intuitiveflow

As it happened to me many times before, I was planning to paint big parts of the picture and use a few different colors to help identify different entities or things that happen in the picture.

Still with the same intention, it came to me to jump to a different portion of the drawing, near what I came to call the mice, so that I could better imagine what color I’d give to one mouse’s back. And suddenly, looking at the whole picture, I knew that it was finished, and the meaning came to me, as it is in the headline for the entry. Until then I did not even think about mice and a goat.

It is an interesting thing, isn’t it? I start with one thing in mind and end up with another.

This change that happens within a creative process is not an exception to the usual way things go. I believe it happens in every creative process. As a creative process goes on, because of allowing it to happen through us, our perspective changes. We become better connected with the place from which the creative process comes from. Creative processes happen not only in the arts but also in many other activities, when we really put our hearts in what we do.

Why? What does this mean?

The answer is in the following of one’s heart.

When we follow our thinking processes, we can’t but be limited to what is kept in our minds, which is what we have learned. We can learn more before we make a new decision, but still, we will be again limited, this time to our extended knowledge.

Creativity is different. When we get into a creative flow we let our minds rest and we open our inner listening to what may come from the infinity of all that is. This is what I call intuition, which is: Knowing without the need to think about it. If you do these things, you probably know that creating or letting intuition come through us, feels so much better than trying to solve problems through thinking. The intuitive flow is what brings us into a deeper state. Our perspective changes and with it our aims, the ways we think and act and our choices.

In a way, getting into an intuitive flow is like climbing a mountain to be able to see a wider area to understand it within a bigger context.

So it is natural to start a work of art, aiming at one thing and to end up in a different place.

In my case here, the mice who still want to talk with the goat represent ways of understanding of my life that are based on ideas that I had stored in the subconscious in early age and that are still active today.

I feel something went wrong and I want to fix it. I, represented by the mice, want to talk to the goat. The child wants to discuss an unfinished business with the parents or with his world.

At the same time I keep getting better at going deeper, and from there both sides of the conflict are seen as what had been created by the same intelligence, to enable experiencing this unique conflict and maybe to enjoy the deeper satisfaction of freeing ourselves from it, realizing that it is a game after all and it will change when our belief in its truth will end.

This is what healing is. This is what meeting your true self means.

Everything is changeable. The two sides of the conflict were invented for their enactment on the stage of life. One of the sides is what I call “I”. The other side is mostly the other people around me. I had my extensive experience of living the conflict.

The show has ended now.

The lights in the hall came on.

It is time for curtain calls. And then: What will be the next show?

It is hard to not be able to sleep because of constant pain. It is even harder when the pain keeps coming in waves. You may wonder what is it. It is possible to see it as strong movements of energy through places in my legs that refuse to let the energy pass. It is thoughts that move energy, and that block energy. So what are the thoughts behind these occurrences? It is possible to tolerate it for a while. But very soon it becomes unbearable. You start moving in different ways to escape it, to change it, to make it less vicious, but these efforts only make the pain stronger.

Then you give up trying to do all these and you bring your body into a position in which you can tolerate it better. Maybe this position includes some movement? Then you just wait like this for some relief, some relative relief, that will make it possible for you to fall asleep for a while and have some rest that you so crave.

After hours of this, I got up and carefully walked barefoot on the painful soles just a few feet to the table. I turned on the lamp, separated a sheet from the block of watercolor paper, dipped my brush in the first color that called my attention, and started, with no plan, except for being true to what will want to come.

Looking at the drawing, you can see that all the lines have the same character. They are agitated. They are so taken by their agitation that they hardly create any recognizable shapes.

There is, maybe, a sense of walking to the right side of the drawing and being, at the same time, pushed back to the left. Maybe what is expressed, without having planned it, is walking against resistance?

The friction that resists the walking is the pain. For me the walking is spiritual, and now I read in the drawing a message to mysef: I need to go on, in spite of this resistance. There is still a lot to clean out from my subconscious.

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Looking at the drawing again, after breakfast, I see snowy peaks of a mountain range. It feels as if the view is being obscured by mist. We don’t see the mist. It is white and the paper is white. But the view is broken, incomplete, only suggested by discontinued lines.

So what do we gather now from these two interpretations?

The first one feels more convincing. Knowing the condition in which the drawing was made, it is easy to believe the first interpretation. It even has an additional “wise view” that shades some deeper light on the immediate experience of suffering.

But the second interpretation  can also be convincing, when you know that there is a meditative state throughout all of the experience. True, the experience is harsh. But I have changed at some point in my life and the aware state never leaves me. With all the harshness of the physical experience, there is some inner freedom from it and a continuous observation that is free from the stories of life. It is a view with the taste if being in awe. As if something, deep I me, is saying wordlessly: Wow! And even as the immediate physical sensation is of torture, there is the accompanying taste of eternity with the infinitely intricate and beautiful views that appear in awareness.

Seeing this, I can’t but feel thankfulness.

I could continue the drawing by adding colors and other effects, but I chose to not add colors to the drawing, so that all that I wrote about stays as clear as possible.

The drawings in my work are always the most direct expressions of the immediate experiences. The colors and other effects that come later offer additional interpretations of the same states.

