"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.