Healing and growth through intuitive art
The bird wants to fly
On her own
She slowly disconnects
From where she stands
Wanting to fly
Takes its energy
From the sun
And it is light
Hesitation
To leave the earth
Is from the fear
And it is heavy
For many years
It seemed that
She has flown
And stayed
It took a lifetime
To slowly be
More airborne
Than earthbound
One
Lifetime
Which is
No time at all.
I close my eyes
And let the not-body see
My body can be found afloat
among the houses, tables, pencils, thoughts
Emerging from the ground of all
I move between my feelings and my pen
As if I fly
From dream to dream
Myself has turned to air.
I let everything go. My attention goes to where it usually is, which is everything that has to do with seeing. Seeing seems to be the strongest attraction and if you try to feel where you are, when you close your eyes, most probably you’ll find that your attention is somewhere where it feels that seeing happens: Somewhere inside of your head in the front part. The place where thinking happens is maybe also as strong. But this is only a habit. You can move yourself to another place. Or you can shift your inner listening to another mode. You can settle yourself into an energetic attention. This is what I did here. I found myself just attending to the field of awareness.
In the beginning it looks empty. Then you feel that it is alive. Then you start knowing that it is eternal, and you may start knowing more things. In this specific case I started seeing colors. The painting was some expression of that. The reason for seeing colors may have been my expecting this to happen or even just wanting.
And when you find your body, your thoughts and emotions or your experiences, in this context, Then this is what the poem describes. The sense of beauty is inherent in this state.
Your experiences will be unique to you, if you try this. Don’t take this writing as a guidance. My teacher of meditation would say: “Let go of imagining altogether. See what is there already.” What is there is awareness that you can experience. And beyond this there is nothing. That nothing you can’t experience. You just experience that there is nothing. And this nothing is you.
I have not been here for a while, as you know. But I continued to work on myself.
“Working on myself” is only a way of talking. I did not work. I watched myself, my inner workings, in the most pleasant way that I know of. It is a pleasant way for me of course. Other people surely have their different most pleasant ways. And for some, my way may be most pleasant too. As I wrote before, this is my main way to keep being aware of my inner life, but I also do other things, like meditating and learning from other people and from non physical guides.
If your way is different, you can learn the deeper principles of this work, see if they feel right to you and apply it to your way, if you feel inspired.
What is my way?
I draw and paint intuitively, and I read my art, to know what is going on in my mind.
There is a part of the inner conversation that is easy to know. What we consciously think, we can know. But we usually are not aware of the conversations between our experiences of our world and our subconscious. The subconscious has a much faster language than our spoken language. It responds to everything that we encounter so fast that there is already a response from the subconscious, before we even start noticing that something happens. And so much happens that we don’t catch. These mostly missed thoughts are important because they indicate what we create and what we experience in our life.
If we want to know what is going on in our minds, and what will determine our experiences, we need to be in a deeper state.
What does it mean?
It means relating to what happens in our minds not from a content point of view, but from an energetic point of view.
I’ll give an example: Let’s say I argue with my friend. He gets angry and insults me. From a content point of view I feel hurt and endangered, and I want to protect myself.
From an energy point of view the feeling of being insulted is a movement and contractions of energy, created in the body by two contrasting energies. One is the energy that is generated from the thought that I am weak and in danger. The other, contrasting energy is the energy of my higher self, or the energy that creates me and watches me always. This energy is impossible to describe in words, but in some short way it is described as love. The two energies mix with each other and create disharmony. This is what I experience, if I relate to what happened energetically. This disharmonious mixture is unpleasant. It is the essence of suffering.
Now comes a strange thing. It has to do with this energy that we call the higher self or who we are or any other name. This energy or this consciousness can do things that we people don’t think are possible. So I’ll describe. But please know that it is really impossible for me to describe.
Imagine that you are an infinite consciousness that has no shape or any boundary. You are like a transparent clay too. You can shape yourself into any shape. You can think in many ways. you can experience everything that you shape yourself into. You can make yourself into many beings that all have these same capabilities. And you experience all of them all the time, with all their thoughts and actions and experiences when they encounter their worlds. Well, this is you. Roughly. But this reality is mostly hidden from us. We focus on thoughts, things and feelings, and we miss this underlying part of who we are.
Reading my art enables me to see my patterns of creation and to free myself of unwanted automatic reactions that obscure my freedom.
So this infinite mind is the part that starts experiencing the mixture of energies that does not feel good to us. Some of this mixture is the flow of my infinite consciousness itself, unhindered. The other part of the mixture is itself too, but made to be less free. This is us as people. And it is like a huge body of streaming water that encounters a little disturbance in the flow. The disturbance is smoothed out and it disappears into the general flow.
