"Initiation of the heart"

 

"Initiation of the Heart"

This image was meant to be a follow up, a second take on the first image.  A different way of imagining or describing the experience from which "Entering the sacred heart" was born.

This image now appears so transparent to me, though it was not as I was creating it.  I love that both have a series a increasing transparent curtains as they come to a central image.

I have been dancing first and second chakras over the last week.  And while the first image was certainly the heart, its emotional wisdom and pain, the capacity to feel pain being one of the aspects of its wisdom, this image now appears to me not as the primarily the flower and flame of the heart as I was imagining it, though that is present for sure, and a subtle fragrance of its perfume its purity, but more than I had be aware of, this is a portrait of the vulva, of the first chakra, and entry into the second chakra.

For some time, I have been shut down in the first and second chakras in key ways.  These being part of the lower dantien, having to do with survival, vital energy, sexuality, creativity, elimination, sensuality. Being in a place where the climate is harsh in so many dimensions has been difficult for me, I feel many times like a plant transplanted into unfavorable soil. Life is difficult in this physical and social climate in which I have landed. I chose to come here alone.  The beauty was has been a blessing, to see and fill oneself with beauty...

Oh, I digress a little... there is something so important here in this imagery for me... the linkage between vulva, flame, sacred sensuality/sexuality, reclaiming the lower chakras and their unconscious content, including yearning and wounds, and yet the flame, the flame, the vital fuel for the integration of body and spirit.  The reclaiming of the feminine. The ascetic archetypal model perhaps never worked for me, though I did my best.  This is not to say that this is literal, it is so much more... the tantric path that this alludes to may or may not involve the actual exercise of physical union.  It is an energetic lived experience of the energies.  Just as the first was more the Christ energy, and so a masculine take, this is a feminine take.  The earth take... 

In the center of this image there is a red pearl or maybe it is also Anna's red spot!  there are two tears and there are two flames, the tears and the flames mirror each other in form.  The flames are flames of passion and they are purifying flames, the tears are of joy and of grief... dichotomies are unified in a larger whole. At the edges the thornes open up and stand aside to make way for the opening of the veils and the access to a sincere naked inner truth.  

What I am finding in the art making process, and tending to the images, is a winding back and forth between yin and yang, masculine feminine, and also between the "higher" unconscious of the "higher self" and the "lower" unconscious... last night my dream was salacious, playful... after these images... and in between the dreams of light there was a difficult dream of shame... so amazing.  So amazing to have the container of art to work with these archetypal energies.  

"Entering the sacred heart"

 

"Entering the sacred heart"

Yesterday was painful.  I was in deep pain that may have been related to working with emotional clearing.  I have been doing Mantak Chias emotional clearing process with the organs for a few days.  I was feeling especially out of sorts and got into some difficult thought-emotional cycles... unable to tell whether pain was coming from emotional or physical origins.  I knew I had to resume walking, and qigong (5 element medical qigong)... and I also knew I had to resume dialoguing with my soul through the imagery she so generously provides through images in revery, daydreams and night dreams...  And yesterday, the pain was so great, I needed to pray... this highlighted how intensely my ego identity wanted to control everything, wanted to be the one who does it all, who fixes it all, who knows it all... There have been more and more clarity that to do, effectively and with authenticity, yes, there is a place for the personal will, but there is a time and a place that in order to grow we need to surrender to a divine will, a greater power, as they say... this is what I am finding... the reality of life, the reality of pain, the reality of intergenerational wounds... we carry something that is beyond ourselves and we need to go beyond ourselves to find new patterning, and to request grace... it is not within our old level of consciousness, or even our lineages consciousness... I am letting go of so many things as I literally clear house to get rid of things as I have moved out of my house, and have moved all of my things (nearly)... and as I sort, I remember, my dreams, my mother's dreams, my uncles dreams, and there is, has been, a pressure as the last of the incarnate lineage to somehow carry my lineage's dreams, what they loved, what they hoped for, and yet I cannot... I have what is left of my life to live, and reality is bigger and more generous than my lineage may have hoped for, or maybe they did hope for that... my mother has been encouraging in my inner dialogue with her, my uncle has been mostly fine too, my grandmother more difficult, something she did not live out perhaps... which dreams are mine to inherit?  And which to let go of... mostly for the material, I am gaining confidence to let go of it, and know that what I have been left of value is in me and what I have been left materially and is of no use to me other than as I place holder, is actually richer in movement as I let go, as I give, as it is used and valued by others.  A friend published recently, a person who gives always has their hands full... there is so much receiving in giving, it is like I get the essence back that lives in the heart, not in inert things. As I cried because the energy felt so stagnant in heart and body and mind yesterday, I could only pray... and as I did there were curtains and curtains of white energy and I glimpsed the vunerability of the pure passionate, burning, being purified sacred heart and felt its movement deep within my heart. A surrendering... a grace.  I felt its meaning.  (This image is closely related in meaning to the last image, where the divine mother is in the deep waters rising.)

"Deep water rising..."

 

The sun has turned... the season is turning... the inward pull is strong... Today I resumed my digital collage practice with an image grounded in a dream I had sometime within the last 10 days.  In the dream I was on a train tour through different levels, somewhat like a theme park, all seemed normal and it was hard to believe the waters could rise from the depths... in the dream my mother is alive and she is on the train too... when the waters rise with a great undeniable power... I am thrown into the water...

There is always an evolution in the process of the art making...  It was so reassuring to be on the train with my mother.  In this image, she does not appear, but the great mother appears in the grand epic force of the water... the familiar train I was on now in the image seems illusory, yet bright. My fingers stretch out still, but where is the security, on the train, the rail, or... And yet I seem to float, I seem to swim... In the dream, I did hold on to the edge of the train, but the water, as awestruck as I was by it, was warm, felt good.  Maybe it is not an either or, and yet it is a both and... and, I wonder what I mean but that... it has to do with the larger truth of our spirit being part of the all, and the truth of the train that we have been riding all our lives, our chain of ancestors, of events, or karma, of memory, of intergenerational gifts and limitations, ease and challenges... gratitud for what is in that story and yet there is also a bigger truth to embrace, beyond the identification with the story and its drama, an all emcompassing, unconditional capacity to embody the divine, the creatrix within us, the microcosm, macrocosm of what we are....

There is something inevitable, a part of the life cycle, and a sense of the growth from an individual ego identity to a larger understanding or our place in the universe.