Expressive Art

No Thoughts

Often in my sketchbook I draw the elaborateness of thought. This figure is positively bloated with  thoughts. As I grow quieter and better able to stay with my feelings without spinning into thoughts and reactions, I understand the beauty of having no thoughts. Most of us are rarely silent inside. Many even wonder why it is desirable not to think. What I have learned is thinking always follows a feeling we can not be present for....a feeling we are afraid to feel.

The minute we feel uncomfortable, we move into thought and into what needs to be fixed, changed, or controlled in our lives in order to feel better. Thinking takes a ton of energy. Energy literally leaves our bodies when we indulge in excessive, unnecessary thinking. When I am in a constant state of thought upon thought I can feel energy draining out of my belly and I often find myself putting my hand over my solar plexus to stop the drain. To build spiritual/creative energy and power, it is necessary to quiet the mind.

By the end of my work week I usually feel clogged and accumulated with thought. The practical details of my life seem to drown out my stillness. I always seem to spend the first day of my weekend trying to recover my depths and leave my busy work week mind behind.

An elder I knew at work who has since passed on introduced me to the most fascinating, deep book called The Eye of the I by David R. Hawkins that I have been meditation on today. He talks about why we like to think. He explains we get pleasure out of "doing something" with our minds. When we think we have the illusion that we are accomplishing a goal, we as he says are forever, "creating solutions by rehearsing and planning, righting imaginary wrongs, or giving other people a piece of one's mind."

He writes that the basic function of thinking is to (1.) to try to feel better - ie. to restore self-esteem and (2.) to increase one's capacity to survive. To quiet the mind certain motives have to be relinquished. We have to in effect let go of wanting to think! Have you ever tried this? You have to let go of the desire of the pleasure of thinking.

The mind occupies itself with stories and lengthy scenarios. The mind seeks continually to control and anticipate the next moment. It is quite amusing to watch and to see how it arises in minds everywhere. When we are preoccupied with our thinking we are in essence focused on our vanities and fears and are completely missing the boat on what is actually happening

There is tremendous pleasure beyond thinking. A multidimensional creative colorful pleasure that invites all measure of rich experience and intuitive knowing. Stillness of mind creates space for "Reality to shine forth."

Contemplate that when we are silent inside:

A style of knowingness replaces reason and logic, and intuitive awareness focuses on the essence of life rather than on goals or the details of form.

Perception begins to change and the beauty of creation literally shines forth from all persons and objects. A simple scene may suddenly become overwhelmingly beautiful, as though revealing itself in three-dimensional Technicolor.

There are moments when suddenly all is still and the experience of All That Is takes place within an all encompassing presence. In the stillness of the Infinite Presence the mind is silent there is nothing that can be said; all speaks for itself with completeness and exactitude."

-David H Hawkins

Opening Up

I just spent the weekend painting at a large group workshop with Jesse Reno. I am not going to post a painting because I have not had my "breakthrough painting" yet. On the way home I stopped at the hardware store and bought several pieces of scrap plywood and am on the path to painting again. I find my freedom in my private journals and I have always had a challenge translating my drawings into paint.

Jesse's style challenges me to take my drawings into my painting. It is funny, perhaps because I was a gallery artist in an upper level gallery when I was younger, painting feels like the last expressive frontier for me. With clay sculpture, I am lost in creative passion. Drawing is my door to freedom. Collage is absolutely effortless and instant.

There is an element to art for me that is equally sexual as it is creative and I have been feeling the inexplicable urge to get back to painting after a long hiatus. For the past many years I have been writing and sharing my spiritual/creative discoveries but have kept much of my creativity private.

Something however is freeing up in me. I can feel it's movement under my regular life. What I once was only able to express during times of intensity and crisis seems to be emerging as a regular form of expression...or it wants to. Years ago when I underwent a period of intensity and trauma in my life, I opened up wide to life and it saved me. I feel this drawing speaks to this gesture...an opening of all centers of the body, creative, emotional, sexual. There is an aliveness in this drawing that I would like to bring into my paintings now.

Meeting Darkness

Look at this figure grimly trying to push down all that feels untamed within. My bible these days in case you have not already guessed is Richard Moss's book The Mandala of Being. These days I am going through a considerable amount of "darkness cleansing" and this book is helping me meet feelings in myself that I have long recoiled from.

What I mean by this is, I know, and yet still, I always forget, that my outer circumstances are not the cause of my uncomfortable, darker, more repressed feelings. My outer circumstances can only trigger what I have already, long ago, repressed within. And life is exact and timely in this darkness cleansing process.

I like the look of this jester because try as he might to be "happy", "positive" and "nice" his face belies that he cannot push down his repressed feelings any longer. They want to come into the light.

Everything must be brought up to the light, as much as we would like to pretend and wish otherwise. This is a process we rarely learn how to do.

The process itself is intensely difficult, yet rewarding...cleansing...relieving. Usually when repressed feelings come up, there begins a black despair. Nothing feels right. Everything feels horribly wrong...tainted. Usually when I get to this point, I desperately want to change my circumstances, run away, quit my job, leave my partner, burn down my home!! Ahhhh!

We want to run but we cannot hide! We feel terrible, but the darkness is benevolent. This is where the present moment comes in. We have inner thoughts, stories, beliefs ect. within that suck us into tremendous emotional suffering and these are the very hardest to stay present for.

Richard Moss, so generously writes:

"We must learn that when we are powerfully contracted, we must turn our attention fully towards the sensations of angst and despair instead of the thoughts that such dark feelings always generate.

I have learned that I must stop thinking at the feelings, which means I must stop trying to interpret or explain them. I intentionally resist letting my mind race with thoughts that invariably begin to generate stories about why I am feeling this way and what I should do.

Instead I enter into a pure relationship, a profound intimacy with this suffering, and simultaneously sink into the Now of my body as though falling into infinite space.

 My attention never breaks with the bodily sensations. When my energy moves back to into my reactive mind, as it does for a while, I just renew the single pointed attention to the feeling. Suddenly whether it happens all at once or after many long hours, the darkest place becomes stillness, and even bliss.

It is as if I suddenly become transparent, so that both the terrible feeling and the self that hosted it disappear, and there is openness. I return to the beginning of myself, the Now."

So many presence teachings do not explain this process. This is what we have to present for...the hard stuff...so it can transform in the light of our attention.

I have been working with this process of attention to my darker feelings for over two years and it has tested everything in me. This kind of presence requires tremendous strength and willingness, and it must be built up gradually over time.

To give you an example, in the last while, I have been intensely struggling in myself, filled with overwhelming dark feelings, and have been feeling quite ill. Finally this past weekend, I began to turn my attention more fully to the intensity of darkness within.

It was hard not to go into my typical stories that arise, that tell me everything in my life must be changed NOW in order for me to feel better. Finally on Sunday, after mustering my fullest effort to be present within for days on end, I broke. I took our dogs for a slow walk and started to cry. I could not withstand my inner pain any longer. I have no idea why I was even crying, but as I started to sob more vociferously, I crawled up onto a flat rock and let it rip. My golden retriever climbed up next to me and kissed my face worriedly, and then she and the two other dogs sat in a semi-circle around me and held court as I moved through the feelings fully in my body.

As my tears began to subside, I slid down the rock and lay flat in the grass, in the hot sunshine. The dogs relaxed and gathered around and we reclined, present and at peace, my heart wide open....nothing needing to be different anymore.

Cleansing Anger

This collage makes me laugh. That is a good thing! After several rousing fights in the latter part of last week with my partner Ondrea - all started by me - I realized....I am angry! I have been feeling a lot of anger lately....especially anger at my own anger!

I told Ondrea on Friday that I want to hold my anger without projecting it outwards and be present for it until it moved and shifted on its own. It is here in my my body - I might as well face it. I have a hard time being present for my anger. Anger is a hot and uncomfortable emotion - it seethes and boils - it is enough to drive you crazy. It is very easy to project it outwards..."Someone or something has done me wrong" stories abound, and they are so easy to dissipate anger towards.

Determined to withdraw my projections from my life, I immediately got sick with an raging infection and spent the next days sleeping away my weekend. When I awoke from my stupor today at noon, "I said to Ondrea, " I am still angry." She laughed and said, "Go for a run." Years ago when I went through my divorce, I ran everyday and it healed me. It gave me somewhere to put my anger. My attempts to change and manipulate my ex-husband into someone who would not upset, provoke and disturb me, went instead, into my running.

I like this collage above. There is a fierceness to it. It is a good kick in the butt reminding me to look at what I am not meeting in myself.

Richard Moss says it best:

"Demanding someone change (including ourselves) is fruitless; in fact it is a form of violence. We all have the potential to change, and it happens completely naturally the more we realize our essential selves. In the absence of this fundamental understanding, requiring someone to change is a weapon used against that person. It means attacking what is and an attempt to protect ourselves from feelings we are not meeting in ourselves. We must not attempt to manipulate other people to protect us from our core fears. Who they are, as they are, is the reality of them. To fight against this is to suffer."

The Elaborate Self

I found this drawing in an old sketchbook the other day and laughed at the surprised face of the figure at it's own complexity. These days when I feel myself going into my mind and it's complexity of parts, I feel such a longing to return to spirit. When I look at this drawing I see a storehouse of memories, selves, unreleased patterns, reactions, monuments to the past...and all this blocks the way back to my essential self.

