Healing and growth through intuitive art
The lines, Connected,
Do they help to move
Or do they hinder?
The dots, white and yellow,
Over brown, grey and ocher,
Are they smooth
Or are they rough like
Stones or broken bones?
The beauty, is it real,
Or is it a dream that we have,
As this person runs through the fields
With the last sun of the day?
What happens here?
It looks there is wind, coming from the right and everything that we see is effected.
It is a strong wind. Little things are being blown away to the left.
If the wind goes on like this for a longer time, what are we going to be left with?
Maybe some branches will break?
Maybe the light green figure will run away? Or, will it stay all the way to the end, to see how everything else has disappeared?
The empty space will seem devoid of things to look at.
So the figure will eventually give up on trying to see physical things.
With nothing in its environment, the figure too will have no reality. With the impossibility of a contrast, how can anything be?
Aren’t we creatures of contrast?
We say: This is I and this is you or this is the world. But without a world, who are we?
And there is that grey shape that may look as if it is the thought of the figure. As I was painting it and as I had gotten to this point, something from inside of me stopped me. Enough said, it told me without words. Don’t add any more.
So the grey shape remained unfinished, as if there was no point any more in believing in what we thought was real.
When the figure’s last thought stopped before it became full, when the belief in thought and the reality stopped, what was left?
Try it out.
There is a power that makes everything be, and it comes from our thoughts. You feel it in your guts.
In time it also blows everything away. Then the last thought is never completed.
And there we are.
This is a very long one, to compensate for the long time between entries.
Yesterday (I wrote this on 9/7/2017) I started a big series, as I figured it would be, of little drawings, quick, spontaneous, intuitive, as connections, asking and getting answers, discovering subconscious conflicts and fears and releasing them, using whatever will work best, and not leaving the process until I am without fear.
This drawing was the first.
I won’t describe the process. I can say it was directed from my better place. I was determined to go back to not planning, even in the most free and general terms. I wanted there to only be what comes intuitively. No preparing an area to be painted and then painting it, as I did a lot lately.
I took verbal notice of things in the art that I saw. Just flew through the painting and wrote the words that came to me as I was looking at different parts or groups of parts. It is quite easy to figure out the parts that the lines of words came from. You will see.
Then I scrambled all the sentences, as in the old days, added words and sentences to make it work as a piece that makes sense verbally, added two lines in the end, and turned the first line into the name of the piece.
As these additional words came to me, to explain meanings and connect the parts, the arranging mechanism of my mind started to form meanings.
When we are in a deep good place we usually don’t look for meanings. But sometimes, new knowledge appears for us. We suddenly know something about how things are, that we did not know before. Here it is different. I flowed with the verbal investigation to where my heart took me by the hand, so to speak. The heart wants to take the mind with it, if you have the tendency to do it.
Now, before I started drawing, I asked all my acquaintances from the nonphysical to help me find where I am, and how to proceed. I felt quite lost, did not know what to do with this mock life that I created, in the world that I created. Everything has lost its allure for me, from the knowing that it is not the real. I wanted to know the real. And I also lamented the loss of what seemed to be a beautiful life, imperfect indeed, but meaningful, depending indeed on the world and I being somewhat real.
I knew that there is a more real me, more beautiful, and it is what comes from a deeper perspective. I knew that this life, with everything in it is an illusion, but still I felt there were people who could use help in finding their truth, in finding their way to be happier. This idealism was lost, as I understood that all that appears to me is invited by me, in search of knowing myself in a deeper way, or it may be in search of anything that I chose to invite and investigate.
Anyway, this meaningfulness was gone.
So everything I had an idea about starting to do, I immediately had the idea of stopping, as it made no sense to do anything.
It did not feel good to be like this. There were things that my life could be better with, practically speaking and I could busy myself with them. But this is not all.
I lived with meaning all my life. I thought that it was possible and necessary to have meaning if I wanted to be content. I wanted to find my way into it again. This was a habitual thinking indeed.
There is the teaching of the truth that I felt I wanted to do. But I saw myself at that moment unfit, as I have not lived in the knowing of it all the time. I still experienced fear, freezing fear.
So I asked all of them to help. Come through the drawing, I asked, and let me know where I am, and what to do next.
So here is what came in the words and sentences at first.
# Landscape view
# Unexpected turns
# Trees fly up slowly
# Blue stars like precious stones
# Energy jumps all around
# Arranging
# There is something in the next area, sending thin feelers in to where we are
# It is busy here but a lot of sky is open.
Now I scrambled all the words and sentences in my favorite way and wrote it all in the new order, with a few additions that came to me in the process, to connect some parts logically and to give meaning.