This is what we can call a healing event. This is also the only possible healing of thoughts, emotions and even bodies. It happens in all kinds of modalities and therapies, when the therapy is “working”, and in most cases the therapists themselves don’t know that this is what happens.
This was a simplified description, done by someone who still does not know much. Take it as a description of a view, given by a mostly blind person. Don’t trust me blindly. Walk your own path with your inner eyes wide open.
I cry
For how I suffer
For how I let my youthful thoughts
effect my stay
My feet are burning
But
Being infinite
I split myself to two
The deeper
wiser me
Takes the crying me
In hands
Look around, I say
See how energy makes the trees
Do you see
How sensitive it is
And happy
As
It
Flows?
You too are energy
And all you see around
Is you
Including me
Do you see
How much
you love
yourself?
The stage workers bring a heavy black chair onto the stage. The chair has stout heavy legs. The workers place it facing sideways. Then they leave the stage.
A man now comes to the stage and he is dressed in black. He turns to the audience and boughs. You can feel that he is preoccupied with something, as if not all of his attention is to the show, as so many people that we know are. Maybe we too are like that. Something bothers us even as we perform the movements that our society expects us to perform.
But this person is well exercised in doing all the necessary things and we, in the audience, get the feeling that he knows what he is doing and we don’t have to worry about the performance we are about to watch.
The hall is dark indeed. We do not look at ourselves. We are focused on the stage and our hearts just pump a little bit stronger than when we are at rest.
The person on the stage sits in the chair, facing sideways, as the chair is. He looks at us, to connect and to draw the attention he needs. We can feel it. He needs our energy in order to perform his miracles. Nobody says anything and there is not even any pantomime that suggests it, but we, in an unnoticeable way, become committed to giving this unknown man in black clothes all the energy that he needs.
To our amazement, while the man is still looking at us and we feel his preoccupation with something that we do not know, the legs of the chair start to become shorter, but the seat remains in exactly the same place in the space of the stage. It does not sink down. Indeed it floats in the air.
The person’s feet still touch the floor. If he was made of steel and if his soles were screwed to the wooden floor of the stage, this would be somehow physically possible, with a lot of stress. But this man just walked. His legs are not made of iron. How can he do this? What is going on here?
The man on the stage acknowledges our wonder. In fact he seems to be just as quizzical about this as we are. He slightly boughs with his head to us, but our attention is attracted now to something else that is happening.
Somehow, in a way that I cannot explain, another, slightly smaller man is coming out of the first man’s body.
At first it looks like a shadow. But the shadow immediately becomes a real sleek person, who climbs on the first man’s shoulders and sits there. This person is more extravagant. He smiles at us, tilts his head slightly forward to thank us and he waves his hands, as if he is conducting the applause.
We are still holding our breath, fearing that the two men on the stage might fall backward. How can this all be?
And before we even start slowing the clapping of our hands, another, smaller person comes out of the second one and sits on that one’s shoulders. The clapping goes wild. We do care about these wonderful people, who can do such miraculous things, and we want to be very careful not to excite them too much. But we can’t stop our gratitude from coming.
The last one is a child. Maybe he is a smallish teenager. He takes his cape off and waves it for us, as if to show that this is an easy thing to do.
The child is shaking his body up and down to imitate riding on a horse.
Then he folds himself back into the second man, and the second man disappears into the first man, who still looks at us, collecting our energies.
Only the first person is on the stage now, sitting in the chair that does not touch the floor. Some clapping still lingers. There is an expectation that the lights in he hall will come on and the show will end.
The stage workers appear on the side of the stage.
The chair, independently, starts to move from under the man to go towards the stage workers, as if they are its parents who came to take him back home. But the man’s legs prevent the chair from going to its parents. The chair tries again, pushing harder against the legs, and this time the man in black notices. He apologizes and lifts his legs from the floor. The chair runs to the stage workers who hug it and walk away.
We move our attention back to the man who, yes, there is no way to deny it, is still in mid air. Who knows how he can be floating there in the tense silence, still looking at us with the expression of not being sure that he did not forget something.
Then there is a puff sound, like that of a balloon exploding far away, and the man disappears.
Note:
You may wonder about the significance or insignificance of this show. It had a profound effect on me.
Walking home, moving from light to light in the night, I was not sure where my footsteps rested on the pavement. I still remembered the comfortable chair I was sitting on just a few minutes before, but the chair was not under me. Somehow my mind mixed the chair that I was sitting on with the chair of the show. And when the chair in the show became a child and ran to his loving parents, I felt that my own childhood was leaving me and all of its traumas became resolved. I felt as if I gave up the need to rely on my childhood’s experiences in order to explain my life. And I knew I did not need that part of my life-story any more. More than that, I did not need my whole life story. Instead, I settled into the flow of moving from light to light in the night, trusting the never-ending emergence of playfulness.
