intuitiveflow

Window box

December 14^th. Still a lot of pain visits my left foot and some visits my right foot too. There are changes in the pain and in where it is all the time. I sit on the bed and talk with A. I look at my left foot and realize that new muscles have grown there.

There is a known phenomenon that goes with deterioration of the nerves. As the nerves stop serving some areas of muscle, the muscle tissue deteriorates too and simply disappears. You get areas where the skin rests directly on the bones, with no flesh between them. I had some areas like this. I almost could close a circle with my thumb and the middle finger around my left ankle. Not any more. There is flesh there now.

I look at the blog and read the last two entries. I feel love. As if this is someone else who is going through his adventure of becoming clear. I always marvel when I see other people release subconscious material and become lighter. What can be more heartwarming than that? It is I who is going through it, and another I is looking and feeling love.

 I promised more and here it is.

Three in the morning again. I am too awake from the pain. I go to the studio and make a drawing. Slowly I move the brush, as if I have all the time in the world. I do.

I look at it.

Like running impalas

I write to myself a few things. I can read my drawing fast. But I prefer to play with the going-in-with-words because it is more fun. I can be surprised.

I collect sentences about what do the different shapes in the drawing do. I scramble them and in their new order I insert a few words, change a few things until they start to make sense.

This is the result:

I spread green boughs

Like a herd of running

Impalas

I turn myself into a landscape

I play becoming sky

And cirrus clouds

I am fed and aired

I even peek in from my side

To take a look at

How I grow.

It is a good feeling and with this I go back to bed.

I wake up in the morning and feel the heaviness of depression-like feeling pulling me down. This is strange. I have my morning call with Shirley and we dig together into my subconscious to clear programs that don’t want me to be free and happy. This helps. I feel lighter, and become very active, calling some people that I want to call and sending some emails. I feel compassion and gratefulness. That’s how I work.

Then the depressing mood comes back.

This is strange. It has been about fifteen years that I have been very stable in my good mood. People who come to me with depressions, memories of abuse and anything heavy always leave the sessions feeling lighter. This seesaw of feeling light and then heavy reminds me of one meditation retreat in which my mood switched between these two extremes every session, for a whole day. I could not do anything about it. I just watched with huge calm as my moods changed in front of me, so to speak, and then I went deeper.

I sit down to draw again.

Pick a side

The drawing does not show depression. Instead there are two sides, as before. Every one of them walks away from the other. The right, purple side, seems to have more difficulties and is getting into trouble with the yellow and the orange, coming from the ground. The red spots in this side also seem to get in the way.

The left side seems to have an easier time. Red in the left side feels like flowers.

The whole thing seems to be about duality and about judgment and choice that duality forces you to make. The more I go through these drawings of right and left that do not harmonize, The more I become a witness again, who is not on either side.

I am not that.

All of this is a process of meditation. It allows moods and memories to come to the surface. We have so many of them stored in our subconscious. Being quiet invites them to come from whatever depth they dwelled in and if we stay in the witnessing state they just go through our experience and disappear. Making art intuitively is even a better witnessing state, because there is wonder and love in it, and the mysterious sense of a wiser and more compassionate order.

It starts with a 3AM drawing. 3AM is a good time to draw intuitively, because even though you are not asleep obviously, you are asleep to some degree, and it is all for good.

I draw with my nose close to the paper, as children sometimes do, so I see what I am doing up close, but I do not see all of the paper. This is good too. The drawing makes itself. When I finish I look.

Turning away from the light

It has two sides, one is dark and one is light. In the dark side there is some  furniture with some kind of a vase. One plant comes out of the vase. It is green. It looks depressed. It lost a part that is falling. There is another plant, made of the same dark blue that the furniture is made of. In this plant, there is some blooming, but the blooming happens inside of a constraining circle. The red flower cannot grow out of the circle. This whole part, on the right side of the drawing, seems to come close to the other, left side of the drawing. But instead of getting mixed with it, it turns its back to it and grows away from it.

The light side seems a little pushed away by the right side, but it sends one ray of light into the sad area. In it there is life and change.