The meaning, in a strange way, is a choice, as I am the one who invites this meaning. But it is also what is received through the connection (with the non-physical). This whole process is a connection. And you can have a sense of the absurd. It looks very compellingly that something happens, but really nothing happens. I think I’ll need to talk about this some other time.
Here is the final arrangement:
ARRANGING
It is busy here
But a lot of sky
Is open
The trees fly up slowly
To discover the landscape view
With many unexpected turns
There is something in the next area
Sending thin feelers in
To where we are
What is it that they are looking for?
Is it the blue stars
That are
Like precious stones?
Yellow energy, faster than everything here,
Jumps all around
To define something new
That we do not know yet.
Now I took small portions of the writing that seemed to have one specific meaning in them that had to do with me and my life, and wrote this meaning, as it came to me. I still did not know what would show up. It was just intuition after intuition and more intuition. Intuition is not thinking, so we don’t have meaning yet.
I know that philosophy deals with intuition in its ways. But this is not the intuition that I write about here, as far as I know. I’ll have to write about this too in another entry.
Here are these specific meanings:
Busy with open sky– My mind. The forces of habits moving. Awareness sees a lot of space.
The trees that fly up slowly– Like me, venturing into the bigger me.
The landscape view with the unexpected turns– Change, when you look down from above, is waiting to happen.
Something with feelers– My friends in the nonphysical, always expecting preparedness, illuminating me with knowledge, when I ask for it.
Blue stars, like precious stones– Memories of the truth, spots of love and openness, connection moments.
The yellow energy, getting ready. It is the energy that does the ’how’, when I choose the ‘what’.
Definition of something new that we do not know yet– Everyone and everything getting ready for the change.
So I see, as I’ve seen several times before, that every time I turn to my friends in the nonphysical, or even just ask intuition, or just ask nobody in particular, the first answer I get is that things are so much better than I think.
That it will be okay if I take care of feeling good. They did not say this but I know they would have said, had there been a need for it.
Feeling good is the main thing anyway.
Maybe this is a stranger entry than the usual? Please comment and I’ll answer to the best of my ability.
I was born in Israel and my parents were idealistic pioneers. They built Israel from nothing, with all the others there of course. They wanted social justice, a place to live and grow their food, a place where they could have a country and a piece of land and they wanted their children to be born in a country with a house and a field. I drank idealism with my mother’s milk. (This was long ago. Now it is a bit more complicated there.)
I was an artist from young age. I went to study graphic design. In Graphic Design you make art that is used immediately. Then I was an illustrator. As an illustrator you illustrate children’s books, for children to grow up with good stories, with knowledge and love of the world about them, with a good taste in art, as it makes for a better life. And you illustrate for adults so that they will think in a different way and they will laugh…
Then I got involved with Buddhist meditation, and the idea was to know what I am, so that I’ll live my true life.
And indeed, once you start to know something you start teaching. What can be more important than helping others know what they are, so that their lives will be good, and truthful? And that they will be good people, help each other and create a wonderful world for all of us, and our offspring…
Then I went to study art therapy, so I would be able to help people get rid of what held them back from being what they were. To show them how to become free of inhibiting ideas and thrive, so that they can live happily and lovingly etc.
And I did all these. I was idealistic and practical.
Then I started to know that every one of us has his own world, created by his own consciousness. We do not live in the same world. Our worlds meet with each other and it looks as if it is one world, but it is not so.
You can’t create a meaningful change in any part of the reality that is around you in your world. If you want this reality to change, you have to change yourself. The new thoughts and beliefs that you will have will bring to you everything that fits this new state of mind. So I cannot change or help change the people who come to do therapy with me. In one view, they are part of my outside world. I have to change myself, and as a result another version of that person will appear in my world, which will be a match to the way I have become. From another view, the patient is in another world, where he is the only one who can make changes in his world, by changing himself.
I always thought that we all lived in the same world. That there was one person in front of me, who suffered, and I helped him release the suffering and live a better life. But no.
And I thought that making art was a good thing for other people, to widen and deepen their experience, to give them the experience of beauty that will help them live a more beautiful life, with love, with collaboration, with understanding…
Now I felt there was no sense in doing anything. I always had a purpose for doing things and I missed it.
It felt like depression.
Then I decided to ask August Moon about it.
August Moon is my inner guide. I have been connected with him for a while. He always answers. He is always there.
I asked and made a drawing, as I like to get the answers through the art. Sometimes I know through words, but if it is a big thing, I make art and read the answer in it. I just like it this way.
And as soon as I started making the art, I knew the answer. The lines in the drawing spoke to me with the energy that is in them:
The reason to do anything, to do all that you want to do, is not that there is a need for it. You are not doing it for any idealistic purpose. You do it because it is your nature to be interested in doing things. It is your nature to love. It is your nature to be curious, playful, peaceful, capable and creative. This nature is what you are and it is expressed by what you do. So you do, just because you are a natural expresser of yourself.