When I say the word HEALTHY, there is a rush of energy developing in my being, and moving through it to unknown depths.
The same thing happens when I only think the word.
If I do it a lot, and experience the vibration of the word many times, this experience starts to take roots in my being, and there is movement in me, to become the expression of this vibration.
Try this: When you feel not so good, ask yourself, in your mind: How can I feel good now? And watch how you feel.
If I ask, beore I start to draw, to have my drawing show me my experience of feeling good, then I’ll spend the time of making the drawing feeling good, and even go into it in a deeper way than just thinking. So my body will feel good in a deeper way than just by thinking, and the experience will last longer.
My subconscious will take notice and will start to realize that it has to learn how to create this feeling, as it seems that I, its owner and commander, am interested in being this way.
Then the subconscious will start producing this feeling of being healthy on its own, every time there will be any association to this coming up in my being.
And with such a competent couch within myself, what do you think will happen? With me feeling healthy all the time, how can I ever be sick?
So I set out to draw how it feels to me to be healthy.
The first drawing even includes the word ’healthy’ in Hebrew, my mother’s tongue, and the strong energy springs out all around it.
The second is about how the body feels strong and capable.
The last is about how the energy moves in my body when I feel healthy.
At the beginning of the third drawing there were only the heavier lines without the lighter pencil lines and the colors. At that time the drawing was really successful in describing the flowering of the energy inside, arising and opening up. Then I wanted to add the lines and the colors, and the whole art became heavier. The energy almost does not move any more.
It is not what I wanted. But it has beauty so I decided to show it anyway. It srill shows the shining, the power that pushes things up, and some sense of a struggle to arise. The struggle is mental and energetic. All is true in this drawing as to my feeling at the time. Maybe this is why it is beautiful.
But can I change my thinking, and can I teach my subconscious how to create a different feeling?
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.
I just wanted to paint or draw the pain again.
In the past I used to draw the pain many times. The pain was not almost constant, as it is now. It would come every now and then and it would be quite devastating. I found then that I could draw it, the way and shape it was felt in the body, and after becoming stronger at first, the pain would start to get smaller and smaller until it would disappear. This would take some five or six drawings, which I made quite quickly in a little pad that I always had with me.
I thought I had the cat’s pajama. This gave me a way to protect myself from the pain and a way to feel capable and not out of control. But it also helped in establishing the pain. Because I did not want the pain and at least part of the activity of drawing was for the purpose of winning against it. When you think this way many times, you repeat the belief that the pain is bad for you and dangerous and needs to be fought against. This establishes the pain, in your mind, as dangerous and needing to be fought against.
I understood this and stopped this practice. But I also knew that there was a lot of good in making art about the pain. The good is, or at least some of it is in this: In order to draw you actually change your attitude from fear to curiosity. Curiosity is a characteristic of the true you, and it is of a higher vibration than fear. This makes you into a place, in which fear’s lower vibrations cannot stay. So it was beneficial in the emotional realm. And it taught me to automatically change my attitude every time the emotional reaction to the pain arose, from fear to curiosity. And you can add the sense of beauty that easily added itself to the drawing and brought a lot more good vibrations.
I am sure there is more good things to be found in this activity, so I decided to paint my pain again and find out. I wanted to let the painting bring in the thoughts and not the other way around.
All that is done with lines is a description of the pain. I took the liberty to twist appearances, as this helped to express the pain. You can see that it radiates strongly to all directions.
Sometimes when I want to give the feet energy with my hands, good, healing energy, the left hand jumps away. As if the strength of the pain’s energy frightens the left hand away.
After the lines, came the color areas, and this was done with a more relaxed state of mind. There is one line of orange round shapes going from a big shape at the bottom to a small one at the top. This is one story line. And there is a blue line of three rounded shapes going from right to left and crossing the orange story. And there is also a line of same-size round, smaller shapes, as if it is a bit farther, going diagonally through the whole picture.
To me, as I’m looking at the painting now, the orange and the blue describe an inner conflict. Two ideas in my being don’t agree with each other. And it is not shown as a juicy harsh conflict, but as an idea. One thought goes in this direction, another goes in a different direction and they disagree. Maybe it is even possible to see that there is no need for a resolution of this conflict. The two ideas can stay intact. We can get used to having contradictory ideas within us, because we all have plenty of them. Solutions, in any case, are never in the same layer of the conflicts. We have to go deeper.
