Meditation

Stream Drawing with Young Adult Creators

Last night I taught stream drawing to a large group of young adults at Covenant House. I was so moved by not just their creative expressiveness, but the depth and insightful reflections they had based on their stream drawings. I was able to hear them explain profound and meaningful associations and emotions they had based on their imagery. I can’t say enough how wonderful this experience was, and how important it is for us to draw freely with open hearts and minds, and embrace one another while supporting the creative genius within ourselves and others.

Stream Drawings in Water Color Offer Up Surprises

Water Color Stream Drawing/ August 2019

I’ve been doing stream drawings (stream drawing is a drawing meditation technique I developed and you can see more at MAKING MARKS: Discover the Art of Intuitive Drawing/Simon and Schuster) with studio visitors and it is enlivening, relaxing and at times profound.  Playful, creative (our natural state of being, in essence!) presence at times springs forth wisdom, conscious awareness in the form of surprise and delight, and gives us the chance to see things in new, unexpected ways.  Book your stream drawing session time with me and let’s see where it takes us.

Passport to Wellness at Indigo!

Come join us at Indigo on Nov 18th at 3-6 pm EST. We are hosting a fun event to celebrate the many ways we can elevate our wellness and embody wellbeing. This event will be fun and interesting with such excellent practitioners to meet and learn about. Register on FB or contact Indigo Wellness at 404-370-1151.

I look forward to seeing you there!

Guilt is the Ego’s Way of Entrapping Us

Detail of a work in progress

Transitional times often are full of resistance due to negative emotions such as guilt. Guilt can be the first step in acknowledging responsibility for mistakes once made, yet guilt is also the ego’s successful way of entrapping us (ego does not like to let go of pain because it is one of the ways that it knows itself–the ego wants identifiers and pain and guilt do feed the ego-self which needs blame in order to hold others and self hostage–it is a control thing).

Often people will “guilt you” for not doing as they’d like you to do, or by reminding others where they/we fell short. And we often do that to those around us. Since none of us are perfect, the most kind people of all may be rendered excessively hurt by someone laying guilt upon them, and the one receiving the accusations may then disallow harmony as a way of self punishing. Forgiveness purifies all of this: we forgive ourselves, we forgive the accusers and we forgive our ego for trying to hold on to negative emotion. What if everyone said,”I’m sorry, I love you. You and I made and make mistakes, but we are only human”–wouldn’t that be great? Sometimes there is no way to resolve an issue except from within, which is to embrace forgiveness on our own terms, whether the people around us are able to do so or not. And they may have not even asked us for forgiveness. Do it anyway to set yourself free. And set yourself free again by not allowing others to guilt you into paralysis or self misery.

Don’t hold on to guilt, but grab forgiveness and see if you feel so wonderful you alight your path in the blink of an eye with tremendous love and joy.

Viktor Frankl’s Powerful Choice

Detail of a recent painting in progress/2018

“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.” Viktor Frankl

Viktor Frankl survived the brutality of the Holocaust by remaining present within his own mind and heart, by not giving away his attitude. “One’s attitude in any given set of circumstances,” can be that one element that allows a human being, even in the most dire of situations, to survive on his/her own terms.

Most of us don’t know what a bad day really, really is, but Frankl and millions more endured the unthinkable. Frankl’s living example demonstrates the power of choice; we do not have to think of ourselves as surrendering, but more so empowering ourselves to inwardly, fiercely keep our strength,   to “choose our own way.”

 

Spirit Painting Meditations

This is a recent Spirit Painting I was commissioned to create. These are very different from my other work (abstract and other figurative work) because I meditate while creating it for the person who commissioned it (or for their loved one). I paint what comes. It is a very surprising process for me as the painter but for the recipient, too. These are done for a mitzvah (read that as a “good deed”) and I charge next to nothing for them, but I feel strongly that I should make them available for anyone who might want one, which means the commission fee is very low. Check out others here on my site, under the Spirit Painting heading at the banner. And of course contact me via this site if you’d like one!

Being Creative Means Being Playful

This is an ink drawing (with colored pencil) from one of my many, many sketchbooks. Allowing for time to draw everyday in a playful way opens us up to our creative power and serves as a portal to the unexpected in the way of ideas, realizations and higher consciousness. Really, being playful while drawing does that? Yes, it does. The issue is most people don’t feel playful while drawing because they feel like the drawing has to be “good” and so they are listening to an inner critic who stops that process from unfolding. This is why I teach people to draw freely, a method I call “stream drawing”, a way of accessing stream of consciousness while drawing. It is very simple, and fun and well worth trying! For example, look at this stream drawing below. I saw in it a penguin w/ an egg, and colored it in (not shown). You might see something different–maybe it is a hummingbird hovering near a flower? Turning it around, there is many other ways to see this image. 

Epic Spring II: Our Choices and Destiny

Earth Changes Series/Pole Shift: Epic Spring II

This new painting in the series is currently at Art/Place Gallery in Fairfield, CT. In the meditative state I entered painting it, I felt that swell of momentum reminding me of great ocean waves. Even stepping just a few feet into the breaking waves, there is a power so tremendous, so epic. And when we are subjected to the tide, we succumb to it. We may play with it, but it is with the understanding that the force within each crashing arc of salt water, there is incomprehensible power. We in your physical form are but a moment of time upon a shore that raged thousands of years before we were present, and this same rising and falling, according to its attraction to the moon and the sun, will breathe in and breathe out long after we are all gone in our current form. White horses run toward us, crashing at our feet, as we stand in “the tide of time and light” as it says in the Siddur. Our time is upon us with each wave, our choices and destiny.

Time and Thought Are One

Detail of a painting in progress/Earth Changes Series

Listening to an Ekhart Tolle meditation, he spoke of the way we allow our thoughts to define our sense of self, which usually involves incompleteness: “I will be happy when…” etc. The future seems to hold everything we think would somehow make us okay, yet the future never arrives.

For a meditation, imagine your thoughts as one with time. Close your eyes and “be there”–be in and with whatever you love, whatever you like–in your thoughts. Don’t imagine yourself withheld from that which you desire or idealize. Embody it to bring the energy of it unto yourself now. We don’t have to give the illusion of future all our power.