The creative spiritual path is really one of letting go of all that blocks the spirit expressing itself. Thinking becomes quite pointless at this stage and in the end one must rest into a felt-sense of bodily intuition and presence. Maintaining that presence is the tricky part. I watch these days how easy it is to spin into a story of dissatisfaction about myself and then I am lost in all the emotions associated with it.

These days my stories have been distinctly as Richard Moss would put it, "This isn't it!" I have been painting in every moment of my spare time and this often leaves me feeling discontented with my 9-5 scheduled life and longing to set my life up in a more "visionary way".

Richard Moss writes in the Mandala of Being: 

"Most of us, if we look carefully, will see we are haunted by a perpetual sense of dissatisfaction, a subtle, unfocused state that invests us with a restless urgency and tension. It generates a tendency to be increasingly vigilant and driven, and we attribute the feeling to something external, rather than recognize it is generated from within us. Until we can turn our non-reactive attention directly to this feeling and be softly present with it, we will continue to identify with "This isn't it."

These days I am remembering to say..."This is it...yes...thank-you for this moment just as it is..." And I can rest again in stillness.

I leave you with a film of visionary artist Jerry Wennstrom:

To see parts 2 and 3 of this film you can go to my website here.

Healing Victimization

Today I am revisiting a series of drawing I did a few weeks ago and am marveling at how they have come to pass in the recent unfolding of my life.

This drawing here on the left makes me feel uncomfortable. I remember years ago painting this similar image onto a large canvas. As with all spontaneous, unconscious imagery the creating of it filled me with a forbidden aliveness to see it appearing under my brush. Something dark was moving into the light.

Spontaneous art often expresses parts of ourselves that have been designated to the basement of the psyche. Very soon however, after I painted the canvas, I remember a sense of shame arising. I quickly painted over the image. Later I deeply regretted it. As I closed off a part of myself and painted over it, I felt a part of me was relegated to the darkness again.

Now here is the same image again. Often I drive myself crazy repeating the same imagery. I often draw  the same thing over and over for years wanting to see a less desirable part of myself and then closing over it in fear again. I see this image as a drawing of my inner victim. I see this as my belief in visual form, that I am helpless to overcome my circumstances...that I cannot quite reach my goals. "Something" outside of myself is always holding me back.

Victim consciousness is a universal archetype that we all carry within our human selves and in a part of our minds it will always speak. We all have areas of pain our lives in which we blame outside circumstances for holding us back, for hurting us, for keeping us small. Perhaps our past was too damaging, or we feel we have not been given the right breaks....we can find a million reasons for why we withdraw, why we do not give our gifts, for why we do not offer our fullest contribution to life. Victimization is all about inner hurting that is unhealed - inner hurting that has been un-cried. The truth however of victim consciousness is that we want to stay small and separate and hurt and scorned. If we cry and let it all go - who will we be then?

I had a profound counseling session last week around my experience of dealing with darkness in my workplace. Look at this drawing to the right. Look at how hard that head is thinking and trying to "spiritualize" over the truth of reality as it is unfolding. At counseling school they would call this "spiritual leap frogging." I get so frustrated with darkness and pain and the unconscious people that seem to thwart and hold me down...yet I would rather be angry and victimized than do the real work of seeing how I hold myself back. When I arrived at my counseling session I was so angry at myself for crying. I felt like I had arrived at a place in my life where I should be "above" tears, and I was trying to figure out from my head, from a "higher perspective", what I really needed to work out through my body with my tears. After I released my negativity my counselor had the higher part of myself speak to my lesser developed parts of self.

What I have come to understand is that life is forever triggering us. We have mountains of tears in all parts of our bodies waiting to be released - waiting to be cried out and then replaced with higher ideas. Our accumulated pain as human beings is great and it is fascinating to watch how we continually want to retreat from life to avoid that pain. One great thing my partner Ondrea has taught me is that it is noble and beautiful and right to "cry it all the way out". And as I do, I keep hoping my tears will one day end. But there are always new cleansings, and a processing of larger levels of darknesses that bring me to new levels of clarity and light. In my most recent darkness for example I felt that part of what I was crying, was my mother's pain inside of me. This I am finding is the journey.

When we do cry it all the way out, suddenly we are clean on the inside, and the light pours into the dark places in our body. The day after my counseling/crying session I was told by a man/Shaman that I respect deeply that he could see light pouring into my head. I simply noticed a lack of wanting or needing anything. I had no sense of being victimized by life. I felt as though a dark cloud had lifted out of my mind and that light and clarity had taken it's place. I felt the blessed peace that tears can bring. 

I look at this drawing above and I see a figure that can reach into the lowest and the highest places and know that each is interdependent on the other and neither is more or less holy. I realized this week that I am always searching for a fiction I have in my head, of a better place in the spiritual sun, than where I am right now.

Often I rant against the darkness inside of myself and others. But what life shows me again and again is that there is always a divine thread underlying every event, both light and dark. And all of it includes me in some way. All of it is showing me the most hidden places that I need to heal.

Life, as much as I would like to exalt all of my spiritual experiences, can feel crushing in it's mundane ordinariness. In my quest to be a large, extraordinary light, I so often feel less than ordinary in my daily squabbles and duties. Yet below my resistances to life and how it reflects me in not so wonderful ways, are endless messages of support and encouragement to see the divine in the ordinary. Inside the mundane difficulties of my life is always a larger truth unfolding beyond my personal preferences and I long to see these little windows into Reality more often.

The other day just as I was contemplating that maybe I do not believe in letting my victim consciousness take over in my life anymore, a favorite elder of mine came into the art studio and handed me a deck of wisdom cards. This is the message it held:

"When your old beliefs become outmoded and ready to crumble, after a time of stillness and settling of dust, you emerge newly reborn with a love that takes over where the abandonment once lived."  -Devrah Laval

The Divine Mother

My dear friend Holly sent me this article from the Spiral Muse Newsletter. You can see the original link here. The article is called "She Dreams Us Awake - ReConceiving the Feminine" by "Susannah from France." You can see the original article here. I am posting it up in it's original form because it feels it reflects the energy behind this drawing that I did at a recent workshop with Mary Rockwood Lane and Michael Samuels MD. You can read about the outer events that impelled this drawing in the post "Creative Healing" below.

"I feel inspired to come forward in this sublime birdsong morning and add something to the mix.  Many years ago, a friend told me about men, women and  the lobster pot as an allegory to what has happened in our shared evolution,  particularly with regards to the instinctual energies that have mostly not  evolved at all over the years - the expressions of the lower chakra realms.
 
In this case, the focus is on aggression and how we, particularly as  females, learned to go underground with ours.  We know the archetypes of  males and the obvious forms of brutality that has taken over the millennia -  the nightmarish results are ubiquitous in our world.  As it turns out, we of  the 'gentler' sex also have our own form of brutality and it has played  itself out way beneath the surface in our adaptation, being unable to match  sheer male brute strength, yet also contributing to the degeneration around  us, perhaps more profoundly so.
 
 Now, to refer to crustaceans and the law of the shadow realm jungle.  I have  heard that it has been observed in restaurants that if male lobsters or  crabs are put in a tall soup pot and they sense what is about to happen,  they get agitated (understandably) and start to climb on top of one another  in an attempt to get out of the pot.  As one does manage to get out of the  pot, either he will walk away, if he can, or he will allow his body to be  used to help the other males out of the pot, sometimes even reaching in to  help pull the other males out.  Now, if the same scenario happens with  female lobsters or crabs, they, too, will become agitated and begin to climb on top of one another in  an attempt to get out of the pot.  And if one does get close to getting out  of the pot, what happens? The other females will reach up and pull her back  down.  It's amazing how we had to 'do power' as women and it's ugly, heinous  and it leaves its scars, though less visible on the surface.
 
 And of course there are other underground maneuvers we human women have  added in our 'more evolved' species - such as vicious gossip (looking for  'negative merged support' in taking a third party down so to 'elevate' ourselves by  comparison?).  There's also the mechanism of speaking with a forked tongue,  where we say something on two levels simultaneously and slice someone to  pieces or cut another off at the knees while somehow making ourselves look  innocent on the surface.  Clever, aren't we?  Perhaps we have proven who is  really the more powerful sex (have we?), but at what cost to ourselves and  the larger body to which we belong?
 
 I have loved taking in these teaching and the continual invitation that is  here to keep coming to another ground, to the place of the True Mother, the  true feminine which nourishes and sustains what is truest and best in each  and all of us.  We are also dismantling the tyranny of the 'Monstrous  Mother' and her toxic root ways that live in us, the ones that became so  unconsciously, perniciously interjected by each of us so as to turn us into baby  monsters, which we then have perpetuated in our own, broken, helpless  crustacean dimension (dementia?) and our own black hole of endless need.
 
And now to flip that into becoming emanations of the Divine Mother that  inhabits herself profoundly, full and over-brimming, emanating in turn love,  compassion and forgiveness to all !  What an invitation !
 
