Posts Tagged 'drawing'



209. Traveling with my clients

I am leafing through blocks of mixed-media-paper that hold drawings and readings from between May 12th and today, May 25th.

It is amazing to find that all the drawings dealt with the same issue, and that there is a movement there. I was not aware of these as I drew and read every day. They say that if you try to heal yourself, you have a fool for a doctor. But it is not so if you use this method (and a few others). The seeing and understanding with the method are not of the ego-self. The ego-self can easily be fooled by the resisting subconscious. But when the viewing is done by a deeper state of us, deeper than thinking, this view includes the struggle and the resistance that the subconscious performs. It is this view, that makes it possible to see that the resistance is an old choice that may not be serving us any more and that we can now choose differently, if we so desire. The deeper state is a wise and loving state, because it leaves our free choice intact. It only shows us two things: what is going on in the subconscious, and how do we feel about our struggle state. Being in this deeper state that we entered through the process of drawing intuitively, we naturally tend to choose what makes us feel better. This is what guides the choice and this is what creates the movement.

I wrote about this before in this blog, in a slightly different way. I wrote that being in the viewer state we are in a happier mood than the mood of the struggle, and if we have more of the happier mood, the less happy state dissolves. That is true too and these are only different ways to speak about the same thing.

So my subconscious continues dealing with the same issue, and all the people who come to me for therapy during my focused attention on this subject, present different aspects of dealing with the same issue. If I want to help them resolve their aspects of the issue, I’ll have to resolve my aspect first (it can happen through my work with them, but not only).

This gets closer to the true meaning of therapy.

I decided to present some of the drawings and readings from these three books.

I’ll present each drawing in a separate entry, day after day, and it will take about two weeks.

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This is the first. There were many before. This is a part of the page. I decided to start from this as it is a view from outside in a way, and later the eyes go inwards, in the later drawings.

Then tears have made a lake

An old dream

An old dream

Standing in the water

It used to be

A joyful flying machine

With a golden heart

Now it is barren

The paint is peeling

The tears have made

A lake.

Then I asked my inner guide what to do. He said: Go live in it. Take one room and one window. Grow a plant. Play music. Create. Make a huge space in your heart for me, and thrive. Do only what you love.

199. The painting of the pain

Make believe pain

Make believe pain

The pain was strong and unrelenting. I decided to paint it.

In the stage in which it was a drawing only, it expressed the craziness and strength of the pain quite effectively. When I added the colors the effect became somewhat weaker. The power of lines to affect the areas that they point at, was hindered by the viscosity of the colors and also by the effect of the colors. A body of color has an effect of its own and when you place different areas of color next to each other they influence each other and create yet another effect. All these added effects weaken, relatively, the effect that the lines had when they did not compete with the colors. Nevertheless, you can still see the craziness of the pain, the way it spreads in all contradicting directions. This contradiction creates a feeling of struggle and chaos. The chosen colors also cry out from the page. They radiate energy that refuses to settle. This adds to the expression of the power of the pain and the chaos. When you hold this picture in your hands you want to drop it or put it quickly in a box and cover it with a black cloth, to stop that radiation and protruding thorns.

Well, this is how I feel when the pain is so strong and persistent. And since I do not have any way to smother it, as I would have liked to do, I have to come to terms with it. And the most important part of coming to terms is to learn that my mood is not dependent on how my body feels. I can have this pain and still be in a good mood. I can even feel thankfulness to the pain for giving me the opportunity to learn that this is possible.

You may notice that the painting has this air about it of having been done for children. As if fear, danger and threat have been depicted here for a children’s book. Do you get this feeling?

This is due to this distance that I took from the pain, allowing it to be, and taking care of my mood separately. It is still very impressive in its effect, but its power to make me fear is reduced to a make believe fear. It is like a monster in a puppet theater. Even if death will result, it will be a make believe death.

