After recently going through some deep and layered personal work, with a little help from my gifted light-worker friends, I came to see how stuck I was in my ideas about what my world-work is meant to be, and how distracted I was with all my TRYING. I so very much wanted to make the various strands of my art/teaching/consciousness business “successful”, well-attended, lucrative, helpful. I wanted to be in the world, making a difference, making beauty, changing consciousness. But my ideas about how I wanted to make that happen were rooted in the past—not necessarily a bad thing, but limiting. I was imagining my new events, products and promos into in the future, with a consciousness still in my past. I couldn’t see around the structures I’d built in my mind.
It felt like I needed to give it up, let go, let it all just be, and climb back into the studio and just make art. Let the art make itself through me. See what showed up. See what actually needs to be done through me…
Days into this new regime, as I was taking a break from a whole gang of new paintings, I realized something even worse, or better: I was still avoiding facing what I feared. I was stowing my fear down under everything else, acting like it wasn’t there, but feeling it well up and catch me when I wasn’t looking. I’d been making all these wonderful paintings—they are in progress now—but I hadn’t touched my fear yet.
FEAR. So I returned to one of my tried-and-true creative processes, an artgame I’ve pestered my students of all ages with for years and years: a process of touching what our emotional bodies know by making seemingly simple emotion paintings. I’ve done this myself so many times, and it never gets old—it is like peeling away the band-aid and looking at the wound—giving it air and love and attention.
I began to realize that before I had been able to allow myself to get brave enough to encounter my fear, I had first needed to slip back into a place of authenticity, creatively. I had worked for days with my familiar beloved geometric forms, I had painted on every single image that had been hanging around in my studio unfinished, I had started 5 or 6 new paintings which I’d sketched ideas for, I had played happily. And yet. The FEAR was there. The morbid “what ifs”…
So I finally started listening to the fear, feeling it in my emotional body, feeling its texture and color, listening to it, letting it get on the cloth in front of me. It was messy. Unexpected. Ragged. Dark, low energy, when I listened. Shot thru with hysterical brights and slashes. As I was mashing the painting up with dirt and debris, it curled in on itself, and I stepped back gasping. This felt totally true. That’s how my fear felt. So good to have encountered it, admitted it, given it form.
The three other emotion paintings that followed were quick and true as well:
COURAGE. This was what I needed to be able to face things… But the process of emo painting isn’t about making a picture of an emotion. It’s about BEING it, questioning it. So I had to look at: What is COURAGE for ME? Where is it in me? Am I courageous at all? Where I finally got to was this: it seemed that when I walked through a door, knowingly, into difficulty, that might be courage. And boy-o-boy, does FEAR walk with that! So the courage I need to be is whatever is my most wondrous, even Margaret-ish self—what does it feel like to face a known difficulty or hardship? I had to use my favorite shimmery blue, shot through with outward shining power. Because if I was walking into something scary, I wanted to be cloaked in the most wonderful colors possible.
DIVIDED/INDECISIVE followed. Torn, separated chunks of energy—the ideas or decisions can see each other, even hear each other, but they are separated by that scratchy messy barbed wire of “I can’t decide” “I don’t know which”.
Lastly: UNCONDITIONAL LOVE. Fierce, open, flowing, strong, free, soft, lit. This one needs more elaboration, but it’s a start, a beginning of touching the feeling consciously, creatively, not just in prayers at my altar.
So here they are, my four: from the left, FEAR, COURAGE, DIVIDED, LOVE. I hope you will join me in doing this exercise too. Again. And again. And again. I’m going to keep painting FEAR, and UNCONDITIONAL LOVE, AND SEE WHAT HAPPENS…
for a list of possible emotions to work with, and a step-by-step how-to, CLICK HERE