This strikes me. I meet with a tendency in me to turn away from the light. Many memories and ideas are stirred in my mind. The feeling of loving being sad, seeing it as beautiful. Loving the longing to the light, but being afraid that in the light I will not want to make art any more.. What kind of a life can that be?

This is not my normal everyday self. But here it is and it feels true. There is a pull to the sad, the dramatic, the ill, the dark, the hopeless.

I guess one can live like this and still make good art and long beautifully to the light. A beautiful longing always moved me. But I know that it is impossible to be happy this way. There is always giving up on happiness and choosing the lack, beautiful lack, but still lack. So here I come to a new front in my adventure with intuitive flow.

I am already an old hand. I ask myself: What is in the dark side? And I draw.

Little house in the snow

This surprises me even more.

It is almost a realistic picture of a house on a slope, with a little tree to its side and a big tree in front of it. The house leans on a hillside with wintering trees and there is a grey cloud, maybe in the sky, maybe as fog, caught up in the trees. There is a feeling of winter and snow.

And there are two sides in this too. The left looks more optimistic and inviting. The right seems to be closed and non communicative.

I remember seeing such a side in the pain phenomena. It is a part that is so hurting that it does not even want to hear anything from you. It just turns away and only if you hug it for a long time, it will start playing with your hair, maybe, or feel curious about your skin.

I decide to go through this façade and see what is behind it. The question is: If I go through this layer, what will I find behind it?

The drama of the knight

Here is what I see:

There is the red figure leaning forward to play? to touch? to own? a blue figure that looks like half of a woman. She is bending backward to avoid the red figure. Maybe she is on a boat that is about to leave. Maybe she will fall, because there is nothing under the right side of the boat. The red and the blue figures are connected with a light purple line through the ground. Maybe they belong to each other in some secret way? The ground is tilted and seems to stand on the back of an ochre horse, which makes everything very unstable. There are trees in the back of the red figure. They tilt in the other way. They have their own agenda. And here is an interesting thing: From the left low corner comes something that looks like a saw, to cut the leg of the red figure. This again! And I remember one more thing. I always had fascination with knights, fighting to prove their love to a woman that they can never touch. The whole scene looks somewhat theatrical and unreal. This is the direction it is going. What was a memory from a past life is starting to change into something that is less real.

After drawing this last one I go to the window seat. I lie down, very close to the window and drink, so to speak, the light that is coming in. I have to open myself to the light. This is what I think. So this series did something positive. But there is more to come.

I did not feel them for some fifteen years.

For a long while there was only the pain. Well almost. It did not leave me day and night. It went closer to the skin and became stronger and harder to take. I thought it would go away in a day, two days, three.. but it stayed for three or four weeks. Today I had a two hours break. For three nights I could not sleep. During two of these nights I drew these drawings on my little hand-held computer at night. I keep it near bed. As you can see, the pain got different. It was not any more concentrated in specific places. It was everywhere between the knees and the soles, all over the skin. Yes, specifically stronger where it always was, but almost as strong everywhere else, where it has not been before at all. It became a mood, an atmosphere, an overwhelming-throbbing-and-moving-in-unexpected-waves condition.

Maybe these drawings do not look like pain at all any more, but like confusion, or like a cloud, a colorful cloud sometimes.

During this time I took one session of Access Bars, which left me totally exhausted. The Bars are spots on the head that you touch lightly and release energy from mental formations that block your freedom. Then I took an eight hours class in doing these Access Bars. I got two new clients too. It is a miracle that I could even do sessions without enough sleep. Five minutes into the sessions I start feeling energized and sharp, as if I am in wonderland. Then, when people leave, there is nothing that I want more than to have some sleep.

Several times I draw in watercolor early in the morning or earlier, when it is still night and every time the drawing tells me that I am OK, that I am developing, that all is good.

So I decided to show you the little pain drawings that are different from all the pain drawings from the past. There is almost no composition in them. There are eight in the first night and four in the second night, but I’ll only show a few. And then, one of the morning watercolors and its going-in-with-words. Take this as a report from the road, where I do not yet know where I am, I do not see where I am going, but in spite of the strong and unbearable pain, somehow everything is OK. I can’t walk, I can’t sleep, I can’t sit and yet I do all these, shaking uncontrollably again and again. Somehow it feels right. Not from the point of view of guilt and having to be punished. This feeling has almost completely gone by now.