There are two places where the colors that were used are dark and contrast strongly with their immediate environment. One is in the blue that is darker than all the other areas of color and contrasts strongly with the red lines that are touching it. It could have been an opening to the sky and a window to escape through, but the restlessness of the texture is pretty deterring and the strong red lines all around it make it feel dangerous to pass through. So there is no escape.

The other place is in the lower left corner, where the dark violet made the lines stand out so clearly that their drawing character is emphasized. The feeling that these lines give is more like wanting, longing, needing and complaining. Maybe the pain asks for attention, as love was not given at some point to something that wanted to be accepted and loved?

195. The screeching is terrible

Old clunky machine

Old clunky machine

The drawing was done at 10pm, the painting – in the morning after.

It is like a very big puppet. The head is too big and heavy in the composition. The mechanism is old. It stood outside in the rain and plants started growing on it in some places. You can almost hear the clunking of its mechanism, the screeching of its rusty metal, in friction with other rusty parts. It used to be very beautiful. Some of the paint is still there.

The face is stubborn. Even though parts of it have fallen off, it still insists on moving forward. It works without an operator. It used to be the fascination of the community. Now it only walks alone, with much effort and nobody is watching. It is hard for it to move. The screeching is terrible.

It thinks.

Thinking is the essence of its engine, the oil and the fuel.

And now I know who it is: It is my autopilot.

190. What is the belief behind the pain?

Sometime during the night and early in the morning I painted the pain. Here it is.

Pain

Pain

Then, in the morning, I heard a program on the radio in which a social psychologist (Ellen Langer) talked about her finding that it is our beliefs that determine the outcome that we experience. For example, if I do some physical work and believe that my work is actually exercise, and of course if I believe that exercise helps me loose weight, then just by doing my work I’ll loose weight. The weight is lost not by the work but by my belief. This indeed is also what I believe and this is the basis for all my work on the pain. (Remember the “About” page?)

I was not satisfied, leaving things as they turned out in the pain drawing, because every time I looked at it I remembered the experience of the pain.

I decided to do another drawing and the idea came to me to ask intuition directly: What is the belief that stands behind and drives the creation of the pain?

I have done this kind of asking many times before. You ask your question and just do an intuitive-flow drawing, in which the thinking process does not participate, and the answer comes through the art.

Here is the painted answer.

The teeth that never bite

The teeth that never bite

The zigzag lines in light and dark blue and in reddish purple look like wild animal teeth that come to bite the little pencil scribble in the upper middle. They look angry and threatening. In the beginning there was no pencil scribble there at all. It was just a small, empty space. I added the scribble in the very end of this drawing. I call it the dust ball. I think the drawing could work without it too, but it is there now.

Every set of teeth has some cloud or layered clouds behind it. The clouds are where the anger is stored and from where it comes to the teeth. And of course the anger is against this little dust ball. Or maybe it is against nothing at all?

Such a big anger against such a small and insignificant thing does not make sense. And why don’t the teeth come all the way in and eliminate this little dust ball? They can. But the fact that they do not do it shows that they consider the dust ball to be much stronger than the way it looks. If it provokes such a big anger, it must have a lot of power. Does it make sense to you?

The clouds and the teeth believe that this little dust ball has done something that is enraging and it deserves to be punished. But they stop short and don’t even touch it. The little dot feels all that anger turned directly at him and he turns into a dust ball, ashamed and guilty. That’s why I called him a dust ball. He agrees with them.

And this is how things are for years and years, for ages and ages. How come?

To help us there are a few more details in the artwork. There is some open space where there is no anger. The dust ball cannot go there because there are a few zigzag lines in the way. But this area is quiet. There is no struggle there. And there is a figure there. This figure was the one before the last element that I placed in the drawing. I felt there was someone there, watching and being unaffected. It feels like someone with a childlike curiosity and playfulness. This figure is a result of having developed identification with awareness. There is always, in all situations, a knowing that all that happens is being witnessed with clarity. This clarity is the real me.

