Inner Muse / Inner Critic

Muse

color

play

energy

romp

wings

time undone

beautiful heat

seeing with my third eye

animal guides

beauty and fun

Critic

blood shed

runaway rabid animal

barren heat
shadow

uncontrollable

can't get off the horse/ride

panicing

nuclear war; everything going to hell

lie on bed and and feel alone

shades without color

"it looks incocuous but it has deadly poison in its skin"

Looking at these, my thoughts have turned away from what I see (though that is important), to a more meaningful question, "how can I stay in muse mode?". Pondering that...

- meditation/dedicated spirtual practice

- energetic boundries with others

- encouraged curiosity

- belief in synchronicity

- time is just an illusion / need to stop worshiping time, on the flip, give time space

Family of Orgin, Part 1

This exercise was extremely hard for me. The initial mediation was very difficult: the energy shooting out of my body felt violent. I kept on having to open my eyes to make sure my head wasn't cocked at at 45 degree angle (what my energy was doing). It didn't matter that I was physically in a place of wholeness; it was very difficult to go back to the house on Sanchez Street and see my mom. I also pictured my dad, Julie, Oona and Summer to protect me

As I made them into sculptures, I calmed down a lot. It felt good to repurpose the angst an emotion in a physical form. As I talked to each piece it was very telling:

mom said - I hate myself. I don't know how to love outside myself fully. Learn to love inside so you can share it with the world.
I responded - Find your inner beauty. Everyone can see it. I can see it in me and you.

dad said - I travel to be multiple places. I tried to have flexible love and understanding for a woman who love you fiercely. I did it best I could.
I responded - I love you dad. I knew you did. I get angry sometimes, but I'm grateful for the gifts.

I left the exercise feeling...drained. And with a new found understanding of my parental relationships. And slightly confused that I still had work to do (after so many years of therapy!). I could really see how I have problems loving myself because it was never shown to be by a women how to do it. And I could see that I subconciously choose men who are not completely "here" because that is the love I am used to.

Carousel of Happiness

Doing a web search for "trickster imagery" lead me to a fun website. I can't help but share. I love the healing intention of this carousel and the beautiful animal/symbolic interpretation.
http://www.carouselofhappiness.org/flashcarousel/flash.html

The carousel has a marvelous rabbit (trickster) image, which initially brought me to the sight. In this class I keep on circling back to my internal dilemma of chaos vs order, organization vs creativity, and the reading on the trickster is no different; he seems to be little animal who darts in between different worlds. As The Lucky Find states, " trickster is the mythic embodiment of ambiguity an ambivalence, doubleness and duplicity, contradiction and paradox". I love that there is an archetype that plays with this contrast...if feels comforting that my inner struggle can be more playful, and reserved for the trickster inside of myself.

I see the trickster coming from the creative side and hopping over to the more structured calling "'Dare to be different!'" as in The Trickster writes, "'Hear and speak that which shatters tradition!'"

this thing called sacred, part two

The doing vs. being concept tugged at me for quite a while. The dichotomy was extremely apparent between my very planned day job, and my open artistic life. I like the contrast, but figuring out how to make the two fit puzzles me greatly. Hoping to get a better understanding of the process I decided to do my healing altar on time. As the "Stealing Fire" article noted, "to harness the healing power of a stealing fire story, we have do the work". I felt like if I worked through the concepts, or at very least honor them, I'd have a better understanding. I'd steal my own fire back.

Part of the embracing of my fire story is to accept that I like organization....and that's good. Almost embarrassed to admit, but I set my timer in 15 minute increments to get things done. This routine gives me the structure gives me the sense of freedom. It allows my mind to stop thinking about the time (that's the timer's job!), and rather to concentrate of what I want. What I want to heal myself from is the obsession of time, and specifically, the stress of thinking that I have limited time.

The central element on my altar is a broken stove timer; the idea was to make time stand still. To honor the pause in between seconds, to understand that it's about seeking the joy in the moment. The roses are the reminder to literally stop and smell them, and the Mexican flags are for celebrating wherever you are. The candles represent past, present and future; as an understanding that it's all one. And the stones are symbolic of eternal life.

My favorite element on the altar are the purple leaf/branches. To me this represents the underworld, and the ebb and flows of time. I will be adding in pomegranates tonight once I go to the store. There is something about the myth of Persephone that seems to resonate here. As if the organizational part of me is the underworld: a sense of duty. If Persephone was raped and pulled to the underworld, I feel like my own dramatic event was my mother's alcoholism that lead to an unstructured childhood home. As an adult, I've learned that having structure can give me a sense of peace and order. In pyhc speak, it calms my inner child. This is my "planned work life" that I have created. The spring time is my opening up to my creative freedom, the going back to the peaceful life I had before being innocently abducted to the underworld. This is the myth that I'm living.

Pulling this back to the reading, I was really struck by the passage, "some Native American elders teach that any time we make a difficult decision, a part of us goes the opposite way, following the path of the choice we did not take". The myth of Persephone illustrates that she went both ways, splitting her time into two worlds....which ends up being a very comforting myth for me.