So, (raising my tea cup) here's to shifting from 'tightly controlled' to  'lightly held', from 'I need, need, need' to 'I am infinitely full', in  clear, luminous, crown-full, heart-full, resurrected being and true  relating, one of mutual empowerment with built-in forgiveness ~ midwifing  ourselves and one another into our true light bodies.  I'll meet you here. . . any time.  This is our Declaration of Interdependence.  Offered with deep appreciation and in the spirit of mutual respect."

Creative Healing

For much of my life I have considered myself a rugged individualist, unwilling to ask for help and support from others. Underneath this bravado is a small, silent belief that no support is available. My partner Ondrea calls all of life a shamanic initiation. Because I spend the majority of my time in a week at work, my workplace has become my initiation in learning how to ask for and receive support.

I work in a beautiful art program, started after World War 2 for Canadian Veterans. It was initially intended as a therapeutic program to integrate soldiers who had been injured physically and emotionally during the war. Back then (before my time) we were called "Art Therapists" and wore starched blue uniforms and nurses shoes. We followed the doctors around with clipboards discussing therapeutic measures for each individual.

Now years later I work with older veterans with dementia. Providing art for those nearing the end of life surprises me. I see miracles of creative healing in my work all of the time. When mental censorship leaves with dementia, creativity and emotional healing begins.  Elders who do not talk, and are isolated become creative and expressive again. At 80 and 90 years old, elders discover they are gifted artists and they begin to thrive creatively for the first time in their lives.

When I entered my job 2 years ago I came into a group dynamic that, surprising to me, had a long standing bullying issue within it. Perhaps ten women working in one art studio does not bode well for a harmonious working group but when I asked on of my older co-workers if it had always been like this she said, "No, we have had vibrant, creative group dynamics over the years where everyone for the most part made efforts to love and support each other."

When I began my job, I see in hindsight I was a typically socialized woman, my personality being overly nice and accommodating to a fault - reticent to speak up and make waves. Perhaps I was a perfect target for someone who is hurt and angry and identifies as being a victim. I have not always immediately spoken up to mistreatment. I have often tried to ignore it and always try to see the "good" in the situation. I have not always known how to say no to inappropriate behavior but I have become stronger and much more articulate with each incident. In the midst of such tremendous inner growth however what I have been grieving most in my process of speaking out is that I have seen such a lack of support and overt fear and denial from my co-workers/friends and management.

This week my co-worker came up to me and said, "I know you where just spoken to as though you are stupid and incompetent, and I am sorry but I don't feel like I can say anything." It was at that point that I realized that I was losing touch with what is inappropriate behavior in the workplace. I saw that I had become overly identified with my victim in that the abuse in the workplace had become so normalized, we often just listen to it, pause, and then carry on with business. Our tolerance as a group for inappropriate behavior has become so high we can deny it is even happening and everyone goes into trauma and survival mode. Every woman for themselves. There is a common feeling of "this is just the way it is...there is no support." With such a seeming lack of support from my work-environment, especially around speaking up when the opportunity presents itself, I began to doubt my own light and my belief in myself as a creative healer, so I took a day off work to seek support from the outside.

After my counseling session I had several revelations and felt clearer and stronger and better equipped on how to support myself in my situation. To a big degree in the two hours that I spent with my counselor I understood that I can find and ask for support, and that is always available. I have just been unwilling to believe in it. I found that I need inner nourishment to do my best work in the world. This was an incredibly healing understanding for me. And in the following days and hours, I opened to receive it.

Blessedly, I had the next day booked off to attend, with Ondrea, an amazing workshop to see the vibrant and passionate Mary Rockwood Lane, co-author of "Creative Healing" and many other books. Her co-author Micheal Samuels MD so beautifully and wisely created the sacred space and co-presented with her.

The workshop was called "Creativity and Spirituality in Health Care" but it was really about claiming the Artist/Healer within. Micheal Samuels, the founder of using guided imagery with cancer patients and author of "Healing with the Mind's Eye", led us through a deep inner imagery process in understanding how we heal through creativity.

This is the drawing that came out of my inner visioning. Note the solid line of inner support running through the center of the body. After the workshop I felt such a solid sense of support, spiritually and emotionally for who I am and a deeper connection to my soul mate Ondrea and the healing support work we do together. All of the participants touched me deeply. I felt we were all trembling with soul purpose and passion in recognition of our unique healing offering to the world. With the climate of my current work environment I had begun to doubt my creative healing work and the truthful energy of my own soul. This drawing and Michael and Mary's workshop brought me back to myself.

The Gift of Anger

Look at the force of this anger in this drawing. The figure is filled with cherished ideas about herself that dare not be challenged in any way. If this figure's cherished self ideas are challenged, some amount of force and control will be implemented to try to change the experiences and people that bring out these uncomfortable feelings.

The trick to meeting intensity in any form of conflict is to trust and remember that no matter how it appears, life is never against us. Life is always trying to show us some truth about ourselves and it serves us better to not try to withdraw and distance from the truths that are being constantly being revealed.

Usually our pain comes from not accepting the multi-dimensionality of our humanness. Most of choose to be blind to our own weaknesses and tend to see them more easily in others. Yet if we refuse to see the whole truth of ourselves we will continue to suffer endlessly. Life will always bring conflict to our door to wake us up to our part in things.

Pain and anger is usually about the loss of a cherished self-image. Perhaps for example, we prefer to see ourselves as all-kind and all-loving. When conflict arises it brings up all of our hidden pain and we realize how angry we actually are. How hard it is, and how unrealistic it is to be "nice" and "kind" all of the time.

I have felt unraveled by conflict in my workplace the last couple years and I am starting to see the Truth in it. What I am understanding that groups and families in crisis usually express extreme polarities. There is usually one or more who expresses the anger and the discontent for the whole group or system. This would typically be called the "Black Sheep" of the family or group. The angry ones seem "less than" and those who appear to have it all perfectly together seem "better than".  Both sides however are being called to the truth of balance and integration. Since if we are drawn to be in a group together, we all have an equal amount of anger within us and equal amounts of good....otherwise we would not even be there. We all have anger, but if we allow another to express it all for us, we can easily disown it in ourselves.

We can become unraveled in group or family dynamics because usually someone is expressing some dis-owned part of ourselves. It provides us something to argue with and fight against. In disowning our own feelings and the truth of our own lower human tendencies, we tend to want to disown the people who bring them out in us. Whenever we do not want to see a particular, less than savory truth about ourselves, division, separation and conflict is born. The nature of wholeness is to allow everything into it's expression. As I allow myself to own and integrate all of my parts - even the more wild and untamed parts of myself such as anger, I experience less conflict and judgment of others in my being.

As I experience and accept my own anger, instead of retaliating and trying to change a person or situation that "makes me" feel disturbed or uncomfortable, I can let it transform into personal power and creativity. Consider this quote about anger and let it transform you:

"Anger is born out of the fear you feel when others won't conform to your point of view. Give up your anger towards others and yourself by seeing that the force of fear is not strength. Remember that for any and every action of force there is an equal and opposite one. This explains why the fighting never ends. Let it end."   -Guy Finley

The Purification of Relationships

It has been difficult to admit that every relationship I have is an accurate reflection to the relationship I am having with myself. If someone is attacking me, I must ask, "How am I attacking myself? What do I feel guilty about?" Whatever we feel angry and guilty about always points to something we are not giving. If someone is withdrawing from me, I must ask, "How do I withdraw from life? What do I not want to look at inside of myself?"

Sometimes relationship feels like walking into a purifying fire. Anyone who ever said the spiritual path is full of peace has already walked through the fire of relationship or is avoiding it completely.

Life requires a tremendous amount of deeper vision. We can get hurt in daily small ways by the opinions of others and then choose to add another layer of defense over our coat of armor. When we protect ourselves in this way, we withdraw from life more and more. On the opposite end we can choose to take a step towards what is wounding us and look for the gift about what it is telling us. Anything that bothers us is pointing us towards something we are afraid to look at in ourselves. Usually it is something in our character that is not contributing to the whole of life and that we selfishly wanting to defend and not change.

Perhaps the greatest fire of purification in my past few years has been at my full-time job - working in an art studio with 10 headstrong artists/instructors. Group dynamics and all the complex relationships within them are my subject of fascination of late. My earlier opinions of groups have been that they do not allow me the " fullest expression of my unique personality" and I have avoided them all of my life because I have wanted to be ME without compromise.

As the two year mark passed at my full-time job I have shifted my view. Because I feel that the full-time work I do facilitating art and creativity for the elderly is purposeful and valuable, I have been willing to change my opinion on groups because I have to work in one! I now see groups as a refining and purifying force, that come kicking and screaming, are going to point out where we from our defended ego stances do not step up and contribute to the whole.

I see group dynamics as an amazing experiment that we all must learn to flow in and co-operate with in order to be part of a larger interdependent expression of the whole. Within a group, our individual edges, preferences and strong ego likes and dislikes have to get rubbed down in the interest of a harmonious working group. We can bring our unique gifts to a group but not our ego defenses. This is a good thing, even though the comfortable, primary expression of our personality would like to convince us otherwise.

