THE ART OF THE INNER LIFE

This barn belongs to one of my closest neighbors and is part of their 600 acre dairy farm. I fell in love with them and their farm and land. The picture captures some metaphoric and literal essence of where I am at right now.
My husband and I bought a house in a beautiful location 1.5 hours north and west of where we used to live. Details about our home came to me in dreams before we had even been to the area. Though it was love at first sight with the land surrounding us,

In Art, Spirituality, Awakening and Life
I have lived my life from a feeling of equality with all beings and want to resurrect and make popular old-fashioned values like humility and respect. In March of 2021, I wrote about the value of promoting humble and vulnerable art. A year later I felt moved to expand what I'd written to include the realm of spiritual awakening. Through spiritual writing and teaching, I advocate for equality and integrity

Healing Embodied Powerlessness and Despair
Though I’d done enough inner work that I now felt inwardly safe and supported, my physical body still held a posture of discouragement and despair. So I ventured into exploring bodily spaces where difficult emotions were still firmly entrenched. It was not easy. I felt crazy for choosing to wander into dark issues

Sometimes art pieces emerge from the subconscious that act upon us in unexpected ways. An image may offer a blueprint or energetic pathway for healing trauma that has been stored in our body. Rachael and I offer our experiences with two pieces of somatic art, which reveal the importance of creative expression and a healing bodily response.

Explorations into Unseen Dimensions of Life and Self
We all live multidimensional lives, whether we are consciously aware of it or not. Everyone has untapped potential and access to subtle realms of existence. However, many have a tendency to elevate and glorify these dimensions, or conversely ridicule and judge that which falls outside of a culturally agreed upon reality.

I did not make this drawing, though I wish that I had. It was made by my good friend Heather Quaine. The truth is that Heather and I only recently met. I left glowing comments about some of her art pieces, and then asked for permission to write about her work. She then made a short video telling me about her life,

We each live a life of wholeness. Everyone receives input from their unconscious when they sleep. We cannot survive without it. Some of us, however, intentionally develop an ongoing rapport with subconscious material, while others live their entire lives without consciously drawing upon these unseen connections.

Diversity and the Freedom of Being Fully Seen
My life has been lived between the tension of wanting to be myself, while trying to fit in with others. Perhaps you also negotiate this delicate balance. As biological mammals, a degree of conforming to family and culture is crucial for survival. Ideally, one is raised to have both — authenticity and belonging.

In February of 2021, I was eager to bring my Drawing into Trauma series to completion. After two plus years and 111 images, I was weary of mucking around in the angst of healing. I longed for an expansion of creativity in new directions. So I felt relieved, when this particular piece birthed forth rapidly, in a frenzy of motion that left little room for thinking.

When I made this drawing in March of 2019, it represented the first significant shift in my healing process. For a number of years, I had been holding a daily foundation of presence for my body. In response to this healing work, my armoring of muscular tension had been gradually releasing.

#47 Leaf Body Landscape This drawing was made on April 13, 2020. It depicted my body as abstract landscape. It felt healing, but I had no idea that the plant forms symbolized organs. Months later, after making a drawing that released emotion, a benign liver cyst that protruded from my abdomen dramatically shrunk in size.

When making the Drawing into Trauma Series of 111 images, I did not reject any work or toss out mistakes. Healing entailed being with the neglected, abandoned parts of myself, so accepting uncomfortable pieces, facilitated inner reconciliation. However, when I was young, I regularly destroyed artwork.

My subconscious uses the imagery of circular forms like eyes, to depict trauma and its gradual progression of healing. In this image, the intensity of the trauma has begun to dissipate, though grief and vulnerability still remain. At the beginning of the series the two circular forms were empty, disassociated, and frozen.

This art piece that I made on March 5, 2021, references insects, which have positive associations for me. I feel especially fond of spiders. As a child, I would rescue spiders from others who wanted to kill them out of fear. Since many people associate insects with dark energy, they offer a bridge for integrating shadow elements of self.

We all experience trauma. As biological creatures it is natural to freeze and recoil in shock when flooded with overwhelming situations. Early childhood traumas are carried in our bodies as patterns of tension and holding. I knew that trauma lurked behind the stress of grief, shame, anger and fear.

Number 39 in my series on healing trauma. This drawing was made in early March of 2020, a week before the pandemic shut everything down in my area. (Art which comes from the subconscious, tends to be just a bit ahead of my lived experience, while significant dreams take many months to play out.) This image exposes the body as a landscape, revealing the inner healing time that the Covid-19 quarantine engendered.

This is the second piece in a series of images that delve into The Art of the Unknown. My art arises unplanned from subconscious scribbling. After two plus years of drawing into trauma, a transformation has occurred. I am no longer drawing wounds.

Number 50 in my series of 111 drawings on healing trauma in the body. This one shows a portal or opening into an inner womb-like landscape. This piece soothed some external disappointment and difficulty that I was experiencing at the time. It served as an internal balancing of darkness with light.

Most of my art arises from a state of emotional intensity of one kind or another. We might as well make good use of our distressed energy! The art making process transmutes turbulent emotions into something healing. A drawing might begin with anger, but very few end up looking and feeling that way.

Last year I had multiple encounters with 2 (or perhaps even 3) different moose. The encounters felt heightened and magical like a dream. My husband put up several game cams and we captured many videos of this one particular moose. (I wrote an article Vermont Moose Mysteries

#23 in the Drawing into Trauma Series. The seed for this drawing was planted in the early 80s, while I was a student at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts. While there, I made a drawing with the same form as this one. It arose out of a primal, healing, scribbling movement.

This is a rattle that I made a long time ago. I use to make rattles and shekeres for professional musicians. Each tiny bead is individually hand-knotted into a mesh that covers a gourd. The mandala patterns were healing and meditative to make. The sound quality and movement of the mesh on the gourd was important to me, too.

In the beginning of the Drawing into Trauma Series, each drawing depicted a wound, most of which were composed of unresolved space. I was unsure how to resolve the wounds visually on the paper and emotionally in my body, but eventually both body and art transformed. However, this drawing puzzled me, because it did not blatantly depict a wound like the others.

#78 in the Drawing into Trauma Series. This image resembles an animal integrated in a landscape which is also its home. Nestled within the animal is yet another animal or home. The drawing explores the multidimensional feeling of being at home within oneself, while simultaneously embedded within land and surroundings.

In the Fall of 2018, 3 friends passed away. One of them, Lisa Charkey (lisacharkeyart.com), was an artist who knew the stabilizing power of art making. Even when dying she did not abandon that thread of expression, while I had practically severed mine. At her memorial exhibit, I felt an inner calling to return to art making for myself, but also for Lisa, as she was no longer here to continue.

This is drawing number 88 in a series of subconscious drawings. My artwork has been an integral part of releasing old trauma stored in my body. This piece in particular represents a pinnacle of inner healing, a momentary balance of humble vulnerability and light. The drawing reveals a beautifully simple relationship of support and space between background and form.