Meditative Mandalas on Antibiotics

I went into this exercise on my first day of antibiotics, second bout of strep throat. To me, the three drawings really show the healing process in a mere 10 hours.

In the drawing before bed, I see the beginning of chaos in my line, really showing how uncertain I was with the world. Get strep again really shook me up. There is a cyclic movement between the tree, the moon and the mountains. I also put in salmon (or some sort of fish) jumping in the water. I feel the optimistic blue skies and a pretty silver bow to wrap it all up show my faith. The bow really feels like I'm trying to contain everything . Getting strep again was very stressful to me....I couldn't figure out how I was going to get everything done. The bow looks like I'm trying to keep it all very contained, with just the elements of nature popping out. A metaphor for me trying to keep everything together and the mother nature taking its due course anyway.

For the middle of the night drawing, the chaotic line is very apparent and starts to take over the page breaking it up into quadrants . I remember waking up and anxiously feeling my sore throat; disappointed that I was still affected by the bacterial infection. I see a spiral (spiraling down or spiraling out of sickness?), and lots of chaotic energy going around. As if on a cross, I wrote the words: here, love, now, rest. Feels like a prayer of acceptance and healing for the fight against bacteria. Like the first drawing, the blue dots (night sky) is repeated, this time at the middle of the spiral; almost like a black hole.

I am surprised my the calmness of my third drawing. It's important to note that I did wake up feeling much better, which seems to be illustrated. The buoyant doodles seem to contain a fresh energy coming over the hills, and they are topped off by opaque circles, which seem to represent the four directions (not initially intended). The four directions are connected to four feathers that give a lightness to the drawing, and certainly that is how I was feeling. Again, I've taken blue dots (night sky) and put them around the piece.

Doing the third piece was by far my favorite; it felt much very meditative and gave me a sense of calm centerness. I felt release have all drawings, but centered only after the third. I also find it interesting that the third piece takes elements from the first two images and combines them into one piece that feels much more stable than the other two. There is a cross-like foundation to both the second and third piece, which gives it a meditative feel. Mountains are also represented in the first and second piece.

This process feels like it summoned the magician in me. Though I felt like I forced myself in the for drawing number one, the rest of it seemed to flow easily. As The Magician put it, "magicians discover that, at a deeper level, force does not work". I love this philosophy for life, and enjoyed using it in my art.

According to The Secret Language of Symbols:

mountain = masculinity, eternity, ascent from animal to spiritual nature

sun = male; higher self

moon = female; resurrection, immortality, cyclical nature

feather = Great Spirit and the sun; ability to visit other worlds

salmon = prophecy and inspiration

circle = perfection, eternity

spiral = energy flow

stars = less important gods/goddesses

Need to mull over the symbolic meanings; right now nothing is jumping out at me.

this thing called sacred

I was in a Yin Yoga* class last weekend, and the instructor asked us to go inside ourselves and locate a low-energy feeling that we were having, give it a name and this using our unconscious, figure out what that feeling needed. I named my "sickness/strep throat" and consciously, thought I needed more time.

My logical mind started announcing:
more time to heal
more time to do
more time, more time.

I could tell by the way my mind was shouting at me, it wasn't the right answer.

So I breathed back into my body and tried to let the nothing envelop me. And that when the word sacred slowly appeared. Yes, of course...there is always the to-do list and most everything I really want to do, but I'm just galloping from one thing to the other with out the right mindfulness (similar to the Knight of Swords I pulled a while ago).

Knowing that this connects to one of our next exercises, "Sacred Space: A Healing Act of Art", I couldn't help but ask the question: what makes something sacred?

My first reaction is "intention", it's the moment when you intend for the activity to be sacred. For physical spaces, I think it may be easier (we shall see after the exercise) as you can bring in special or sacred objects to create a sacred space. Granted this takes intention, but it's a visual form.

But what about activities? I think eating, sleep, etc can be seen as rituals and easier to make sacred. But what about the day-to-day chores. Especially when there is a whole lot of them. The washing of the dishes, a 45-min commute to work, work itself, washing dishes, etc.

How do you make the mundane sacred?


* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yin_yoga

Four Selves

I am recovering from strep throat (day 4 of antibiotics), and unfortunately I don't have the capacity to properly reflect in my blog, but here are the images and I'm happy to discuss in class tomorrow.

More or less, I found the reading to be much more verbose about the "self" process, almost unnecessarily. At one point I wrote in my notes, "the ego is a pacifier-sucking infant and the hero myths are verbal baby blankets to provide comfort". Clearly I'm not getting the myth thing. However Campbell's comment "In the absence of an effective general mythology, each of us has his private, unrecognized, rudimentary, yet secretly potent pantheon of dream". I fell this makes reference to the collective unconscious that you end up accessing whether you are aware or not.

I definitely feel like I was accessing universal symbols during the brief meditation and then the actual art process, but I don't immediately feel any connection to the 3-step hero myth. Anyhoo, my 4 self-portraits are attached, in order: public self, secret self, spiritual self and future self.