot last long. This in itself is a meditation. I can watch how the events of my experiences become smaller and how, gradually, less of them show up, until they don’t appear any more.

But this is not what I do. Instead, I feel the inner space and I dive among the events. I avoid all of them and dive.

I am interested in how the space feels, so I give the space all the energy of my curiosity.

As I continue diving, the space opens more and I go on.

This is the meditation.

I go until there are no events happening around me.

In a way it is like the other meditation, but here I can imagine being more active and adventurous.

This painting came after the drawing and writing that are in the beginning of this entry.

So you can see that just drawing something and thinking about it, can bring you deeper into that direction.

In this way, all that you do is based on what you choose, out of your interest. You don’t jump into meditation because you think that it is good for you, and once you are engaged, you start having resistances, because the entry into the meditation was not natural. It was acting on an idea that came from outside. Someone said.

I am for freedom in every step.

270. Sending questions to myself

Boiling conversation

I had an imaginary conversation

With a teacher

I let the conversation boil

And took it off the stove

To cool down

I saw I do not need this food

Any more

My soup is ready

Between the milky-way

And Andromeda

I wrote a letter this morning

And forgot to send it

The small waves

On the surface of the ocean

Carried the message for me

As far as it was needed

My friends are listening

Everywhere

They smiled

They flip flopped

They sent the message back to me

With the wind

Next time when I write

I’ll take the letter out myself

And put it carefully

In my own mailbox.

268. I called it A Portrait

Portrait

I called it A Portrait.

I wrote this name and the measures on the back-side of the picture, so it will be ready for all the processes of selling.

Why is this a portrait?

Because I decided to make a portrait as I was starting. Before I did the first line, I wondered: What shall I do? And the answer came up in me: A portrait.

Then I used shapes of nose, eyes, wrinkles, cheek, collar, shirt, etc. But I made sure to place them in such a way that nobody will be able to see that it is a portrait. I do this many times.

Why?

Another kind of information wants to come out. Something that is more alive.

I liked, at some point, the way the drawing looked, concentrated in one place, remaining open in some places and softly closed in others, so I left the drawing where it was and went to bed. Yes I drew this late in the evening, before I retired.

But I drew-in the pencil lines that will contain the colors right after the drawing was finished.

I felt as if I was playing jazz, I had the motto, and it was time for the first improvisation. The pencil lines were the first improvisation.

What kind of improvisation is this one?

It is always, in my art, as I have been doing it lately, quieter than the drawing. Even if the colors describe an inner storm, a big longing, an upheaval of emotions, the improvisation is done from some distance. I am not involved any more with the details of the skin or how the eye blinks with irritation. Instead, my focus has shifted to the invention of the experience, the creating of the appearance.

At this moment, when I do the emotional movements, when I depict the energetic sources of how things ended up in appearance, I become disconnected from the details. Yes, I see them. I still have the experience of having created them a few seconds ago alive in my being. But magically I am able to hold them without being absorbed by them. I am allowing them to be, and at the same time, see/feel in me the energetic structures that are responsible for the forms. Who makes these structures of energy? I do.

And suddenly, I am aware of my experience in a deeper way. Or maybe I should call it multi layered way. And in order to view my experience like this, I must view with the whole energy of my being. I have to be at the same time everywhere in me, and see, see deeper, and actually create all that happens, which I call experience.

This is very much like what I do in meditation.

All right, friends. No big deal. I just made a portrait. I just looked at a wider landscape, where creation happens. I looked at a little part of it. The picture is not complete if you look for all possible details. But it is complete as it is, and nothing else is necessary for the presence of everything in the universe to be there. Indeed, this, and everything else, cannot exist without the existence of all the other things in the universe. Nothing can be missing, and it never is.

267. What is there?

P1000458

Thinking again about the choice of doing the blog as my direction.

It may feel as if I am an ant, crawling on a topographical map, among hills and valleys in brown and green. And it can also be seen as if I am the sky that is getting involved with the hills, the valleys and the ants.

Somehow it seems that doing the blog is the most forgiving occupation. It doesn’t hold you to a verbally defined commitment. You have seen it going in different directions. One day it was centered on poetry as it looks at life in a fluid way, not entrapped in what seems to be reality, but flowing away from boundaries of shape and time.

Another day I looked at my subconscious beliefs, as they could be detected in my artwork. These beliefs are what mask the truth.

Sometimes discussions of artworks spilled over to glimpses of how things are in these ever-changing worlds, yours and mine.

It can go anywhere.

And don’t forget that it started as a description of self-healing, and almost instructional pieces about the method that I came to find, use and share, and you could read how I viewed the sources of illness (In the ’About’ page).

This is why choosing a direction settled quite easily, in the end, into taking this blog-making as my thread, the line in the middle of my path of choosing and doing. It is a direction without a goal, but with a compass. It has no end. And I’m sure that along the way I’ll be healed from the physical ailments and more and more clearly will be living as an expression of the truth, knowingly.

For one year, when I was 21, I worked as a surveyor’s assistant in a copper mine. Two of us, the assistants, were given the geologist’s instructions to the miners about which direction to dig now, and we descended into the dark tunnels with headlights, heavy batteries attached to our belts and the surveying equipment, to mark with little metal pegs that we hammered into the rocks, which are the new directions in the different faces of the mine.