So what does the witness see and understand?

The conflicted situation in which there is a dust ball that provokes so much anger, that he feels afraid and ashamed, while the endangering teeth never bite, this is the formula of the game that I am playing this life, or at least a part of my game. It has to stay like this, if I want the game to continue. If the teeth bite, the game will end. If the dust ball blows up the teeth and the clouds, the game will end too. So to keep the game going, they keep this dance. Of course, the dust ball is me. The angry teeth and clouds are me too. It is all an invention of a conflict. It is a choice that creates experiences. The figure in the open space knows this.

But there is another way. I can change the rules. I can smile at the teeth, for example. What will happen then? See how you feel when you read this, and you will know what will happen. It will be a different game, won’t it?

187. Fear all over

Fear

Fear

It is a key drawing in the process of my relief from major programs in the subconscious. It describes fear. There is a body there and it is full of small waves of fear. The fear goes everywhere, the head, the chest, the hands the muscular stomach and the pelvis. There are three places where, it so happens, the lines in light brown are darker. These places are the head, the stomach and the crotch. These are the places where I feel fear, when it is clearer. Sometimes I also feel it in the heart and in the legs. But the fear I am talking about here covers the whole body and beyond. It is not strong, it is hardly felt, but it is there always, ready to be provoked.

It is a bit shocking for me to see that after all I have lived and done there is still fear somewhere in me at all. But it is so. This is what is discovered suddenly in this drawing that I did at around 4 in the morning. This is the way my body feels when it perceives being attacked so viciously by the pain. I did not know that it would come out in the drawing when I did it. I was just tuned in to my inner guidance.

When I finished the main structure in light brown it felt good to add pink in some places. These pink lines created the sense of fear. The brown lines described the tension.

I considered adding other colors inside of some shapes, but there was a strong feeling, when I thought about it, that the drawing did not need these. It could have changed the feeling in the drawing and this is exactly what I did not want to happen. I wanted to read the drawing as it was, without changes.

And this led to this discovery. There is so much fear in me when the pain comes. There is so much habitual creation of fear even before the pain comes. Mostly, it is very delicate and hard to catch. There is an expectation in me, somewhere in the big system of my being, for something bad and painful to happen soon. Life is dangerous for you, the fear says, and it arises, to prepare me for the approaching calamity. The expectation that something full of suffering is on its way is so strong that now, as my feet are healing, this fear prepares me for some other way of suffering that will soon appear. It already weaves stories that will explain why and how. I catch these swift, very quiet thoughts that predict that something else is starting to go wrong in my body. I catch them because I am aware. I catch everything that makes an inner noise. But this fear did not stand out because it was very delicate, encompassing all and always there. I never experienced my life without it. There is a tension that I feel in the back of my neck. Every time I become quiet, this tension is created. I was aware of this tension for years but never knew what it was an expression of. Now I know: It is this fear. Every time I got quiet something in me said: Wait, be careful, because something bad and painful is coming at you.

Now I know that this fear is what prevented me from enjoying playing music in front of others. When I was six years old I studied piano. In the end of the year came the concert for all the parents and fellow students. I learned a very modern piece, which was an Israeli song, arranged with very modern dissonance. I fell in love with the way the song sounded and it was a revelation to me. I still love dissonance today. My first beloved classical composer was Schoenberg. But when it came time to play the Israeli song before the audience I got frozen with fear. I lost the sense of beauty in the piece and the interest I had in it. I only felt extremely scared. This was this fear, the fear of being true to myself in front of others, the fear that something horrible will happen as soon as I relax into who I am.

I think this is the key to a lot of suffering that people have, where it seems very hard to detect the source of the suffering. It is something that these people were born with and never had experienced life without it. They are used to live with this feeling in them and therefore it is very hard for them to feel it. But there is a way to find and release it, as you see. It is by getting into a deeper state, which is what I did by drawing intuitively, and witnessing the fear from that state. How come I have only found it now? I have been practicing being aware of how I feel and choosing to feel better. My vibrations rose, and the fear stood out as being of lower vibrations.