Working in groups is uncomfortable. In groups we have to stretch in directions that we would not normally choose to. Groups teach us not to be so self-centered and only focused on our own interests. It shows us where we hold back, where we withdraw and where we act victimized and attacking. It shows us where we feel better than others, where we seek our approval from, and it show us where we feel less than others. Group dynamics are an amazing mirror. If we truly give to the good of the group and set aside our selfish and isolated interests, there is less conflict and more cooperation. Groups teach us to step outside of our small selves and give to something larger than ourselves.

The Inner Critic

 We are all made up of different selves and as I have noticed as I become more conscious, I see that each part of myself has it's own distinct reality that will sometimes take over my life completely. One part of myself that I do not like to look at fully is the underground voice of my inner critic.

Recently I have been paying close attention to the critical voice in my head. It is by no means all of me but I have been watching how the not good enough voice seeps under my days and without realizing it I begin to lose my motivation to move forward...and my vital creative energy and life force begins to slip away.

While this inner voice may seem ridiculously harsh to some it is important to know that each part of our personality acts like it's own separate person with it's own thoughts, feelings and dreams. Psychologists Hal and Sidra Stone say that the inner critic makes absolute pronouncements as though it has the truth of heaven behind it. It is for this reason that it is initially difficult to separate from the critic's voice. We think it is all encompassing...it this voice is all of us...it is God or our parents speaking and condemning us.

It is helpful to see that underneath the critic's voice is a fear of shame and of not being good enough. Our entire society is based on perfectionism, of having the right things, of looking good. To give ourselves the permission to be human and to know we are doing our best given our current emotional circumstances and life situation is a relief.

Luckily all parts of life are simply energy with a dark and light side. I remember growing up and saying to my family that I wished we would all be more honest with each other. "Why would we want to criticize each other?" was the response. Although I did not want to be harshly criticized, I think I was looking to be reflected honestly. In my family we would only compliment each other and I felt a huge gap in learning how to relate to others in a constructive way. As I have grown older I find that even the the harshest criticism from the outside or the inside serves to raise my integrity and impeccability. If I am willing to look at it with courage there is always a step forward I can take.

The positive side of the critic is that it is extremely discerning and able to analyze everything. We could reassign it to be a firm but benevolent inner coach urging us forward. It keeps us on track and does not let us get off with the job half done. It has focus and discipline. We can see clearly where we need to grow. With the inner critic applied in balance we can pull up our socks and move forward in a focused way.

The Good Mother Archetype

  I set impossible standards and expectations for myself as young mother and I feel this collage reflects this perfectly. You only need to look at the Good Mother Messages below to see that only someone who is fully self-realized or God herself could embody and give all these feeling tones of love and support to her child.

When my daughter was a baby I wanted to be a perfect mother. I joined an "attachment parenting group". I breastfed my baby constantly, I slept with my baby in a "family bed" so she in my mind would grow up to be strong and secure and confident in my love. I was trying to embody the "Good Mother Archetype" to the fullest.

The good mother in me is the role that takes the most out of me, in all areas of my life, and I have to concertedly stop and nurture myself or I can get very burned out. When I am in this role I will give (from a false should place) until I am utterly depleted. I remember when I was a young mother I could not even accept a massage that was given to me as a gift. Everyone's needs were greater than mine. I was more worried about how tired the massage therapist might be after a day of massages! How self-sacrificial was that!

The good mother role has no limits. She does not say no. She feels if only...she just loves enough everything will work out. She always tries to be unfailing good, sweet, and nurturing. This can irritate and annoy all the "children" around her, for everyone is a needy child when the Good Mother Archetype is in charge! When we start to come out of the good mother role and speak up and say "No!" suddenly realize we are broiling with stuffed down anger below our consciousness.

Last year I took a year of counseling training and I saw how over-nurturing I was to my daughter. I was doing too much for her and dis-empowering her.  I made a concerted effort to de-fuse from her and allow her to do more for herself. In doing so I was breaking a long line of good mother roles in my family. The good mother/good daughter relationship is extremely inauthentic. My 13 year old daughter rebelled angrily when I stopped being continually concerned, caring and loving even when I was seething with anger underneath. I set limits and stuck to them and energetically I just tried to drop the role and let her find her way. As a backlash she told me she wanted to go live with her Dad and still I stepped back and allowed her to fumble and make her own choices.

The good mother role dies hard however and even though I have a more honest and authentic relationship with my daughter, I notice my energy draining away frequently in other areas of my life such as in my job and in my creative work. I still give and do too much from a mental place. I am taking steps to be aware and step back into core connection and nurturing. Whenever I push too hard to give I can feel my energy forcing and straining itself forward into life. This is what I would call the good mother energy of trying too inauthentically hard. Whenever I feel that forcing I remind myself that only my ego-roles require this false forcing and I step back inside and nurture my core connection to myself.

Self-Love

After I did this spontaneous collage I reflected on how a good mother would love her children unconditionally. This kind of love is unending and it echos and resonates infinitely in our souls like the corridors upon corridors in the collage. This feeling of utter peace - self-embracing - I am perfect as I am - self-love is actually something most of us experience quite rarely.

Something I have been learning about self-love is that I cannot love a person more than they love themselves. One of my favorite spiritual writers F. Aster Barnwell wrote something that I have been pondering for years.

"When we talk about God dwelling within, it is in the form of each individual's self-love. For one to love the God in another is more than loving what is noble and upright in that person...to truly love someone we must love that person's self-love. And this is not always easy"

My understanding of what he writes about is that we can contact the God in someone to the degree that they love themselves. We can only love them to their level of self-love. And this in itself is a profoundly loving act. It is to say, "I honor your human journey...it brought you to where you are now and that is perfect." To love someone at their level of self-love simply says I love and meet you here....you are whole and right just where you are. Trying to love them "more" than they love themselves is in effect an act of violence towards them because it is our ego's attempt to heal or fix or change them.

I am also revisiting the question of how much love do I let in? Do I love myself as a good mother unconditionally loves her children? Years ago after my divorce I went to see an eclectic counselor in the small mountain town I lived in. She was an advocate of self-love and each and everyday she would write out "Good Mother Messages" as part of her morning routine before getting ready for work.

I still had layers and layers of self-acceptance to work on and at the time her practice seemed simplistic to me. Now I revisit her path with reverence and I realize that with deep focus on these messages I am transforming myself from within. It is interesting to contemplate that when we do not have the feeling tone of self-love within we cannot accept love and support and bonding from other people. Yet even as we cannot hold and accept love from others, an ever unfulfilled inner child part of us is forever looking on the outside of ourselves - to our loved ones, our coworkers, our friends and even our own children to love and validate us.

Jack Lee Rosenberg, founder of Integrated Body Psychotherapy and author of Body, Self and Soul speaks of all the various feeling tones that we need to feel utter self-love. He calls them "Good Mother Messages". Read them over and see which ones you feel complete with and which messages you feel you are missing. If you meditate regularly on the unique feeling tone of each message you will likely notice a considerable ability to let more love into your life....yet not unconsciously need or expect it from others.

Good Mother Messages

1.) I want you.

2.) I love you.

3.) I’ll take care of you.

4.) You can trust me.

5.) I’ll be there for you: I’ll be there for you even when you die.

6.) It’s not what you do but who you are that I love.

7.) You are special to me.

8.) I love you and I give you permission to be different from me.

9.) Sometimes I will tell you “no” and that is because I love you.

10.) My love will make you well.

11.) I see you and I hear you.

12.) You can trust your inner voice.

13.) You don’t have to be afraid anymore

Bonding

"The highest human goal - whether we call it wisdom or enlightenment - consists in being able to look at everything and realize it is perfectly fine as it is. This is what is meant by true self-knowledge. So long as there is anything that still disturbs us, so long as there is anything that we feel needs changing, we have not attained self-knowledge."  -Thorwald Dethlefsen

Sometimes a window opens and suddenly I see my life from a wider experience and I feel as though I have been living in a small box before. Recently I had some insights about bonding and connection that I have not understood before. It feels like a flowering...like a blessed opening into another world of richness and possibility.

Let me explain...I have always prided myself on gaining a great deal of outer experience. It is what I have viewed up until now as meaningful. I am a doer and a seeker and an "accomplisher". I for example have prided myself on not ever staying at a job for more than a year. I have always felt that I must on a mental level be always learning and growing and stimulating my mind.

As I passed the two year mark at my current job this past February...I began to get "itchy" and irritated and restless. Time to move on! To grow! To travel "forward". As conflicts arose at work, I used those as my "reasons" to want to move on.

Recently as my partner Ondrea has been contemplating surgery I began to consider my level of commitment to her and to all of my life. I realized that I have a tremendous fear of loss and do not let myself get too close to people. I have never really learned how to bond deeply with others from an authentic place. I usually let people see my "good side" and then when I need to get more honest in order for the relationship to grow and flourish...I try to move on.

Chuck Spezzano has such an incredible description of commitment. It has given me deep pause to reconsider my life.

He writes, " Fear of commitment comes ultimately from the belief that we are not good enough, and from the belief that neither we nor anyone possesses enough value for continuous attention."

In the light of this, I am reexamining all of my connections to friends and family. I ask myself...at one point do I, or have I...wanted to break off from connection from people in my life? What in them makes me uncomfortable in myself? What is it that I do I not want to accept in them and in myself in my connection with them?