Sometimes we sneaked away to some neglected, dead end tunnel, far from the noise and sweat of the digging machines. We would sit quietly on the damp earth and turn off the lights on our helmets. We would be then in total darkness, such that you cannot find outside of the mine.

The world would disappear and we would hold our breath.

Why do people do things like this?

I think it is to find the truth. What is there, when everything is gone?

What is there?

266. Just reading

Craving roots

There are many ways to read art. This is one of them: Just start writing and see where it takes you.

You can also say: Start to describe what you see. From there you start to be guided by your interests, associations, and yes, the universe supports you, based on your inclination at the time. We are always supported.

The painting is from June 5th and I wrote this on June 6th. Other things came in the way and I did them, but now I want to share this.

The first thing that came to my mind was that it came out alive. It means that the power that was used in order to create it is still in it. And what is the power? It is a thought, expressed in space and time.

When you look at it, your energy field responds to the experience by arranging itself into an energy structure. To you it feels like a feeling that you may have a name for. Then your thought processes become engaged and a new adventure starts in your story of your life. It may be big or small. Maybe you immediately turn away, smile, have a cup of tea and look at birds in the sky?

Here is what I wrote:

It feels like this: a number of shapes in different colors bump into each other in the middle (These are the colored shapes). The feeling is of an argument or at least a disagreement (Purple, orange, brown and blue). But it does not come to fighting.

There are three shapes who are out of the group. They haven’t come into touching relations, like the four others. So maybe they hesitate to join? Maybe the yellow on the left and the pink on upper left were kicked out of this society or could not join in as there was not even the slightest invitation extended to them. Or, maybe they stopped before they came too close, so that they can take a good look at what is happening.  Maybe they want to check it out before they join? And the cloud, the third of the outsiders, is the one who cares the least. He seems to have more power than all the rest. He has his own behavior and his own field of reference, which is the weather system in the area and the world. As such he is much less a participant in the meeting. But because of him, the perspective of other, bigger systems, is added to every part of this picture.

Then there is the earth with an orange border. But this element is cut abruptly on the left, without too much drama.

This tear-off breaks the impression of a stable earth. This earth can shrink to nothing. Don’t rely on me, it says. Look somewhere else for your stability.

Now the purple and the brown seem to connect with the earth, in spite of it being ephemeral. The orange and the blue seem to be okay with just floating in the air. Or maybe they are not so okay with it, and this is why they come to mix with the earthlings.

So here is a kind of a summary. There is a little drama here. Like in a country, or any society. People collaborate without agreeing with each other. There are some small areas of overlapping and you can say, some form of compromise and collaboration. The others are in differing degrees of separation, deciding not to get involved. But they are close anyway. They are human too and they don’t want to give up on their belonging to this group.

These are the energy bodies, operating by the hidden assumptions that bring about what seems to appear in reality, which is the drawing in green lines.

The green lines describe little separate forms that together create the pattern of what appear in this world of time and space.

So when you wander in this world and see all these forms around you, know that they come from a deeper, usually unseen, layer of energy bodies, coming into being from thoughts and ideas.

All comes from thoughts.

As in a known Zen story, in which some students, looking at a flag that moved in the wind, argued about what truly moved. Is it the flag? Is it the wind? And the master said: Nothing moves, except for your thoughts.

And how could I forget the red part of the lines, in a little area in the right? There was some drama in the reality of the picture.

This red part is indeed a part of the reality that I created with my thoughts. But I gave it the red color to say that according to my beliefs this is a violation of some sort.

Now imagine that you are an art therapist and this is the first artwork that your new client made. Do you see how much can be learned from just the first painting?

And if every one of us has a such a collection of thoughts with him at every moment, can you see what the fabric of our humanity is made of? If we want to have any measure of freedom, we must come out of this state, in which we are controlled by our assumptions, and look at it from a deeper perspective.

265. My heart has been here already (the door)

You will have to imagine the picture for this entry.

Imagine a few wide horizontal lines, painted with a soft pastel in brown, any brown that you like. The lines overlap and, together, create one thing that travels now and now and now. It travels joyfully, like a dolphin in water. Sometimes one of the lines becomes bigger. At other times another one does it. Sometimes the colors change. Let it be painted by your heart.

Now in words.

The big picture:

I hear a bird outside. I don’t recognize it. But somewhere, in a deep place in me, Of course I know it. And I think: this bird sings from my heart. Then I think: everything that happens in this world comes from my heart. The buildings, the people on my block. There are many of them. I live in New York City. The street here is like a canyon. The precipices on each side are made of some eight floors apartment buildings that are more than a hundred years old. The number of people who live on my block is probably 300 times greater than the number of people who lived in the village of my youth.

And everything, all these people, the dust and soot, the funny and strange cars, the way the sunlight manages to come in and paint parts of the walls, all are coming from my heart.

This is the big picture for our purposes now.

The small picture:

What do I want to do?