183. When the blue comes in

How the good appeared in the mundane

How the good appeared in the mundane

Can’t sleep. The phenomenon called pain is very active. And in addition there is some energy in me. I don’t now what it is. But it makes me awake. I slept for three hours. I am very awake and clear. I come to the studio and do this drawing. At first, before I put the colors in, it looks like a confused body of energy being intruded by old habitual dark thoughts. But I feel the urge to put colors in. I start with the diagonal horizon. I know that this is how I want it. Then I know where the next area will be and the next and next.

At one point something, maybe the sleeve of my pajamas, touched some wet color and dragged a line into the white. It looks good to me as it is and I let it be.

Sometimes in sessions with others I go into such places, because they are where there is a break from the rules of good behavior of the picture, that offers a glimpse of freedom. On the one hand I did not intend this to happen. But on the other hand there is nothing that appears in my reality that is not called for by some of my vibrations. So it makes a lot of sense to dive into these spots. But in this case, I just like the way it came out and ignore it.

As soon as I finish the blue areas, and it is done in that late night hour with the clarity and patience that I feel, I see the beauty. Somehow the piece changed from being bleak to hopeful. There is enough space in and between the shapes of confusion and habitual nagging, to let the true light come through. The dreams of beauty and goodness came to play and changed everything.

The diagonal horizon takes the stability away from what seems like the reality of my thoughts. The stability that the blue areas give is independent of that reality. It can fill reality up and then reality becomes different altogether.

Yes, we can do that.

173. Before I was born

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.

Wild roots

Wild roots

 You can see in the drawing

that the roots are wild

And that they lead to a growth

that is more peaceful and joyful.

On a rocky ground an airy city stands

On a rocky ground an airy city stands

 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.

Trouble

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.

 

169. An inner conflict

An inner conflict

An inner conflict

Obviously there is in this drawing something that grows. And also there is a relationship. The relationship is between two groups. The green and brown is one group and the yellow and ochre is the second group.

The yellow and the ochre are free from attachment to the ground. They are transparent and interpenetrating with everything else. They are light and there is a feeling about them of playfulness and curiosity.

It seems there is love between the two groups, a lot of love.

But it also seems that the green/brown group has some inner conflict.

The brown is stiffened. It almost does not have any flexibility. The green is very flexible, soft and responsive. Both of them, the green and the brown are attached to the ground.

While the brown is stiff and cannot move, the green is extending its arms to the right side, to embrace the yellow and ochre group, but at the same time it leans backward to the left. So you can see the inner conflict. And it is funny, you see? With such loving creatures coming to you with playfulness and joy, what is there to shrink from?

I am not going to go into more detail. It is up to you now, if you want to expand on this, for your own delight.

168. Questions and a new beginning

Somehow I lost the drive to read art. I mean to read my art. I still read others’. I feel resistance to reading mine. Maybe the reason is that I think: Well, what is the point? It does not mean much, since I am not attached to it. There is no reason why I’ll let this past thing interfere with what I want to do now. So why bother reading it? It looks beautiful anyway. Looked at from a deeper state, all the complications look beautiful, and this is enough to see.

Where does the beauty come from?

So what can I do with these artworks?

How can I continue my blog? After I stopped being interested in the contents of my past, it has become hard to add anything to the blog.

I had some very good, high feelings, that I described, and some less good feelings, but now, what am I to do with this blog?

Maybe this is the place to go up and up in vibrations?  So this is a new beginning.

Life as a process

Life as a process

Let’s look at this last drawing now.

There are warm colors at the bottom and they gradually turn colder until it is blue, transparent and very soft. I think that the texture, in spite of the coldness of the color itself, gives some warmth, related to the sensitivity that is expressed. So it is coldness described very sensitively. Maybe aloofness? So you become very interested, being a sensitive person that you are.