It does feel all right. I know it is alright.

Pain

Pain

Pain

Pain

Pain in two feet

Pain

Pain

Now comes a morning watercolor from November 25^th.

Lines are getting rounder

And the words:

I loved this mysterious blue

It was all ease and flow

For the four years old of me

I could not have enough of it

I was old and dark not long before

And suddenly I was a baby and a child

When blood came after me

I started flowing underground

But look

Light is everywhere already

And the lines are becoming rounder.

This is the first drawing.

The wounded farmer

The mountain of resistance (that we saw in the previous posting) has become the farmer, walking away from his fields. He has a jacket and a bag and has one leg. The other one is cut off. His fields have become his shadow. He has a wing that is heavy. The wing is connected to his fields. If he wants to flap his wing, he will have to flap all his fields with it, which is very hard to do. His horizon is sadness and lack. He is trying to walk away from his past, but the past sticks to him.

When I drew this I did not realize that I drew a person. I just did one line at a time, listening to suggestions from within, being dedicated to fulfilling my sense of beauty’s instructions.

The next drawing got me closer to the person.

Anger

I found tremendous anger. Colors change on the surface like the color of some octopuses when they are in danger, or about to attack.

Dark parts are parts that have become dead. The only thing that moves is anger, fury, clenched teeth, hostility. And now that I look at it I can feel the resistance too, as if it is saying: I am not moving from here.

But there is life in the hair. The hair shows some imagination. If it was a therapy session and the patient was immersed in sadness and anger, I might have suggested going into the hair, to give the patient some feeling of being alive. But I know that already and I am on my way to see in what way the resistance will change, if I just see it closely, again and again.

I drew once more.

Sad

There is softening. The anger turns to tired sadness. Remnants of beautiful colors appear and move through everything, as if saying: Look at what was lost. The figure, which suddenly looks like a bee, is bent as if it carries a heavy burden and there is a threat in the air, above the figure’s head. There is painful feeling in the chest. Gloom. Depression. Being a bee brings to my mind the way the bee has to die after she stings.

Maybe suddenly he starts to have these questions: What am I here to do? Why did I come here? I am sick and dying.

Some vigor remained in the lower parts, in the groin and in one thigh. Maybe it is the bees memory of the power she had in stinging. And there is a weak leg.

There is still some feeling of being stubborn, but the figure does not seem to be energetic enough to move far from where he is. Maybe he is destined to be on a slow, permanent pilgrimage? Maybe he will die? I find that many trips into the depths of our emotions and imagination reach death. Usually we are afraid of getting there, and quickly turn around to escape. But if we go all the way and agree to experience death, we discover freedom right behind it.

Here is the next one.

Trauma and the way nature goes on

The world is split into two parts. On the right is violence, blood, rain and soaked earth. On the left there is something like a bird on a bough. And there is green, maybe cultivated green, living in these two worlds. When trauma happens, nature continues to be alive and beautiful as if nothing happened. This seems to be a split for us, because we do not feel calm and natural while having trauma. We cannot understand how nature can be so peaceful.  What is interesting is that the figure has disappeared. Now there is only seeing. Maybe there is a teaching in it. The universe is always teaching. Maybe it says: The solution is here. Look at the natural world. Be natural. Be who you are. All the troubles start when you deny yourself the natural state of being who you are. Or maybe it says: What has just happened to you is natural, just as the bird, standing on a bough is. Everything happens because of the laws of the universe and everything is just as perfect. As such it is peaceful and harmonious too, even though it is hard for you to perceive the peace and harmony in it, because your mind refuses to accept it.

And then comes the next drawing:

Flowering

All is plants now.

They grow healthily, spread seeds, make colors, live fully.

Who made them?

In whose mind where they created?

For what witness do they show their full life force?

Do you see anybody?

 And now I can stop, because I know that the next one will be an empty page.