The yellow line of smaller round shapes feels to me as the experience of a deeper layer of myself, where connection to infinity is felt.
How strange. In one painting you have the screaming of the pain, a more peaceful view of an underlying conflict, and a sense of infinity.
I was not interested in this case in the disappearance of the pain, but in seeing the bigger picture. I have changed.
When I told my Friend Stuart, many years ago, that I was about to separate for my wife, he told me a story. A student came to the Rabi and asked weather marrying was a good idea for him. The Rabi said it was. If you both fit each other, then you are a lucky man, he said. And if you don’t, then you will become a philosopher.
I feel as if I am married to the pain, we don’t fit, and I am becoming a philosopher.
In the end it may turn out that it was good for me…
How?
By forcing me into the deeper view.
All the colors stand around me, in bottles, tubes and pencils. They are looking quietly at what I do. What will I say? They are my audience now.
I love them. They can do infinite things. They do not really look. I know. It is the whole who looks. The infinite listening-with-the-heart. The heart-of-listening. His name is I.
When the light of seeing is bright and strong, everything that is non-transparent burns into non-existence. Its energy is left with no job. It gives itself back to be used for creation.
The name of the creator is I too.
It seems the light in the middle of the painting (the yellow and orange) is marred. It has been hit on the head.
Darkness (on the left) makes a threat. But the little child-who-flies is not afraid. He flies into the darkness to repair his past. He will find his love that he rejected in those old times. It is like the soul-retrieval that shamans do.
The goodness and the freedom-filled-joy, which is the lost part of him, will be found where it went to hide when it was not permitted to act in the world. It will be invited back and respected, loved, accepted, joined.
Again the lines tell the stories. The color shapes tell the emotions. The composition says that all is blessed, with all its tiniest details.
The white always looks with endless love and curiosity, with awe, with pride and marvel.
There is confusion there too, on the right, projecting a yes-no feeling.
The big yellow mother would like to say: Be careful!
But she knows that daring requires love and trust, and not carefulness. So she does not say a word. She admires her child.
#####
Yesterday in the morning I sat on the window seat and meditated. With all the lack of sleep that I collected, because of the pain, I fell asleep. I lost my balance and fell. I opened my eyes in the middle of the fall and saw the world turning around. But I was still asleep when my forehead hit the floor.
Then I woke up.
I felt fear and this conjured up memories from an event in my childhood, that now I saw more fully than before. Doors that were closed before, opened.
Fear cannot come if there is no story behind it. Falling cannot happen without a belief or a few beliefs that invite it. I know this is strange for some.
Being tired and in pain I became sad. Pain is a simple thing but living with it creates additional problems. Now all of them weighed on me. I thought: I can’t go on like this any more. I did not even paint yesterday and today.
My friend from Germany called. We started to talk and the phone line went dead.
I pulled a new piece of paper onto the table, dipped the brush into the water and into the first paint that my eyes saw in the watercolor box. It was olive green. This is how I choose the first color.
And then there was the drawing. No time. No pain. Brush, water, paint and the composition, the story with no words. The energy of the truth. Everything is good.
The olive green lines and the white of the paper are the best of friends. It is a holy connection. The lines, strikingly, appearing out of the white. The white does not have inside and outside. It is everywhere. It is all-there-is-everywhere. Even the word everywhere does not fit here. Is the green line real? And my eyes that see it: are they real? And my heart that has just become so full and so delighted, what about it?
(The other colors came later.)
Now in a different way:
Pain is part of the illusion of life, together with the body, with time, with good and bad.
The true self cannot have pain. Its essence is joy. Its essence is love and playing and being curious. The true self cannot be affected by the illusion.
For the “I” in the illusion pain is real and hard.
The good thing is that everything is connected. All I need to do is to change the way I focus and switch my identity to the true I.
Instead of focusing on the pain and automatically trying to escape it, to fight it, to prevent it, to change it, Instead of these, I find my curiosity and make the olive green lines. I find my playfulness and play with everything that shows itself. I look for the beauty in everything and find it easily. I look for my joy and it is right there. I am joyful. I look for my love and indeed what else do I have? This is how I start to identify with the true self.
And as I do this, I find that I have forgotten the pain. I don’t even feel it. Or if I do, it is not significant. I am in peace. The vibrations of the pain, the waves that streamed through the legs calm down. My hands that clutched one foot fall down, relaxed. The body rests. The energy of creation flows flawlessly everywhere it has to go. The body heals. The specific thinking processes that hold on to the body and its suffering become weaker. I am not so dependent on the body and the world around it. I witness them and I am free. In my mind I am already walking down to town, where the galleries are. I am going to see an exhibition. Right foot, left foot and I dance.
intuitiveflow 