So, you see? There is no outside reason for me to be happy. I am happiness.
And how can this be depressed?
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.
Up or down?
What do we see?
One complexity is flying up in the sky, above another complexity. Maybe the second one is the ground? Maybe it also floats in space?
Maybe the ground is floating in space?
If it does, then this goes along with what I started to experience more and more, that our reality is not so real as we think it is.
In our referential world there is a ground under everything. And if what appears above the ground is floating and does not even touch the ground, does it mean that it is floating really? Is it happy and jumping with joy?
One thing I can tell for sure is that both the ground and the thing that floats above it continue beyond the canvas to the left and to the right.
It seems in both of them that the left side is close to the end or to the beginning. There is less and less, as we approach the left side. So we can guess that if we go a little more to the left there will be the end of the shapes there.
Is this significant? Well yes. We don’t know yet how, but it is something clear.
When we look at the right side, things both in the floating part and in the ground are becoming more spacious.
This state of events leaves the middle area heavier and therefore it attracts our attention to it. We do not pay much attention to the left and the right. But I am used to looking for the bigger context, so I saw it.
The shapes in the floating part seem to be standing, dancing, running and moving. They seem to be moving to the right. That’s because everything is slightly heavier on the right side of the middle.
The shapes in the ground seem to be horizontal. They seem to be holding on to the rest of the shapes, as if trying to avoid being left behind, when everything else moves. If you look at where in this group the weight is, you realize that they even seem to be pulling to the left, back to the beginning.
Now the difference between the sides helps us understand. To the right there is the progress toward the unknown. In the left was the beginning. One group dances to the future and the other group holds on to where they are, afraid to move.
So it is like two worlds, living very close to each other. One is light and happy, and it is going to the future. The other is depressed and lonely and afraid to move. The two worlds don’t touch each other. Maybe they do not want to pay attention to each other. It is only us, the painter and the watchers of the painting, who can see this strange phenomenon.
In the upper part there are the adventurers, the ones who take risks, those who are not afraid to live life to the full.
In the lower part the figures are afraid and in distress.
Within each group the figures collaborate and are of the same three colors, red, orange and purple. So maybe this shows that basically these are of the same kind, those in the upper and the lower parts. But their experience is totally different.
Where would you choose to be?
You see? Suddenly the drawing changed. Before, maybe it was undecipherable and did not speak much to us. Now it is a challenge, pressing you to decide about your life.
It is nice and looks full of wisdom when I speak about this as if these figures represent some other people. But I drew this. Both the upper and the lower parts came from my imagination. So they represent me.
Which of the groups is me? Both.
If I give up on the upper, I’ll be only depressed and suffering. If I let go of the lower part, who knows what will happen? I may expand. I may explode. Everything is possible. We never know until we decide to be that upper part.
But for now I want to tell you that even though these two groups seem to be of different spirit, they actually belong in the same layer of understanding. They belong to where things are different, separate and competing.
So where is the wisdom here?
In the watcher. You and me. Let’s watch.
And if we let go of wanting to be either the upper or the lower parts, who are we? what do we belong to?
Beautiful despair
I am starting this project. The final acceptance of everything.
It will be like Dzogchen throutgh art.
And I start from this painting, which I did at night, around 1 am, with the experience of this strong and crazy pain that was sharper than the usual, to which I have gotten used already.
I prop the painting up against the basket with the pencils and brushes on my table and the light from above is good to it, emphasizing the texture of the canvas.
My general view is that there is the group of many colors, heavy on the upper right and after some space there is that brown branch, maybe falling away, overwhelmed by the weight of that group and even breaking down .
Then there are two penciled dry and sharp branches and something strange, also penciled on the upper left. And of course there are the shadows, the areas I painted with pencil.
What do these do to each other?
The big multi colored area seems to have a lot of sadness. All the shapes are sending fingers or hands to nowhere, searching for something they already know they won’t find. Presenting again and again the idea of I want but I know I can’t. This creates a very disquiet, nervous cloud. It is beautiful in its sadness. It becomes almost like a tapestry or a physical “thing” and it even has some shadows, to show that it is real, it is three dimensional, and you can touch it. These are thoughts becoming things. There are a few places where a few parts become messy, blending into each other uncontrollably, crying into each other.
The introduction of the penciled branches into this area introduces another distinction into the game, between more real and less real or maybe between soft and hard. The bareness of the penciled branches feels poor, hungry for love, hardened by hard life. It seems that the lower penciled branch supports the whole cloud on its back and keeps it from hitting the brown branch harder. That brown branch is losing in a way. It is falling down, broken, as if escaping the vengeance of the colorful cloud.
