The natural world is crazy about you
Your energy responds
By getting warm in places
The wooden deck is growing suns
And acting like a down quilt
I can’t describe in words
How nature loves
Forget the words
And you will know.
Healing and growth through intuitive art
I feel that I am falling apart
I look at the mountains
And feel intimate with them
I try to be like trees
And have my wounds to prove it
Then
With amazement
I note
That, a bit chaotic as I am,
And disintegrated
I am also watching all of this
Experiencing touch
And even more than this
I’m making it
Rocks and trees and body
I
Am here.
The bird is infinite
She wants to fly up and up and far
But tears attach her to the sea of sorrow
Her ideas limit her
The rock of pain
Threaten to block her
The sea is wide
The angels watch and cannot interfere
Their heart cries out
Come, come, sweet bird
You can
And what’s the source of power?
It’s in the knowing
That her mind
navigates
Her thinking
Moves her
Think flying on
Think delighting in the life on earth
Think love given and received
And if one day
All your ideas will cease
Where will you find yourself?
Sweet bird
Where will you be?
And aren’t you already there
Right now?
In the middle is a package
With a secret
Of unknown consequences
All other things in this picture could be microbes
With a very elaborate social order
And rules of conduct
But in spite of that
They cannot contain their joy
For just being able to move their fingers
And toes
And they keep doing it
Secretly
But since all of them are doing it
They discover each other
In new ways
And through their joyous smiles
Become one
With no beginning
And end
Enfolding endless possibilities
Of love.
3:30 am.
If it hurts too much, I’ve learned to not let it go on. I get up and become more vertical to the earth for some time, I put an ointment on the skin and wait for the pain to subside.
I am very awake and it feels good.
What would you expect your painting to be like at a time like this?
So soft
Surprisingly
The inside moves in slower waves than the outside
It can all happen
You don’t have to change a thing
Just realize.
Here is my book.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1491062207
Every moment of creating it was a blessing to me.
Years of writing, arranging, creating descriptions of individual sessions, showing them to friends, presenting some in conferences, continuously developing my approach that you have glimpsed here on this blog, fashioning the approach to be more clear and simple, using it with people and on myself all the time, teaching it to other therapists, all these went into the book.
And because it all depended on my innate sense of beauty, it was always pleasant.
Then the book was shaped, edited thoroughly, designed very beautifully and published just this weekend.
At times it was hard to wait.
But here it is.
There are two versions, Paperback and Kindle.
The paper book has 172 full color pages, 82 color plates, several session descriptions with pictures and dialogue, a large section about the importance of intuition in everyone’s life, explained with pictures and text. Indeed it also has the teaching of how to make an intuitive painting and how to read it.
The Kindle version is free for five days, from Wednesday, Jan. 29 to Sunday, Feb. 2nd. It is in color too. (Amazon has free Kindle apps for every smart phone, tablet and computer.)
I’ll be thankful for any review in Amazon or elsewhere.
Love,
Giora
I discovered a pattern in a series of drawings that I made lately. These drawings were made during a period of three days. They are not all the drawings that I made. They are just a sampling. The pattern is of a layered history. I had this pattern in many other drawings that I did before. You can see many of them here on this blog. I even noted the layers when I wrote about the drawings. But these days, suddenly something rebelled in me. It was not a rebellion with fighting and blood. It was the feeling that this is a fixed perception, something which is inflexible in a world that I find more and more to be endlessly flexible. It does not have to be this way, I thought somewhere within the wholeness of my mind. This historical understanding of life, in which first there was this and from this came that, a perception that explains the condition now, based on what past events led to it, this perception is a thought in the present.
I have seen again and again that I can choose to change my thoughts in the present. I mean, a thought that occurred already occurred, but the next thought does not have to go in the same direction. I can choose a different thrust and I have done it many times. So do I have to continue keeping the belief in this historical stratification of my life? This is what was churning in me and it was different than just noting it as I did before. I was questioning its necessity and validity now.
Just this questioning, without any effort to come to an answer or to force a conclusion, has moved things in the mind and in the last drawing you will see that the order has turned upside down. What was the order before? From troubled beginning came, through a slow development, light, health and joy.
You can see in the drawing
that the roots are wild
And that they lead to a growth
that is more peaceful and joyful.
In this drawing too
you can see that
turmoil and pain are the basis
from which
a rocky landscape emerges
with a transparent city on its top.
In the last one a healthy beginning is being attacked by trouble.
The blue and green and yellow
are the good beginning.
The trouble is easy to see.
I can say that I did not create this shift willingly. It is the awareness and wondering that weakened the old perception. Awareness and wondering made the shift possible. But the shift happened without the willful “I” of every day. Something deeper has done the work here. My intuition, or the infinite inner love, has come into the personality and moved my focus one step backward. Instead of looking at my history, looking back from now, and seeing how I came from a troubled beginning to a good state, the last drawing shows instead how I was before the trouble came into my life and how the trouble came.