I felt I needed to take some distance from the blog and from continuously describing my experiences, so that I could walk my path for a while without the notion of communicating what I go through.

I see now that it was helpful. There was an anger that wanted to come out.

It is hard to attach the anger to a one specific issue.

When the vibration of anger appears in my being it immediately connects with so many more issues that have this kind of energy, and the experiences in reality that happen as a result are varied.

We all have a vast network of connections to all kinds of feelings and experiences. Trying to know them all and to release every one of them is practically impossible. And yet you do want to do something about this.

The wise and loving thing will be to become a witness that is anchored in a deeper state. It means to settle your self-identification in such a witnessing state, and allowing the varied energies to pass through the inner space of the mind. You can imagine the whole situation as being a part of an infinite heart-mind that includes every possible expression. The part that we are has the ability to make choices.

A choice is something like this: I enjoy experiencing this. I’ll stay with this feeling to experience more of it. Let’s see what more is possible in this area of feeling.

Every time you change your choices, even by a tiny measure, everything in your experience changes too, to bring you the experiences that match the way you feel. If you pay attention only to your senses, things will seem to be the same as before. But with your heart, you will notice that an old friend suddenly says something new that goes along with your new inner experience. An interviewee on the radio, for example, will say things that now for you are the truth and were not so before. You will find a book in which your new beliefs are expressed.

A cloud that passes in the sky before your eyes will have the energy of your new understanding. A bird will chirp your conviction to you. And for me, a line on the paper, the composition, the spaces in a drawing, will express precisely the intricate, sometimes complex, network of energetic connections that I have in this moment with all the energies that match my current state.

So here, to keep the record going, is a painting from a few days ago. My partner Anita called it A Stampede. I called it The Snake And Its Thoughts.

What is important in this art making process, if you want it to be a healing process, is that the focus is not on the person or circumstances that the anger is aimed at. Instead, it is on witnessing the energy of this specific inner event. You witness energy with your own energy. Maybe I’ll write about this in the next entry.

Once more, being a witness is not about waiting for the bad person to get his punishment. It is about being like a little child who does not attach any meaning to the experience, but is awed at its rich and unique appearance. This is the state that heals, because it is infused with the energy of appreciation, fun, playfulness, love, joy.

Nobody needs healing really. But when the inner, deeper perspective is active, the energy in that person is elevated and will start attracting events, environments and other beings with the same energy. This will be a better state of living. Living with these inner experiences will reduce stress in the body and there will be a better physical state too.

So here it is. Enjoy looking at my so-called anger.

Ask anything, if you want, in the comments and I will answer.

And how does the last entry relate to my despair?

Like Jonathan, I want to have my feelings acknowledged, so that I can let them go. I show my moods, my feelings and my beliefs to myself, when I paint.

Before I start, I always ask that the painting will show me what is going on in my thinking, feelings and mood.

This is like asking, before I start the painting: tell me how do I feel now, with all the links to my subconscious?

Now, in order to know how I feel, I need to come out of the feeling and still feel it at the same time.

Is this possible?

It is only possible if I find a way to become aware.

Awareness is a strange ability that we all possess and use when we need it. It is exactly what I wrote before: We somehow find a way to disengage from our involvement with our immediate experience, while allowing the experience to go on, so that we can become the watchers of it.

Becoming the watcher, in this way, is actually stepping into a deeper or bigger aspect of us. We cannot become observers of our own feelings or inner experiences without doing this stepping into the deeper, wider aspect.

This aspect is always watching our inner experiences, from the time of our birth to the last minute of life. It is independent. It always allows everything to happen, without interfering. So this ability to watch and let be, is in every single one of us.

If we decide to dip in this aspect of ourselves more, we see more of our inner experiences and it starts to become clearer to us, when we feel good and when we feel not so good. Then, naturally, with this inner view to support us, we tend to choose the experiences that make us feel better, and we also choose to let go of the experiences that cause us to suffer. In this way we improve our everyday experience of life. We veer ourselves toward more of what we like and away from what we do not like.

Overall our mood becomes good in more of the time, and this is called emotional healing.

The use of this facility is actually the only thing that can heal us. And we are the only entity in the world that can do it for ourselves. Other people can help us develop this ability, to dip in our larger aspect and look from inside, but other people cannot really change anything in our inner world. It is our own choice. We have to do it for ourselves. So every healing is actually a self-healing.

Does this make you feel good?

Check inside. Dip and see, if you want.

Good? Interesting? Unexpectedly enriched? Lost? Frightened? Awed?

I think this is already long for a blog post. So I’ll add one more entry in this little series, to finish it off. But I’ll tell you here that art making can be a very effective and powerful way to get into this deeper larger aspect of who-we-are. I’ll write about it in the next entry.

This is the beginning of the answer that I asked in the previous post.

I sat with the eleven years old boy in the art therapy room. Let’s call him Jonathan.

Christmas was coming and he wanted to draw a Christmas tree.

I have been working with him for a few weeks by now and noticed that he always preferred to make things that he had already made before. He did not feel up to the challenge of imagining and inventing.