In this way relationship is truly the greatest fire of inner purification. If I can't stand someone, I know I have a disowned and repressed part to accept in myself. It offers me no growth to simply "tolerate" someone's negativity and inwardly feel better than them. If I am feeling superior to others negative qualities I am not transforming the very same darkness in myself. Consider that we do not come into contact with and react to anyone that does not mirror us in some way. Even if we do not act out negatively if we are judging someone at all...we will have at least some small similar tendency or impulse inside that we continuously quash and deny and disown .

As I realize this I am looking at how comfortable I feel to express myself and bond in all of my relationships. I realize in a very young place in myself that often I do not feel worthy of  continuous attention from others. I think..."What if they discover this out about me...or that...they will not like/love me anymore." I get to a point in my relationships where I am afraid to show more dimensions of myself and then I unconsciously feel bored with the relationship and then mistakenly want to move on or withdraw.

As I get older and more mature in my outlook I realize that I want to go deeper with my life and my relationships as they are. I am no longer so sure about my impulse to pick up and move move houses or change jobs or end friendships. I am finding a new longing to root...to stay right where I am even if it feels uncomfortable at times. The more I listen and pay attention to my life and all of my relationships the more I am astounded at how the depth of connection is endless and always profoundly revealing more and more. There is no end to the connection process...it just deepens and grows richer with time!

I am reflecting further on Chuck Spezzanos ideas on commitment:

"What you give up in breadth of experience, you immediately make up for the height and depths of your committed relationship(s), and in the meaning it brings to your life."

Vulnerability

Sometimes my drawings haunt me and I do not know how to pay attention to them, but when I fully experience the feeling they convey I go back into my journal with gratitude to my unconscious mind for expressing my inner dilemma so clearly. This drawing was done almost two years ago and I have never really owned it.

Often we get stuck in emotional patterns so old and so deep it can feel difficult to understand that we see our lives through a pair of glasses formed in childhood. If we are to uncover these patterns we need to make time to be vulnerable and let our vulnerable parts speak and be heard.

Vulnerability is a scary thing. Who wants to admit they feel frightened or in pain. We fear if we let ourselves be vulnerable we will be taken over by emotion and will never climb out. The truth is when we let ourselves be vulnerable the pain does intensify and peak almost like a volcano erupting but it is the only way to get to the other-side. If we do not take time to feel it will descend into the body into an illness and if it is further untended the illness will become pathology and dis-ease.

This drawing speaks of my pattern to push my way through my days into a vortex of busyness and competence. The mountains speak to me of my desire to "heighten", to continuously elevate my thoughts and actions to a spiritual peak. The figure is flying. She is not grounded in any way in everyday life. She is focused on a self-created future. I feel tenderness for this flying figure. She is trying so hard to be superwoman!

What pulls my attention in the drawing is the young child behind bars. I can easily feel in jail to my primary competent, success oriented self these days. My creative, more sensitive parts feel rebellious against all my self-imposed rules and success/improvement practices. This drawing tells me there is much more to me than how much I can efficiently accomplish in a day. I could call this competent, efficient self my mask because it does not allow my full range of vulnerable feelings into my experience.

We all have a social mask we present to the world but if this is the only part we live in we can easily feel hollow inside, empty of depth and meaning. We all have a creative self that lives very close to our souls. Our sensitive, vulnerable parts of self are right there below the surface concerns and survival activities of life and often they will express themselves through spontaneous imagery. Our competent survival masks miss out on true connection to our souls because they are designed to protect us from our fears, insecurities and discomforting feelings.

Our survival masks were designed in childhood and they hold unique messages of distrust. Allowing each dimension of ourselves full expression reveals that there is far more to each one of us that meets the eye. Expressive creativity invites us into profound self-acceptance allows every part of ourselves a voice. In each voice, even the negative ones there is a gift and a purpose.

With the "enforced vulnerability" of a bad cold recently I lay awake at night in pain. Too sick to collage or paint or write, I realized that I needed to give my vulnerability a voice and Ondrea sat quietly listening as I did. Silent witnessing of a trusted other is perhaps the most sacred of acts. I realize that I create distance from others when I keep stuffing down my vulnerability. After I shared my fears about my life right now I felt bathed in light. Suddenly life felt open again and filled with new possibilities.

Freedom

Freedom is very much in my energy field and thoughts these days. There is something within me that wants more freedom, more honesty, more self-expression. I think sometimes when we long to be more authentic we can feel angry and rebellious. I have been feeling angry lately...wanting to burst out of my rut of regularity and consistency.

I seem to be ignoring my lists of late and relaxing instead. I have been wanting to shake up my schedules and to do lists. I feel too good, too dutiful and too regular these days. I am boring myself by not taking risks in my life and my relationships of late. I long to be naughty! This is an old urge for me. I started smoking when I was in my teens because it felt bad and rebellious. As a teen I was tired of being so well behaved and sweet and good! I longed to express myself.

I don't smoke anymore but recently Ondrea and I went searching for some "engagement biker boots". We are going to get married sometime next year and we laughed delightedly at how inappropriate it would feel...two women getting married in biker boots no less.

We both attend a counseling weekend last year were we were assigned our alter ego's. Both of us were assigned to be biker types at our alter ego weekends. Good choices for both of us...we are each rather impeccable in many regards. We both present as very appropriate, sensitive to others and quite disciplined in our purposes. To show up as inappropriate, free, loud, expressive and totally self-accepting in our own vulgarity was freeing to say the least.

Mostly I am tired of my own underground self-limiting thoughts. I can feel they are burbling underneath my consciousness because as I step forward into deeper commitment with my partner my body feels heavy and tired and sore these days. I am hitting a wall...as I try to step into fresh being. I started writing again...the kind of daily 3 page spilling that is self-honest...holding nothing back. I come back to this form of writing again and again when I want to make a change. Funny how we all crave stability and security and freedom from fear but when we have it, new things long to spill forth.

My friend Gabriele posted up this quote recently and in it I find a wild freedom since I tend to hold to daily practices and the regularity of my creative disciplines in every regard.

“I pursue no objectives, no system, no tendency; I have no program, no style, no direction, I have no time for specialized concerns, working themes, or variations that lead to mastery. I steer clear of definitions. I don’t know what I want. I am inconsistent, non-committal, passive: I like the indefinite, the boundless; I like continual uncertainty. Other qualities may be conducive to achievement, publicity, success; but they are all outworn - as outworn as ideologies, opinions, concepts, and names of things. Now that there are no priests or philosophers left, artists are the most important people in the world. That is the only thing that interests me.” - Gerhard Richter

Commitment

I have long realized that honesty makes me whole. Each insight I share builds on my commitment to express the next. I am forever being called to be more honest in my life. My body rebels when I am not.

When we are not in touch with our deeper selves it is easy to tell lies to ourselves and others. Revisiting the birth of my daughter in a more truthful way recently has led to a deeper  uncovering. The cleansing of hidden darkness around my past marriage is happening...you know the yucky pockets of fear and shame and mistrust that we all have. It makes us feel on a hidden level, sticky, unclean and undeserving of good things.

I have never liked this collage to the left but it tells the story of cleansing old darkness and there is a promise of freedom. We all have aspects of ourselves that need to be brought into the light. Look at the dandelion getting ready to seed...a weed to be sure...but a cleansing weed. This week I had a strange cleansing/allergic reaction, unlike anything I have ever experienced on my body. Red, itchy spots on my back mostly. The doctor assured me it was not contagious. Louse L. Hay calls skin breakouts "little mounds of fear".

As Ondrea is going in for major surgery next month, I fear making a deep commitment to love my sweet partner all the way. I have always maintained quite a separate stance since we got together in the name of being an independent, passionate artist. I have had to look at how much time I spend alone and whether it is good for our relationship. I ask myself how deeply committed I have been in our 12 years together. To trust love that unreservedly without an undefended heart feels challenging for me. There is always some reservations, some defenses, some mistrust, some holding back that arises from my past. 

I went straight from a difficult marriage with my daughter's father into a relationship with Ondrea. I brought with me a lot of baggage and a two year old child to boot. I have recently been remembering myself as a young idealistic teenager in my marriage...so believing in love...so wanting to deny and bury the hard parts. I committed to my first marriage from blind naivete. I wanted a place to hide away from my family so I could find myself and I wanted to be taken care of while I was doing it.

As my first marriage got harder, I wrapped my life picture in a pretty package but there were parts that went underground. As I buried each lie, each inconsistency, the layers of mistrust began to build up. I participated in a great deal of difficulty in my marriage that I never shared with my family but instead I took it straight into my relationship with Ondrea.

And so what was unhealed in the past became the wounds between us. Lately I have been feeling the deep willingness to commit to Ondrea from a mature place and as we move closer the areas that I have not exposed to the light seem to be crowding into my awareness.  Areas where I mistrust the love and goodness in myself are coming up to be let go of.

I should know now that I must take time to feel my most difficult feelings all the way to completion...but I have not wanted to. I want my daughter to have a good story about her parents but in doing so I stay in my own bubble of denial. And so lately I have been pushy with myself about staying positive... until I became an itchy, irritable mess and had to stay home and look at my feelings.

As I let it all well up and no longer place my wounds between us I find my commitment to Ondrea emerges naturally as does my trust in myself. We are experiencing the delight that we experienced when we were first together. The kind of laughing, crazy fun that has us singing at the top of our lungs as we drive down the highway.