From this I learn that the idea of layering is OK but it has to have three layers. The first is the innocent, fresh, joyful beginning. Then trouble comes and makes war with this beginning, and eventually things change again for the better and happier state.
I could see other things in the drawings and especially in the last one, just as you can. But this is what came to me.
Why is this meaningful?
Every change in my history was a choice. I chose to come into this world and get into trouble. Then I chose again to change the patterns of troubled living into joyful living. But without seeing myself from before the troubles began, I only see myself as one who started from trouble, and because of this, there is always a sense that the troubled state is my natural state. It is where I come from. Something was wrong with me, right from the beginning. It is hard to get rid of this feeling that right from the beginning something was wrong with me. So even if I managed to change patterns of thought into more joyful ones, there is still somewhere in me the belief that something is wrong with me. Because of this, I don’t have the necessary energy to move to happiness. The joy that I want to experience requires some work that has to be done, to overcome this nagging feeling of worthlessness. But if I manage to go farther into the past than this life and see the way I was before I came here, I get to experience the joy in myself in the true, natural state, and this gives me the necessary energy to choose happiness. You have to choose your happiness.
I have seen it with others in my work. Especially I have seen it with those who were born into loveless families with mental illnesses, anger and neglect. No matter how much we tried to understand how these environments contributed to the current suffering, the understanding was not strong enough to make a change. My clients still felt worthless. But when we came together to the time before they were born, they saw that they really were joyful in the beginning and understood that they had made the choice to suffer. This, somehow, leads quite easily and without a conscious effort, to choosing again and this time the choice is to be happy. The most important part of the transformation is the experience of the joy that we really are. And in this way, with surprising ease, people change their lives.
As for me, I find that many times I start new things with my clients. Wanting to help them find the power to change, I discover that we need to go deeper than we went before and come to the point where they can experience how joyful they were before the choice to suffer was made. Once they come back to the point of choice, they choose to change without any effort. And now I find that I am going through the same process.
Thank you, my clients. You are so good in being a mirror for me.
Here is another example of reading art. As it was in the previous entry, when you look at the drawing at first it seems as if it will be hard to tell something clear about it. But as I started describing what I see, the vision became clear. This is the fun in this game. The truth is always hiding in plain sight. And my blog has turned into straight forward reading of my art, based on the most straight-forward approach to understanding subconscious content through art. It is: simply describing what I see. As I describe what I see, the connection to my life appears. The art had to be done intuitively, to reflect so clearly what is going on in the subconscious. Any thinking-guided part of the art would have stopped the flow of the description and obscure the clarity. We would have to read the thought first and let it go in this way, so that the next drawing will flow better. It is a method. I am describing the method that I use in art therapy. Everything in this blog, right from the first entry has to do with how I work not only on myself but with others, to clear blockages to their inner flow and allow them to find out who they really are.
It looks like a collection of creatures. They are very lively and have the sense of being absorbed in being who they are, as monkeys do, but without an awareness of it. They also seem to be agitated and about to jump at any moment. This is what animals do. They behave as who they are, without any hindrances, and they do not know who they are. It is a simple life.
They look like monkeys or cats or bugs.
There is the lower layer in purple and browns. Then there is an upper layer in green and light blue. And finally there are the two light orange creatures at the top of the picture.
You can see that the interest of the animals in the lowest layer is horizontal. They do not think about going up.
The interest of the green animal is in the process of changing. The animal stops going right, horizontally, and turns to look up. The blue lines that come out of it also turn in different directions.
The light orange critters at the top of the picture fly up into the sky, and you can see that they are fine with it. They are peaceful. They do not feel fear. You can say that they are enjoying the flight.
All these are different focuses of the animals and the critters. These focuses are available to every one of them, but they make a choice and focus in one way.
Other interesting elements in the drawing are the two places where there are the shapes in more intense orange. The one in the lower strata just creates an intense interest, presenting to the animals something intensely different. The one on the upper layer seems to be what has stopped the green animal from going to the right. It is sharp, and to avoid it the animal turned around.
All the orange shapes in the picture feel to me to be connected with what we call the spiritual pursuit, or seeking to know experientially who we are. At first it is something that feels different and provokes interest and wonder. Then it may be suffering of any sort that pushes us to change direction. And then comes the discovery of what was felt from the beginning, which is the sense of the true self, which shifts the focus away from the earthly bond.
Now looking at the beginning of this path again, the first animal, the one in purple, seems to be peaceful and in meditation. All of this happens in his mind. The not-knowing, the intense interest, the change of direction and finally the flight. All these happen on their own, without any effort. It is just the way things happen when you take your hands off them, and allow them to move. This is what I call healing.
This is what this art process does.
My book “Opening Intuitive Flow Through Artwork” will come out soon. It has the method in it and examples from my sessions with people.