I let him do what he chose to do. Several times he wanted to cast a plaster mask and paint it later. There was a lot of white plaster dust on the dark table, and As Jonathan was working on the cast, I spread some white plaster dust on my side of the table and drew in it with my finger.

In the end of the session I asked Jonathan if he wanted to have some dust on his side, so he could draw in it with his finger.

The first time he only smiled.

The second, he shyly drew something.

And it became the ritual in the end of every session. I took pictures of his drawings in the dust and we kept them with his other creations.

One day, in the ritual time, he drew something with a paintbrush on a piece of paper.

Then came the session with the tree.

According to Jonathan, the first tree did not come out right.

He tried another one next to the first, then a third and a forth. With every additional tree his distress grew.

I wanted for him to enjoy this new stream of creativity that started to appear. I told him that the trees that he made look really good (They did). Especially as they are next to each other, they really look like trees in the field. Every one is somewhat different. One bends to the right, another to the left, as trees behaved in nature.

But clearly this did not improve his mood at all. He became more and more bent under the weight of his sadness.

Maybe you can try another technique, I suggested? You know, if you draw the tree with pieces of plasticine, you have more control and you can change things as you go. His hands were trembling that day from the heavy medications that he was taking at the time.

He made a tree from lines of rolled plasticine.

In his mind, this did not work too.

It was on the tip of my tongue to say that the tree looked good, but I stopped myself.

Something was wrong with trying to convince him that his work was good when he felt that he was failing.

What did he really want from me?

Then I understood.

-You want to show me that you cannot do it?

He looked at me with wide, open eyes.

-You want me to know how hard it is for you to do things?

-You want me to see how sad it is that you can’t?

There were tears in his eyes and I had some in mine, as we looked at each other.

The session ended and there was no need for further talking.

And there is a little tail to the story:

In the next day, at noon, I took my lunch from the kitchen’s window and started walking back to the art room. I had a pile of lattice leaves on one side of the plate, and one of them fell to the floor.

I bent down to pick it up and did not notice that Jonathan was walking towards me, on his way to the kitchen’s window. When he passed near me he caressed my head lightly, as one would do to a cat, and walked on.

The next entry, #303, will connect #301 with #302.

I have been on the spiritual path from the day I was born. Calamities happened and revelations were revealed. I have experienced the highs and the lows of human experience.

The tendency is to push toward the highs and use any method that I can find, to eliminate the down turns.

These days I wake up with pain that stands in the way of even making art and writing. I love biking so much that I bike almost every day lately, even with the pain. And then I suffer the consequences and do not sleep at night from the pain.

What is going on? Since I create everything that my experience seems to bring, why do I create this suffering?

I was told by inner guidance that as soon as I wouldn’t need it, it will go. Why do I need it?

And of course there were all the good people, healers, spiritual mavens, good friends, who tried to encourage me to choose the highs, to use medications to reduce the pain, to take a look at this article, and to try this or that.

I love this painting because it describes despair beautifully. The sea of sadness is under all the phenomena that is above it. The grass tries to cover it, but on the left side, it is exposed.

Joy tries to spring out from some spot in the low middle. A tree grows from the green, but the sky around it seems to limit its space and is more like a prison than a space to expand into.

Whatever tries to grow up is being blocked and pushed sideway by the heavy dark cloud that has the same color as the sea of sadness at the bottom.

There is one more desperate effort to break trough the cloud with the magenta colored little shapes. It is being chocked in the dark blue cloud. Still, some lines that escaped the blockade and are at the top of the painting try to go up but they too end up broken and listless.

There is a little thin hope on the top right.

That’s it.

Oh, and I missed that baby little line on the right with the orange light on its side. This is the part of my consciousness that is truly free in this moment to turn right and walk into the space of infinite possibilities. But it is not sure yet that it really wants to go. Look at its top. It is looking back at the struggle.

What is missing?

How to allow change to happen?

A deeper view of the truth is needed.

I will start going there in the next entry.

H and I spoke about the light that I saw on the wall outside of my window. I mentioned opening a window and then opening the opening in the window.

We talked about the pain. I thought about health and what my feet will do in a healthy situation.

I have been making some kind of a horizon in my paintings lately, and maybe for many years. It is like an anchor of physical reality. Things can be attached to it or they can float away, to indicate freedom from the idea of an anchor.

I have little things floating in the skies that I make, to also show some connection between heaven and earth.

I have buildings, I have trees, I have openings in the buildings’ walls.

I usually have something green.

And I have some humans or animals that are twisted and obscured, but have strong hints of human or animal poses and movements.

The earth has many times hints of rocks, cracks folds and ploughed fields.

You can find things like these in this painting and in most of my other artworks.

But the paintings are different from each other.

What are different are the lines, the composition and the colors.

So these are the real content of my works.

Give me hands, give me spiders, give me stones, and I will use them to create different compositions, with lines that feel different and of course colors that tell different experiential stories.

Many years ago I made prints that had only numbers in them. I’ve always been like this.

So it is the composition and the expressions of the lines and the colors.

Do you want to understand me?

Look me up in these.

But it will be only a relative knowing.

It is impossible to understand me.

I am infinite, just like you.