Ondrea and I have great beginnings. We have known each other since childhood. Our mother's were sorority sisters. We have a history of shared delight and deep connection. While I was following a more conventional, married path in my twenties, Ondrea was traveling and playing music all over Europe. When our lives converged after the birth of my daughter we found we had much more in common than we thought. We experience a creative freedom together...we found we could express anything to each other. We share a real destiny and a passion that has led me to question every speck of mistrust I have believed in. It has had me believing in love and willing to heal.

True Giving

After a visit to see her father my 13 year old daughter said with a slightly accusing tone, "Mom why have you not told me you nearly died giving birth to me?" She had recently heard her dad's rendition of her birth and was curious as to why I had always played down the circumstances of her coming into the world.

I sheepishly said, "Well I do not remember traveling towards the light or anything." I did however go unconscious for an hour right after she was delivered. I had to undergo emergency surgery after Hadley was born because the birth cord detached from the placenta and I began to hemorrhage severely. All I remember was waking up in a birthing room to see the floor awash with my own blood and worried faces. My birthing nurse who had stayed way past her shift and the many doctors and nurses let up a great cheer when I said, "Where is my baby? I want to hold her!"

Psychologist Chuck Spezzano says that when we have a death urge we have a deep conflict within that we fear we cannot resolve. As I have reflected back on my daughter's birth I can see that I feared that I would not have enough love inside to give to my baby. I felt empty and unknown to myself at the time. I was unconsciously feeling very conflicted about being a mother and went into labor feeling weak from a vociferous cold. My white blood cell count was alarmingly low.

I feared motherhood. I was trying to "find myself"  and at the time was desperately reading self-help books on how to be a good parent before giving birth. I felt unsupported in my life.  I felt like a chameleon, molding myself to others wishes and expectations.  I had not yet learned how to support my own self-expression. Because I did not understand my own unique truth, I felt like everyone was trying to control me and that I was letting them. My marriage at the time was distant, yet I felt very dependent on my husband. I also felt very fused and undifferentiated from my mother. I had no idea who I really was or how to truly speak up for my own ideas and opinions. I viewed giving to others as a drain on my energy. Because I did not know myself, my giving felt like a giving to get approval - a sacrifice. I felt incapable of truly giving to a child.

I am certain that somewhere in that dark hour I made a decision that there where plans for me to continue living. When they told me later they feared I would not make it I did not believe them and put it out of my mind. When I awoke all I can recall is that I felt an absolute joy and welcoming. I asked for my baby. Her dad, ashen, arose from the furthest corner of the room and brought her to me.

The night after my post-birthing surgery an angel walked into my room. A Scottish nurse gently clucked around me to change my dressing in the dark. I felt as helpless as a baby. I was in a completely surrendered state as she gave so compassionately. The day I gave birth, two hospitals merged and the rooms were packed to overflowing. My kind nurse was tending to 28 women who had given birth that day. When she bustled in her air was uncomplaining and full of energy and light. She was unresistant to her circumstances and fully up to the task. Her heart seemed overflowing and endless. Perhaps we exchanged ten words or less. I thanked her many times with tears in my eyes and then I never saw her again. It is amazing what an influence this unknown woman had on my life. She gave me an energetic blueprint for what true giving felt like and I am forever grateful.

In my work with the elderly I often remember that Scottish nurse and sometimes I can bring myself into such a deep state of giving that I become enlarged by the extension of my heartful energy. When I am in this state there is no drain like I once feared but rather a feeling of complete fulfillment where I forget my smaller desires and am fully participating in the reality of the moment as it is presenting itself. This feeling of inner richness reflects the universal law of "That which supports life is supported by life."

Consider this passage by Joseph Goldsmith:
"All the good necessary to our welfare will be supplied to us in greater and greater abundance than we can accept when we give up the desire to get, achieve, or accomplish, and come more into the consciousness of desiring only to fulfill our destiny on earth. We are part of a divine plan. We are Consciousness fulfilling itself in and expressing Itself in an individual way, and if we will learn to keep our thought away from ourselves and from the fear that we will be without health or income or health, and let God fulfill It's destiny through us, we will really find all things added to us."

This does not mean that we do not have a vision for our lives but that we let go of the endless, pointless wanting that can easily occupy our days. I have not realized until recently how much of my day I spend wishing for my life to be different.  I know what it feels like to assertively want to "get" something. There is a longing or a wanting in my belly and I am usually pulled out of the center of my body and feel my energy lunging towards something outside of myself. It sneaks up on me in subtle ways but there is always an undertone of "I am not there yet" or "This is not it" or "This is not good enough yet." The ego mind is always wanting things to be different and prefers to argue with reality. As we grow in spirit it is important to surrender more and more control. To move into the realms of the soul we must be in harmony with the reality that is inviting us to participate in each moment. This means that whatever is happening is not for us to judge. It is always perfect in a higher way that we may not consciously understand.

I have been applying this understanding of the perfection of reality to my daily life and have been surprised at how it has altered my days. Recently at work we have had to quarantine the residents to their rooms because a violent flu was spreading through the center. I was told not to run my art program but instead to spend the day going from room to room visiting. Initially I feared long days and immense boredom and would normally feel a good amount of resistance.

As I remembered however to "forget myself" I found myself in a state of deep receptivity. By the time I went on my lunch hour walk I was filled with an uncommon fulfillment in my soul. I felt so different I was startled. To long for nothing and feel completely fulfilled with my life surprised me. Usually as I walk through neighborhoods I long for things and it impels me towards all kinds of actions. I love good architecture and I start writing a list in my head to manifest. "I want a front door like that and windows like that. I love that veranda. I long to own my own house..."  The longing builds and I become nothing but a yearning for something more. Interesting. I am starting to understand that we are only happy when we are loving and giving to life as it is.

Recieving

 I had an inspiring day yesterday. I met with a friend who is a textile artist to discuss the possibility of putting together a joint art show of her art quilts and my collages. We had sushi together and visited three possible gallery spaces.

We do not know each other really well yet on a personal level. I met her at a spiritual workshop three years ago and I recognized her heart energy as my own. "She gives the way I do" I remember thinking. Her heart is warm and nurturing. She has a strong mother energy. I felt she had known great pain and had survived it. I found out later that she is a breast cancer survivor and thriver. Her compassion is enormous and I immediately considered her an energetic mentor.

On an impulse she wrote me a while back and asked if I wanted to do and art show with her. On impulse I said yes. It felt like a good idea for both of us, both fiercely independent in our lives and artistic processes, to bond from a heart place and come together with a common goal. Ondrea said to me recently, "Shelley you are so independent you do not absorb what is given to you." And this is true. I am always doing, striving, giving from my mental will and only recently have I been allowing myself to rest and meditate and truly let the divine spirit nourish and replenish me.

I asked my friend, "Tell me...are you a good receiver?" and she replied, "No I am not." I shared how I am burnt out by trying to do everything by myself and that I want to take more emotional risks in my life to bond and share with others. We talked about how how our underused receiving muscle related to our level of abundance and fulfillment in the world, how it affected our relationships and our work. We saw how it kept us stuck in emotional patterns and ways of living. Both of us were feeling the need to take risks in our lives to receive more...more purpose, more love, fulfillment, meaning and abundance. Both of us expressed feeling bottled up...buttoned up like the lady in the portrait above.

Later in the afternoon we happened upon an art show at a local art center. A joint show between two women. One a textile artist and one a collage artist no less. A pefect syncronicity. It was a beautiful show. It inspired me immensely. I thought about my renewed commitment to bonding, to friendship, to mothering and most of all to my relationship with Ondrea. I can see where I have withdrawn from life out of fear of past hurts and pain. I thought about my need to do everything myself and how weary I have grown with that. I thought about much I long to include others in my plans, goals and experiences and when I do, people are so sweetly generous and helpful. It was a good day.

Unconditional Appreciation

I have been longing for adventure and outer change for quite some time now. In many ways, for most of my life, I have been frantically swimming around in a fishbowl in my mind - in old habits of looking for outer drama, excitement and change. From this mental place, everything looks like an opportunity to make an outer leap! For example if a conflict feels heavy at my current workplace of two years I think, "Oh...time to move on!" When our old house crumbles a little more and our basement floods I think, " Oh good, time to move!"

I feel an addictive thrill around outer moving and changing and rearranging. Formally all my vigorous creative practices have offered the illusion of change but I have ease up on those. Hence this winter period of my life has been marked by a feeling simple ordinariness with very little outer change. There is really nothing left to do but to attend to my inner depths. Since I am not nearly so manic about creating all day long I have been practicing the simple yes of embracing my life just as it is without resistance or judgment.

I have taken to meditating on each moment being perfect just as it is...because it is. This demands a kind of understanding and focus that is new for me. As I stop restlessly and continuously trying to change and create new forms, I am gaining a new appreciation for inner deepening without much outer change taking place. As I deepen into a kind of peace and love that is not dependent on outer conditions, I am realize that I have lived my life constantly wanting to change everything and this is what I have called my restless creative spirit. It has not fully dawned on me that ordinary life as it is unfolding in it's dailiness can have a kind of heightened magic to it. It is an inner shift that I have not previously discovered because I am always trying to create intensity.