I do a drawing.

A mountain of resistance

I listen to an interview with Sandra Anne Taylor. (Look her up on the web)

What I hear makes sense to me. There is a place to put a question in, like in a chat box. She will answer some of the questions that will be put to her.

I write. I know she will answer me. “Why does the pain not leave me, in spite of doing so much healing work on it?”

I am the third person whose question is being answered.

She connects with my energy, she says. She sees that I am a farmer in some previous life. I have a vineyard. She sees a cart, full of grapes, rolling out of control and crushing my foot. From that point on, in that life, I can’t work and my life is miserable till the end.

Go into meditation, she says. Imagine that you see that cart rolling. This time, escape it and be safe. Go through that life again and make it a really good life. Reach an old age and be satisfied. In this way you will change the memories that you keep. Then there is more to do, and it will come on a CD that I’ll send you for free. In it you’ll find how to make your cells open to change back to their original way of being.

All of this is a wonderful gift.

The next morning I look at the drawing and write down a few lines:

Strong and delicate

A warm living mountain in the middle

A broken stone ground turning into trees

Hot giraffe clouds stretching their necks into thin air

Trees of another kind

All elements seem to go clockwise around the mountain but the mountain does not move.

The mountain is like many people, standing together, with a common cause.

Unified front. Facing left.

 It is not a poem. Just a collection of lines.

Suddenly I know: It is resistance. Everything moves but this collection of bodies or the mountain refuses to move.

Two questions appear now:

1. What is this resisting? It seems to be looking left toward outside of the paper. Can I go to the left of the paper and see what is there?

2. What does it protect?

Then I suddenly know: It is that cart, rolling fast and out of control, coming straight from the left and about to hit who I was in that life.

It is all stuff of the past, but amazingly the resistance is still alive today. It still experiences the danger, the horror of being hit and the pain that was caused and ruined a life. There is a refusal in me to let this experience go. This is what happens after traumas. The fear that it will happen again stays. Then, what we fear comes to us. This is how the universe works. Lester Levenson used to say: “Fear it – appear it”

The three purple lines on the left stand between the mountain and what is coming from outside. They shake with fear. Is this fear the reason for my pain?

Since everything is clear now and the only thing to relate to is the feeling of refusing to let go of the horror, I decide to draw the resistance again and again and see how it changes, and what it will change into. This is how I deeply listen to it.

Will my pain leave now, as soon as I release this feeling of refusal to let go of the fear?

There were five drawings of this feeling that I made that day. I will present them in the next entry.

Thought bubbles

I watch thought bubbles

And water waves

Over

Green land.

I watch holding clay

In my mind’s hands

Thinking into being

Clouds over the mountains

Relaxed and flowing.

It is the late evening of the first day in November.

Before I go to bed I draw the pain.

Pain before bedtime

It is a night with many waking hours. The pain just does not respond to all my tricks and I do not fall asleep. I meditate so as to get into a state where the body relaxes completely. At least there will be some rest for the body. When the pain is so strong The body convulses. The thighs contract, the buttocks contracts, the area of the stomach contracts, the chest contracts and there is a push of energy up, that is blocked at the base of the throat. Who is doing it? Is it the body, naturally, not wanting to have this pain? Is it I, employing old, historical responses to not wanting pain? The nervous system quivers with no control, the legs shake. A lot is going on with the body and the mind, even thought there are hardly any words in the mind.

I start paying attention to one of the tensions and it calms down. I move to the next and this one calms down too. After I calm the whole body I leave the pain alone and sink into spaciousness. This is when I usually fall asleep. But this night I don’t. So I do the whole process again. Then again. I don’t know how many times. I am tired, but I do not feel bad. In fact I feel empowered. At 4:30 I am too awake. I go to the kitchen and make myself a cup of Ginger tea.

At 5 I do this drawing.

Connecting or disconnecting?

The paper is some rare French paper, which is sized heavily, and therefore does not absorb the water but let the pools stay wet until they dry as they are and all the pigments remain on the surface. Also, because the paper does not absorb the water and is quite textured, the lined become “eaten”, as if the space ate in tiny bites into the lines. This makes for “hungry” lines.

