Healing and growth through intuitive art
Weeds grow haphazardly in the village
And the village travels like a boat
On the face of history
To reach its destination
Aren’t the weeds distracting to the travel?
And what’s the village’s goal, if not
To travel while the weeds distract?
And why is the goal so far away
Along the waves of words,
And not right here, right now?
I painted it mostly with my face very close to the paper. This is how I love to make art. From close up I feel that I am in the space of the painting. This is where I’d like to always be. Every area of color is like a place, a version of mood that I can choose to walk into. Then come the spaces among shapes and lines, where you can smell freedom. You can enter these and see how it feels. Colors overlap to create new colors. How does it feel to be in a place of a mixture? How do the clear paints feel near mixed ones? Do you want to run away from places like this, or enter? And there are the placers where the pink guiding lines that I made before putting in the colors show through the layers and cause the surface to feel like leather.
When I look at it from so close everything feels alive and happening right now in front of my eyes. I make myself a little world and get lost in it, just as we all do with our lives.
I started, as always with the drawing. I chose to describe the way I felt. What is my experience of this moment? This is the question that I ask before I start. Who do I ask? I ask the deeper parts of myself.
Nowadays I take some medications to reduce the pain. It does not reduce all of it. But I get longer periods without pain and this enables me to do things. There are side effects. One of them is that the strength of all nerve signals is reduced along with the signals of the pain. It makes it harder to meditate. The effects of being alive come as if they had to pass through a blanket before I sensed them. I learned to become aware of weaker signals.
(I also get tired from thinking. I had to stop at this point because my mind found it hard to continue.) In the afternoons the effect of the nightly medications dissolves and I become clear again.
What can I say about this picture?
Let’s imagine that it was not me who painted this. I tell this to myself, so I can shake off habitual fears about exposure.
I feel, in the shapes of the colors, this same tiredness and inner deafness that I feel in the mornings. Every shape is like a blanket. Or maybe the shapes are like the heavily filtered signals, when I finally get them.
Yes, this is the view.
If you looked at the drawing before I added the painted shapes, you would see suffering and despair. Then a deeper state ensues, just because I was keenly aware of my experience, and I start the colored shapes from a standpoint from where I feel the movements of energy that bring about the outer layer of experience that I described as suffering. At this moment I sailed away from fears and the outermost details of my life. Going on deeper, if I did, I’d come to silence. For me, while doing this layer I already feel the silence. So these energies, as you probably know, come from thoughts, beliefs and expectations that originate at this point from my very long and deep subconscious. Becoming aware of this layer, just being aware from the place of silence, is enough for dissolving these thoughts that create the movements of energy, which eventually bring about what we perceive as suffering.
From this perspective, making art like this is healing. And even though I stopped officially to show in the blog how I heal myself with this way of making art and reading it, the truth is that I have continued all the time. The flow in art-making leads you deeper, to the place from which being aware heals.
And this is helpful indeed psychologically and spiritually at the same time. The more clear of thoughts that mask the truth I am, the more free of suffering I become, from the psychological perspective, and the more free I become, at the same time, of whatever habitual thoughts I have that filter the knowing of my freedom. Freedom is always in me (and everyone). You can never take it away. Some call this freedom love, because, being free, you can’t but love everything.
So this is what we have: despair on the surface and heavily masked signals from inside and outside. What is not shown are the peace, play, curiosity and even joy that are the essence of seeing from a deeper place. You have to guess them from seeing the details of creating a mood with movements of energies that come from thoughts. This is the stuff of life.
The intention was to paint the inside of all the shapes in the drawing, And to come out with the colors at the top of the shapes. First let me do the way that each color comes out and up a little bit from its designated area, I said to myself. These are the tricky areas. So let me do them first. But when I finished, it looked good to me just as it was. The strong contrast between the lines inside of the big areas (where the olive green lines are, where the other green lines are, where the red lines are, where the darker red areas are and where the blue lines are) and the white, gave these areas a lot of energy, and together with the way the lines curled and bent, as if they were in the middle of doing something, there was so much life inside if the shapes. I liked it and did not want to change.
So what do I get from this?
For me it feels like the energy of life inside of my body, about to explode. No. Not to explode, but to do something big, to do something loving and beautiful.
I looked at the drawing a day later and I still liked it. So it was time to sign.
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Everything is born out of thought.
My hand is the result of a thought. This is how it started and this is how it is being created again and again every very short time, like the way a movie is being created from some thirty pictures every second, that when shown continuously, look like something that moves naturally.
The thought that creates my hand has become a habit that is activated regularly. Based on another thought, which is the story of my life, images are chosen to create motion that will fit with the story of my life. I don’t know how all of this works, with all the details. If you want to understand it from the perspective of a human being, which is what we are of course, you will have many questions. And after they will be answered there will be so much more questions. The amount of details is beyond measure. We are dealing here with infinity, using our finite mind.
Whatever happened to my feet continues to happen so many times every minute. The minutes that have passed have gone out of my reach. Some people, who have the talent to see through the big consciousness of all of us, may visit these moments and see the process happening again. I think all of us can have (less controllable) access to past events in dreams, and in inner visions, connected to memories.
The habits of thoughts that keep creating the nerve damage and the resulting pain in my feet, started some 70 years ago. Do you think I need to visit that time in order to correct my thoughts and with the change of thought, the disease activity will stop?
But you see, the thoughts and the behavior of my energy, that creates this condition, are not those of seventy years ago. They happen right now, so many times every second. So it is enough to deal with what is here now.
There is still a lot to explore. But I’ll stop here. This is enough for one entry.
Movements made of mistakes
It suddenly came to me
To ask the space to talk about what he sees
That happens in it
It seems like the most surprising act of circus acrobats
He says
In movements that look as if they are all mistakes
And falling down, attempting some spectacular show
The acrobats manage to put up in the air
A variety of movements
That express running and flying
Longing and trying to hold on
To just anything
Culminating in the unfolding of the sweet unknown
Which, of course, is me, the space
Who is talking to you
Right now.
intuitiveflow 