Certainly a good bout of creative intensity is needed to open up blocks and limitations but there comes a time for appreciation, rest and reflection.  I am feeling drawn to meditation and find I can sustain periods of quietly focusing on the love in my heart without thought for longer and longer periods of time. I used to promptly fall asleep in meditation and it was always something I forced myself to do. Now I crave such sacred quiet time and I emerge feeling balanced and radiant. I feel like I am purifying my heart and that it has been my constant creative restlessness that has been holding me back. As I spiritually move and travel on the inside of my personal landscape, I have  grown into a new level of unconditional appreciation for my surrounding circumstances. I continually ask myself the question..."What if I stop trying to change things?" What if I just observe, listen, participate and appreciate what is?"

Inner activity is the most important thing and in realizing this we are blessed by everything that happens. I notice acutely now how often I feel dissatisfied and disgruntled and I quickly know I am not deepened enough to see life with spiritual eyes or as Rilke would say not poet enough to draw forth life's riches. The only thing that needs to be searched for is the full embrace and appreciation of each moment. It is only then that life starts to speak!

I have always been in such a hurry for things to be different but I seem to be understanding that rooting deep within is preparing me for something that will come when it is ready to come. Since my life recently has become quieter, not so wildly creatively demonstrative I am simply deepening into whatever is before me. With this shift comes the understanding that life is really quite subtle...and beautiful in whatever way it is showing up.

What I am learning is to love this life...as it is...without trying to over-adorn it, or overlay too many judgments and expectations over it. I am finally understanding that outer change does not always imply inner improvement. As I grow to embrace each moment as it is - in it's own perfection I grow quieter inside.

It is hard to describe these new inner movements. It is a kind of appreciation for life at a whole new level that I have never experienced before. In an ordinary day it catches me by grace in a sunlit window and as I look around there is a sacred glow around everything that stills me and awes me. It sometimes comes upon me when I swim or quietly walk - a feeling of immense love welling up unbidden from the depths of my heart. It is an inner movement that asks for nothing on the outside to be different.

Creative Essence

We all have a personality that is based on our childhood and the experiences that shape us. Usually we live in this box of limitations and self-protective mechanisms for our entire lives without even realizing it. It is what spiritual teachers call the "conditioned mind".

It is hard to even know that we have a much larger, grand, magnificent self behind our everyday thoughts. This grand self is our unique flavor of love that is meant to be expressed in the world. I have caught glimpses of people's essence as it awakens from it's spiritual slumber at creativity workshops and in my daily life. As I recover more of my own essence self I am able to see it in others and it is always surprising to me. Often what I see is that someone's essence is quite different than what they express on a daily basis.

If you wonder who you might be in your greater essence consider who you would be if you felt no fear. I discovered the unique tone of my "larger self" when my daughter was a baby. I had a traumatic birthing during which I almost died. During that time my marriage also ended abruptly and I underwent a time of personal crisis when five close members of my family died suddenly within the period of about a year. That multifaceted crisis in my life temporarily intensified my awareness of a deeper unfolding and opened up a window to a self that was infinitely larger than my regular everyday self.

That period of my life marked an explosion of spontaneous creativity. I opened up to a relationship with a woman and fell passionately in love with my partner Ondrea of 12 years. I had prophetic dreams during that time.  I wrote incredible visionary poetry that I have never been able to repeat since. I painted stunning intuitive paintings in my basement all night. I hardly slept. I felt absolutely no fear. I trusted life to unfold and it did. Everything just came to me as it needed to. Love, support, money. I did not struggle. Then after a few months, my old conditioned mind began to seep in and I lost my free flowing uninhibited, visionary creativity. I remember feeling desperate as my higher reality began to slip away. And slip away it did. Every conditioned fear and doubt that was crystallized in my mind that blocked my access to my divine self came up for clearing - and the clearing is still ongoing.

I crashed into an ordinariness that I could not fully accept anymore and thus began the excavating, the releasing, and the teaching of myself how to come back to my fullest possibilities. I found spontaneous collage to be a good way to easily bypass my ordinary mind. It helped me open up to possibilities beyond the everyday and provided a small daily door into my previous visionary state.

The richness of a spontaneously creative life begins when we can let go of most of our thinking. We cannot listen to the creative abundance of life through our regular mind. We have to move into the feeling sense of the heart and when we do we gain little insights into the spiritual secrets of life. Most of us do not fully realize that there is an entire spiritual world unfolding beneath our habitual thoughts.

When we fall into a state of spontaneous creativity we have to be willing to no longer recognize ourselves. Our conditioned minds want to control everything. Most thinking is a reaction, a defense, a protection, a desire. Our everyday minds most often work against life. Our rigid, habitual thinking runs a personal interference pattern against the greater unfolding that is happening at all times. Our unconditioned mind however is behind our regular thinking. Our quiet mind is simply listening to the flow of life and is spontaneously following our rightful path and purpose with innate wisdom. We need to find ways to let go of our regular ways of thinking so that we can participate in life creatively and spontaneously. Who we are in our greatness often bears little resemblance to who we have been.

Letting Go of the Past

I went for a wonderful visit with my brother this weekend. It was his 40th birthday. It was a healing visit for me. I spent three days with him, his wife and his two girls and baby boy.

We have had so much strife in our family in the past - a lot of anxiety in our family - many untimely deaths - our youngest brother committed suicide several years ago. Our family has coped with it's anxiety with distancing and cutting off from each other, sometimes for years.

I have seen my brother maybe 3 times in the last 10 years. I collaged this photo for him. It is my favorite photo of us as children. It reminds me of a time when we were innocent and free and unencumbered with heartbreak and loss.

Our time together felt simple and free for me. Eating together, going on drives with the children, getting to know his wife better, embracing his family life and feeling into what fun and celebration they have in their family.

It felt incredible for me to be present for my brother's children on this visit. We did an art show together and I was struck with this intuitive drawing that I did during one of our kitchen table art sessions. To me this figure looks lit up on the inside, clean and open, and seeing life with love again. The fear is gone. Behind the figure is the past...dead. Over. She looks towards what is growing and beautiful and that is what I felt like with my brother and his wife's children - I was marveling at these fresh young lives, so innocent and open to life. It inspired me.

My little niece rushed to get me before the art show. "Aunt Shelley," she said, "You forgot to put powers coming out of her hands. I drew them in and asked her to name the drawing. It is entitled, "I'm spraying powers on you." Good title don't you think?

The Body Alive

These days I have been getting profound glimpses beyond my conditioned mind and into the passionate intelligence of my body. After years of self-study and understanding my personal psychology I know now that when I feel anxious, I have a feeling coming up to be healed and let go of. We store so much of our past within our bodies - a lifetime of experience. When we disassociate from the emotional and physical pain in our bodies, we store away feelings and that area of our body freezes and numbs. If we have a great deal of stored pain like most of us do, we inevitably cut of from a connection to our bodies and live our lives solely in our heads. When we have an uncomfortable feeling within, it is easy to suddenly feel like something in our external life is "wrong" and our thoughts start racing about how we can control and change everything around us so as to feel better.

Much of my doing, accomplishments and attendant anxiety have been about trying to avoid uncomfortable feelings within myself. I cannot even fathom the sheer volume of art I have created to attempt to heal and cleanse the stored emotions of forty years. Much of my healing work has been done privately within my journals, alone, but that is changing. I recently moved my tiny private art studio into a larger more open, communal space within our house. I pulled the art table out from the wall and placed chairs all around to invite group creativity and communion with others. My art studio used to be my escape from the world and my haven for independently working out my feelings. My expressive journals are many. They are outpourings of expression, of expansion, of hope, of limitation, and of confusion. Hundreds of expressive drawings, paintings and collages fill the pages. I decided to keep them all and bought a new bookshelf to house them to honor this expressive passage. But people are becoming my journals now. My voice is becoming the pen.

As I open and cleanse out my past conditioning and fears, my urge to connect with others intensifies. Relationship with others no longer drains or tires me. I am treasuring being more open and connected to others. I am able to hold wider and wider ranges of experience and can show up fully committed in a wide variety of experiences that would have felt difficult for me just a few years ago. As I open, I notice that wherever I go people are more drawn to connect to me because I hold more of an open space towards them. Clearer now, there is more room in my being for connection. I feel so much more love for all that I experience. People seem infinitely beautiful to me - multi-layered and rich.

As my communion with life intensifies Ondrea and I are finding ourselves back to the original passion and connection we experienced when we first got together. We laughed together this morning, "Where have we been the last twelve years?"  We now know the landscape of our limitations intimately and we are going beyond them. We have devoted our lives to going beyond drama, negativity and pain but the passage has been long, deep and intense.

As I reach new levels of intimacy with my partner, new heights of feeling good in my friendships, and more passion in my everyday life, there seems to be be another cleansing after every new level of joy that is reached. After becoming closer with my partner Ondrea this week for example I noticed that the next day I felt vulnerable and teary without knowing why. I could feel myself withdrawing and isolating. My heart ached and I felt afraid. It is curious to notice that when I am feeling an uncomfortable feeling I begin to feel dissatisfied with everything and everyone. I begin to "mentalize" about what is wrong. My life feels less than good enough and sometimes it all seems wrong. It is easy to start a disagreement or judge others from this place. I noticed this feeling quickly this time and moved into my heart. By the time the next morning came around I was able to cry with Ondrea and we were able to move forward into another level of connection.