There is a feeling that something is growing in the drawing. There is a wider base shape, almost like the leaves of a plant close to the earth. From this comes a stem and another stem in orange and from them some flower, leaf, or a canopy, develop. All these happen in the warmer area. Then of course, if you think of it as a plant or a flower, then you have to have the sky somewhere behind and above. But the sky is not just a flat color. Something is alive there. Shapes come out of shapes, right side and left side parts, describing something that is not so clear realistically. What is it?

A dream?  Sleeping? Something in a sleeping bag? Clouds? A letter? and what letter is it? Yes, it is the G from my own name. I did not notice this when I made the drawing. Planning.. sleeping.. this is connected to that.. life.

A plant is growing, still with the original thought of: Be a plant, be intense or mild. The intense side remains undeveloped. It sends feelers to the left side, the milder, so see what is life like on that side. Of course, here you have the fear of opening up and being yourself completely, checking yourself against another. Then, many thought patterns develop and they will create this plant’s future, its new adventure, its expansion or its remaining limited and constrained.

Is there a separation between the physical and the mental? Between the simple program to grow (It is not simple really but not complicated by thoughts of and the complicated thought patters, to do this and that etc? Yes and no. How about this answer? You can see that this part is warm and that is cold. But where they touch, they melt into each other. The physical and the imagined melt into each other. They are connected, and there is a feeling of lingering there, where they touch. Is it attachment? I mean attachment from the Buddhist perspective, as of assigning importance to something and therefore holding on to something that otherwise would have just gone on and change into something else.

This melting into each other is true also for every step before this thinking occurs. The leaf melts into the stem. The stem melts into the flowering and the flowering melts into the imagination. What kind of being is that? Who is this? What a magical creature that is a process?

And the whole scene has a magical feel to it. Things happen in the dream world, softly, silently. Are they real? Who is telling the story here? Is it the stem? The canopy? Me? You? Who are you anyway? Are you evolving from my dream? Am I nothing else but your imagination process?

I am leaving you with many questions. Who needs an answer, when you have questions like these? It all keeps being created, flowing toward what seems to be up in this case. Maybe nothing really moves? Maybe it is all a thought in endlessness, which has never changed

139. Walking in the rain is the right thing to do

I sat at my desk at 5 in the morning. I slept well till then and it made a big difference.

As I made the lines in this drawing I knew that I was very patient and that I listened to every line as it was made. There was no decision about where the line would go until it went, and I would change direction in the middle of a movement if I felt that this was the truth of the moment. I felt very clearly when it was time to end and I did not touch the drawing any more after that.

I looked at every color and collected the sentences that came to me when I looked at them. I mixed the sentences and fixed them a little until they made sense.

This is not new. I just wanted to say these things to those who came late to this blog. It is a process of looking in and connecting with intuition, to see what is going on in my subconscious or the dream state. The dream state always goes on, even when we do not dream consciously. It has a mixture of programs that are active now in the subconscious and can be released, plus ideas in support of our growth and expansion. If we listen to it, we always benefit. It is the place where our life is being created, the factory of manifesting. Everything that we see there while being in this deeper, intuitive state that enables the seeing is being released, just by having been seen. Its power to create ends. We create less and become simpler.

Being simpler means that we have less filters in our subconscious and allow the truth to come to us both from the word and from within. When it comes from within, this is intuition.

Here is the drawing I made:

Trees upside down in th rain

Trees upside down in the rain

And these are the words, after some playing with them:

Though forms of the non physical

Argue very softly and transparently

That nothing is real

Blood pouring softly as curtains

Is just a story

That does not want to leave

The fact that the trees went upside down

And the sun is coming as showers

Shows that every thing

Comes to bless

Everything else

Memories of wet mud

Are just eternity speaking

Walking in the rain

Is the right thing to do.


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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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