The only hope that this falling brown branch has is that it will find something good when it goes up along the left side of the painting, but the place it comes to is empty. There is only darkness there, a tear-drop and an empty shape.
So where is the power in this picture?
The power is in the observation, in the ability to see all of this so clearly with all of its complexity and simplicity. It is like a poem on despair.
In summary the picture says:
I’m searching. I know I’m not going to find. I am beautiful but sad. I am helped by dry and dead sticks, which are searching just like me. But they are already hardened by the experience of not finding and they do not even have hope. Some part of me is afraid of this despair. It is trying to escape, still hoping to find love and fulfillment, but we know already, looking at the picture, that there is none of these in it.
It is funny that what looks in superficial sight beautiful and maybe playful and colorful actually describes sadness and despair.
So was I desperate when I drew this?
No. I was shocked by the intensity and sharpness of the pain that made me jump out from bed and come here, to this table at night, I remember what I wanted to achieve. I wanted to disperse the confusion that I felt and the shock.
It did this to a degree. After that I slept.
The beauty was very important to me. Without feeling the beauty I would be dissatisfied and restless. What does it mean to me?
When a painting comes out beautiful (For me, as I experience it), I know I have connected to my larger aspect, the non physical part, the real, what we sometimes call “home”. Connecting with the real, all that is not real will start moving. Movement is life, is health, is hope, is everything good. This is the principle of all healing.
I have to give some background.
Everybody believes that what I have is a degenerative disease. People who have this don’t heal. They progressively (what an unfitting word) become more debilitated. Living in this environment, I totally believe that I am healing. Parts of my feet that were totally numb for maybe twenty years are hurting now. All through this healing process they kept hurting more and more. For everybody else this was a sign that things were getting worse. For me it is a sign that life is coming back to where it was blocked. I don’t know why I wanted my healing to hurt. But I know that like everything else, this too is a decision I made at some point. I spoke about this little kid a few entries ago and he may be the source of this idea.
When the pain became too hard for me to take, I looked for some medications and I thought about it as some aid to help me pass these last stages. I needed to sleep. But the medications started to have an effect on my alertness and sensitivity to the subtleties of my perceptions. This was too much for me to give up, and I let the medications go instead. My sharpness of sensitivity is back and I have to deal with the pain without the help of the meds. It will be through the acceptance of my response.
I haven’t written for the blog for a while. I kept drawing every day and reading my drawings. Sometimes I drew more times than in other days. Basically these are all processes that you have seen me doing before. Discovering blockages and dissolving them, expressing experiences of expanded states, asking intuition and getting answers.
Doing this process is the best thing I have ever done in my life. And I have done a lot before this. I illustrated more than 40 children’s books, I wrote three of them. I know I have helped many people change their lives for the better, I raised three children, I showed my art, I got lost in making art silk screen prints until my money ended, I left New York for two and a half months when I had an exhibition in Germany and when I came back I lost all my illustration clients and changed my career. A few of my illustrations are still going around the world with an exhibition of political illustrations done for INX. I had spiritual experiences and spent twelve years in intense meditation. I did a lot more. I went back to school to study art therapy at age 58, I presented my method of using intuition through art in conferences and in some cases people were so moved that they had tears in their eyes. I know I have already done a lot. But this, taking care of my own development through using my own method, has been the best thing I have ever done. This has deepened my understanding of myself and of others and made me into a much better therapist or healer. I discovered my ability to read people from far and know what to do to help them. And I am still learning. All this burst of growth in my late sixties came from this work that I am doing on myself. This work is my meditation, my prayer, my connection to the truth, my expansion.
I am so sure about the strength and benefits of this method that I am now making arrangements for teaching it to people who are interested in using it for themselves and for helping others. It works much better than traditional psychotherapy. I have already started teaching it to a few.
The following picture and poem are just where I am today.
The greens that look so real
The greens that appear so real
Are the children of thoughts
The lovely earth, ploughed with horses
And crops growing
Near the vivid blue
Are all the children of thoughts
Made in the open space
Of eternal love.
The eye
There is an eye
Everything grows around it
Real or unreal
We are always on the back of ancients
Good or bad
If you want to live forever
Do nothing
Settle in the eye.
Every time I sit down to draw and write it surprises me. I never know what will come out in the drawing and in the words.
I know that even if we do not want to live forever we do. But this is how the words came and I respected it. I know that it is not an eye that sees and knows everything. It is something that we cannot describe in words without making it into what it is not.
I know that it is impossible to describe things as real or unreal, and that there is no good or bad. Yet I wrote it as I did.
Don’t believe any word I say.
intuitiveflow 