Pain is released in layers I have found. Chuck Spezzano speaks to this so eloquently. He writes, "By the time we get to independence, we have dissociated thousands upon thousands of feelings. Dissociation is the counterpart to hysteria. Although hysteria seems to feel a lot of feelings, it still avoids the true that would move us forward. Our willingness to be aware and experience our true feelings leads us out of deadness and into partnership. By our willingness to feel our true feelings we can then feel joy and receive." 

What I notice about this move towards relationship with others is that I only do what needs to be done, in its proper time and it gets done beautifully. My prime objective these days is towards relaxation first, pleasure, passion, meditation, exercise, and listening to and moving to music take a priority. Then everything I need to get done gets finished quickly from intuition, higher intelligence and expanded creativity. Once old feelings are cleared out of the body, passion and the body can come first. When I am living from my body the creative intelligence seems to happen on its own and everything flows. Once the body has told it's stories of the past it is free to engage and commit to each moment as it reveals itself and the true mystery of living is born.

Healing Conflict Within

As life unfolds it is healing us continuously and the more we are in connection with others, the more we evolve. I used to think that my relationships should be all good, nice and smooth to be worth my time and attention. In my family growing up, conflicts were frowned upon. We were encouraged to agree with each other and expressing differences felt uncomfortable for me. It has taken me a while to learn how to feel more comfortable with differences.

These days I seem to be committing to meeting conflict in my own mind - in my home, in my family, in my workplace in a more introspective and healing way. When I can embrace and meet deeper levels of conflict in my life then I am more fully committed to those I love. Avoiding conflict in my life has had me with one foot in the door and one foot out of the door of full engagement in my relationships for as long as I can remember.

There is, I have found a higher purpose and a gift in every conflict. The stronger we get the more we are capable of handling conflict without cutting off from others. The reason we walk away from conflict is that we are afraid to truly and deeply look within. We bury things we do not like about ourselves and project them onto others and the fight begins. This is an exact truth that I can verify in my every day life. I always find that if I am bothered by someone, I need only to look for a denied aspect of myself. If I judge someone for not being good enough in some way for example, I actually believe that I am not good enough in some hidden place in myself.

When we avoid conflict, we avoid true relationship. In my first marriage to my daughter's father we never fought. Everyone thought we had a perfect relationship. If we felt the anxiety of conflict arising we just distanced until our couple-hood eventually died from lack of communication. When I got together with my partner Ondrea our relationship felt hard after the initial honeymoon period. She taught me how to communicate and together as a couple no stone was left unturned. I was not used to healing the conflicts in my mind each and every day or in supporting another to do so, but it has felt like a labor of love. People did not understand the nature of our relationship in the beginning. We fought in a fiery and passionate way. But as my daughter always has said, "I am never worried when you two argue Mom because you always work it out!" We hash out everything until we could come to a mutual respect for our differences and to a celebration of our sameness.

Any conflict outside of us is an expression of a conflict within but the first step to understanding this is to risk engaging in conflict with others. I remember when we first got together Ondrea and her mother had a fight - a loud, vociferous, swearing fight. I sat cowering upstairs in our bedroom, secretly feeling thrilled at how expressive they were. After a time their voices calmed and they came to an understanding. My heart felt expanded by their process. I wished I could fight like that with my own mother. We were always so careful with each other when I was growing up, carefully distancing when things got too anxious. When we disagreed even slightly, we retreated to our own corners to heal and lick our own individual wounds and then later pretended that there was nothing between us. We never really got around to sharing and accepting our differences in my younger years. It often seemed easier to quietly blame each other than to look within.

Daily we must look within to see our part in our outer conflicts. It is easy to look outside for the cause. But nobody can make us feel anything that we were not already feeling on some level inside of ourselves. The minute we are hurt, we are saying, "You caused this! You are not doing what I want!" Our hurt feelings are really a form of a tantrum. We have this idea of how others should act so that we can feel happy. There is a delicious distracting drama in emotionalism and conflict that is seductive. Projection onto others offers a release from bottled up feelings. Outer conflict can take what feels like a safe and careful life with old feelings carefully and neatly tucked away, into a whole new level of intensity and melodrama that actually harms others if we deny our part. If we stay stuck in blame, resentment and projection we can get stuck and we can progressively destroy our relationships and our lives.

Blame and judgment causes relationships to wither up and separate. The minute we judge another, the separation is palpable and conflicts begin to occur in our outer lives. What I have learned is that when I am emotionally triggered and blaming of another I have a conflict in my own mind that I have not yet resolved. Ultimately there is never anything to fault anyone for because given their inner and outer circumstances they are doing the best they can. Life is easier when we know that we can never control or change another person's frame of reference. That leaves looking within during every emotional upset. It feels like fierce medicine to take in everything on the outside as a part of myself even life does not seem fair. I must continually remind myself that if I am triggered and angry, there is always something within my own mind and heart to heal.

Much inner work can be done during times of conflict. We can examine what we believe about ourselves and ask, "Is this true?" Resentments and emotional conflicts rarely have much to do with the present moment. Most negativity that gets projected into conflict is from past feelings that we were afraid to feel until completion. We create and draw present experiences to ourselves in our present life to help us finish up with and heal old feelings. When we fully own the negative conflicts within we can open up a whole new door to compassion, communication and love.This is the gift of conflict.

Career as a Journey

I have to come to view my working life as a spiritual journey. Over 10 years ago I experienced a great deal of loss and betrayal in my family of origin and after years of exploring my mental creativity in the fields of interior design, sales and construction I found myself gravitating to toward the field of art as a healing medium. After all of my intense studies in psychology, art therapy and counseling who would know that I would discover such a deep interest in group dynamics in the workplace. What a place to grow!

Two years ago I began working full time in a large colorful, fully equipped art studio for veterans...who in Canada are all in their 80's and 90's now. The program however once was a Red Cross therapeutic, rehabilitation program for young vets returning from World War 2. I hear colorful stories from the "old days" from some of my co-workers who have worked in the program for 30 years. They used to have to wear starched blue nurses uniforms and they were called "art therapists". They had to stand at attention and they did the rounds with the doctors. It was like being in the army with strict rules and protocol.

By the time I entered the program, the rules had relaxed considerably mostly due to management who did not understand the program's objectives. This was fine by me. For the most part I like being my own soldier, moving through my day in an intuitive and independent way. If I get an urge to do something, I follow it and I am always met by fortuitous encounters along the way...a way to give here, listen there....someone would need a word, a touch, a gesture. What a gift. I have learned to listen deeply. The elderly are wise.

Group dynamics in a hospital union environment has been another matter. Learning to work with 10 diverse women in one room on a full time basis has been a profound learning experience. We as a group have had many conflicts and have experienced continual losses and gains in our bonding. Navigating others individual emotions and preferences in a graceful way has not always been easy for me. I have felt disheartened by the backstabbing and betrayals that continually happen in my workplace. I know this is reflective of betrayals that have happened within my own family and it is what I have needed to heal within myself. When people get scared of their own intense feelings they do crazy things. Communication where it is welcome is deeply helpful but in the end I have had to learn...finally...that the only way to change my world is to change myself. A wise elder at the center reminded me of this ..."Life is a mirror. If I do not like what I see...I can only change myself."

I too easily forget that everyone is a part of myself and in this way my working life is a spiritual journey. As I reflect on all of the conflicts in the art studio I see that I am part of it all...I have a part of myself who is mistrustful and alone, a part of myself that likes to be in charge and in control, a part of myself that likes to be bossy, a part that is gentle, a part that is unfailingly cheerful, a part that complains, a part that is afraid to communicate, a part that is compassionate....and on and on. When I see these parts in others and myself I am met by life as my mirror and I feel profoundly connected.

As I reflect on strict rules in the workplace and what they mean to me I both embrace and reject them. There is a certain need within rules to be told what to do from the outside instead of listening to inner guidance. I see a union environment as fulfilling the need to feel secure and taken care of in some way and in this way it keeps us small and emotionally young. I also respect the need for the stability of rules, and in many ways, experiencing and integrating the intense loss and deconstruction of my own family has led me to long for safety, structure...and frankly... parenting... in my work environment. Yet as I release and move through each challenge at work I see that I am growing up in the spiritual sense. When I arrived at my workplace 2 years ago I felt like perhaps the world was not as Albert Einstein said, "A friendly place". As I have learned to meet my own feelings deeply and release them I no longer feel so afraid.

Ultimately we play out our own stories in the workplace and this is what fascinates me the most. How do 10 women with 10 different stories interrelate? How does a team work or not work? I see how I have healed many parts of myself through my working life and for this I am grateful. When I walked into the art studio two years ago, I was from a family of origin that did not communicate with each other and out a of a real need, I have become more of a communicator with a real interest in group dynamics and bonding within the workplace. When you work full-time your co-workers become your family and the healing that is needed inevitably happens. It has to...and this is what I love most about financial imperatives...you have to show up and grow up if you are to earn a living gracefully. You have to face and deal with what is right in front of you....and inside of you at the same time.