I lay the drawing on the table in front of me, still wet, and write what I observe.

The fire is underneath

Then there is space

Then comes a troubled collection of lines

That maybe is in the process

Of straightening out

Connecting with pieces on the left and the right

Or maybe disconnecting from them

To resolve itself

From being a bunch of conflicted forms

To become a feather in space

And then space itself.

Then I write in green what comes to me to say about every line.

The fire is underneath—this is the pain

Then there is space—created by observation

Then comes a troubled collection of lines—the embattled thought patterns of: Why? Don’t want it; it is too strong; I can learn to accept it; etc…

That maybe is in the process

Of straightening out– simplifying

Connecting with pieces on the left and the right—being a part of a bigger chain of connected events, enabling the deepening understanding of its origin.

Or maybe disconnecting from them—by living in the moment

To resolve itself—in the field of awareness

From being a bunch of conflicted forms

To become a feather in space—less overpowering, observable in peace

And then space itself.—to perfection, to freedom of choice.

Then I go to bed again, and after some periods of short sleep among long periods of shaking and tensing, followed by giving attention to all the tense places, all the painful places and to what is not the body but is.

At 6:40 I do another drawing of the pain.

Pain before breakfast

And another one, where, after delineating where the pain is (the green marker lines with red in them), I start to play:

Playing with pain

Old as time

I am shaking and am twisted from the pain (says the red)

I am so strong and overwhelming that I need to say the same thing several times. (says the red)

I include contrasting colors to show that there are many aspects of me. (Says the whole picture)

There is even a light aspect of me.

There is death aspect of me and eternity.

There is beauty aspect of me.

It feels I am as old as time itself.

Thinking about it: Since there is no time there must be no pain.

If I go to the state in which I experience no time, there will be no pain in it.

Pain is like a comet moving in space. It is like the beginning of life, when gases and dust traveled through space

and collided with other bodies of gas and dust to create a planet

with heat inside, water on the surface,

and don’t forget the air

and the sun.

This was done at 4:30 in the morning. Later this night I understood what it means to love what is hard to love. As I was lying in bed, expecting the pain to subside enough so that I could fall asleep, the pain did not subside. I imagined myself going into the body and looking at the place where the pain is. I saw that place like an underground dark river, where buildings stood on stilts in the river. But the stilts were broken and their bottom parts were missing. so nothing held the buildings from the bottom side, but the buildings were connected to the top  of the cave and to the walls, so they did not fall. The columns were black, as if they were burned, and everything was dead. This is what I saw as the place where the pain was. How can you love a place like this? I brought my hands to that inner scene and took the whole thing in my arms, then brought it to my heart and hugged it. It was dead.

I knew that if I hold it like this long enough something in it will start coming back to life. I saw many faces, some frightening, I saw people jumping from a burning building, I saw many other sights as I was holding that thing to my heart. And then it started to change into trees, the water became pleasant, there was light somewhere deep inside. Then there were fires. The columns burned. At one time the whole thing just disappeared and there was nothing to hold, but I kept holding it to my heart. Every now and then the scene would return to the way it started. I kept holding it. I did it for hours. If I fell asleep for a few minutes, I started again as soon as I woke up from the pain.

Then I knew. Many times I wondered, and you saw it in the text: What does the pain want to teach me? I did not know. Was it that I had some unresolved programs in my subconscious, that I had to find and release? I found those and released them, and I still had the pain. No, it was not this. It was something simpler, but deeper. The pain came to teach me how to love more than I could love before. There are two aspects to this pain. One is that there is someone who suffers from it, and you can say also that there are specific places in the body that suffer from the pain. These are easy to love, unless you have a program that believes that you have to be punished and suffer for whatever reason. The other aspect of this pain is something nasty. There is something about it that is dark and angry. As if this thing has been neglected so much that it died to you. It would not speak to you, but just stay there and hurt all the time. It is like a very bad person in a group of normal people. Someone who will spoil everything and be so obnoxious that nobody will ever want to even touch him. This is the one I had to learn to love this night.