For 14 years I was a designer, and changed to an illustrator. Then, after 17 years I changed to an art therapist. Now, 13 years later, I’m changing again. The change happens by itself. Usually people don’t let the change go through, because, logically, it does not make sense to start everything anew, when the old thing is working already and even gets you some recognition and acknowledgement.

But I learned not to stand in the change’s way, because I suffer if I do not follow my heart.

So the new thing was here already and was doing itself. It did not come from any ’sense-making.’ But I did not recognize this clearly yet.

At first I thought I wanted to live like an artist now. The studio was calling me. All the paints were getting excited.

But I also wanted to write and make books and children’s books. My life would be too bad without making them.

And what about living on the path that leads deeper and deeper into the truth of everything?

And what about sharing what I find with others who are interested? This is one of the most beautiful things that I can do. What else is there to do here, on earth?

And I wanted to make music.

And so went my thinking and I did not know what to do.

I’ve learned that when I have such a weighty question, it is best to keep it as a question and since this is after all a matter of the heart, I’ll invite the heart to answer. It always answers in its time. So every time the question came, I gave it to the heart: Here, this is the question I am looking for an answer for.

And one day, when I was in a short meditation, and the question was tickling, the answer came:

The blog.

I ‘work on myself’ all the time and the blog accompanies me as I go. I use artmaking and reading the art as my main method, so I have the art and the writing. It is already like a book. I can, at some point, collect some entries according to a subject that I’ll choose and make a book out of them. Or even more than one book. Sometimes it has illustrations too. Everything that I do from love and interest is already included in the adventure of the blog making. I have a conversation with other people too.

Everything that I did in my life was always about these same things, about development, freedom, beauty, living meaningfully. It is as if I have been doing this blog all my life.

And for income I can exchange the art that is created along the way with money that will pay for my life. It’s all very flexible. Things can be added, directions can change.

And in this way, with all these thoughts coming in very fast and quietly, everything fell into place.

When this clicked into place I felt a huge relief. I knew that everything was okay. And there was no need to change anything, as I was already there. For a while i made sure that I did only what I wanted to do. Tis opened the door for my heart to choose for me, and I was already where I wanted to be.

In my meditation when this knowing appeared, I saw an image in my imagination. I saw a few wide lines made with a dark brown soft pastel. The lines overlapped, just as the colors usually overlap in my paintings, and became one expression. This is the essence of this blog.

So I answered, for those who were interested. And now, back to life.

263. A day free from school

I wouldn't mind

I wouldn’t mind

having a big room where

on the clean floor

somewhere farther than the middle

this

will stand

just a line

maybe dark grey

as here

and people will get

a little book

of white thick paper

and a beautiful small collection

of very soft oil crayons

to do anything they want

with color

and I will go away

to sit in the garden

with a cup of

coffee

and infinity

then

people will come to me

with their color works

and we will laugh

like children

on a free day

from school.

262. What will happen next?

free

I thought about this many times lately. It was like an old friend, knocking on my window to wake me up.

Drawing is my most direct expression. When I started doing abstract drawings many years ago, I was thinking about sculptures that I wanted to make. I did not have the how to, the where to, and I was busy doing other things that I thought were what I wanted to do.

But the ideas were insistent and felt as if they were calling me. So I drew them. Almost all my abstract drawings for years were sketches for sculptures. In my imagination I was making sculptures all the time.

Then the drawings started to have a life of their own. They were independent of everything else, and I did them as final artworks.

A friend from Germany created an opportunity for me, to have an exhibition in Koln. I sent pictures of my works and the deal was made. I leafed through my many drawings and those I chose, I decided to sew onto canvases. I had an old sewing machine but I did not know how to use it. I remembered seeing my grandma sitting at an old Zinger and I imitated all that I remembered her doing, and the machine started to sew.

I started to draw with the sewing and at the same time that it connected the drawings to the canvases, it became part of the drawings. I let the ends of the threads hang from under the canvases. Then some of the instruments I had on my table as I was working found their way onto the canvases too, with some glue, as they seemed to be just what was needed there. Then came words. Some paintings had a word or two. Others had poems.

For a month and a half the works hang in the gallery. I had a good review in the local newspaper. The curator of one of the museums visited my show. I made friends with other artists and I went to visit their shows.

All the works were not just rectangular with straight edges. They had irregular shapes and stuff extended from their edges into the space around them. This is the point here. Irregular shapes, and breaking away from being restricted into rectangles.

Then I participated in a collage class and all the works that I did there refused to be blocked in a straight lined frame. They all had things sticking out of them.

In this drawing I thought about a sculpture again and I let the shapes play in a big shapeless background. I cropped it for the blog, but the frame here does not have as an important part as the cropping has in all the other paintings in this blog.

In this painting there is not even one little part that is not totally alive with the experience of now.

Is it a plate with something on it?

Is it a ship, traveling on a golden sea?

Is it a jungle with a cloud?

Is it about having been in a place where food was ready for me on the plate, and a ship has come to take me out of the jungle onto the open, golden sea?

Now, what will happen next? “What will happen next” is a pregnant question and all is good.


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The healing process

Entries 1-58 show how I use the method of Intuition Through Art to heal myself from Peripheral Neuropathy.

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