The dark places

I finally put something on this background that has been sitting here for months. I blogged about how I made the background here. For a long time I thought maybe I would do something about fire, since it looks a bit like flames. My sister commented that she thought it looked like a page about fear, but I didn’t feel to write a page about all my fears. I thought I’d rather write about what helps me to navigate my fears. Not just my fears, but the dark places of anxiety and depression as well. So I found some kind looking eyes and stuck them into the blackness. The goddess with the gold dust is showing me that there is treasure to be found by going through the darkness, and the eyes are showing me that I am not alone, they are there to help. I’m not sure who “they” are, something like spirit guides, or guardian angels, or aspects of my higher self. And maybe they’re all the same. In any case they are serene, unafraid, and they give me the gifts of compassion (for others going through dark places), courage and resilience.

I have been working in my journal a lot in the last few weeks, wanting to get all the pages finished for our exhibition (and they are finished, yahoo!) so I have a backlog of pages I would like to blog about. So I intend to try to blog a bit more frequently for a while to get through them all.

We’ve booked out tickets for Europe next year, nearly 4 months, wow! I’m still looking into what kind of journal I might keep while I’m traveling, there’s so many different options!

Witnessing my thoughts

I belong to a women’s group that meets very infrequently (although we all love it when we do meet) This page was inspired by a meeting we had a couple of weeks ago when we were talking about Eckhart Tolle and trying just to allow ourselves to witness our thoughts and not get attached to them. Not as easy as it sounds! One of our members lovely 25 year old daughter died one year ago in a fire in Paris. We all so admire how she has dealt with this unimaginable tragedy, and one of the main things she does to survive is not attach to her thoughts but just keep returning to the present moment. Listening to her speak makes me resolve to do this more also, after all, my thoughts must be very petty compared to hers. I used the image of the thoughts drifting into my mind through a window, and I just watch them as they pass through and allow them to float out the door.

To create this page, I took a photo of my own eyes. First I tried fading it out to black (on photoshop) but it looked like I was wearing a burka, so then I faded it out to skin colour. Then I cut it out and blended it into the page more with acrylic paint. The window had a light brown surrounding, and the door a dark brown, so I tried to match this with paint to blend them into the page and then blended both browns into the skin colour above. This was quite difficult, I have trouble with acrylic paint it seems to dry so fast, before you have a chance to blend it! Then I wrote some examples of the kinds of thoughts I might be likely to have. I must say, I am pleased with this page, I like the way my funny little eyes are floating up there, I love the window and door and I love that this page is really meaningful to me as a reminder to summon up my witness more often!

To finish this post I will leave you with a quote from Eckhart Tolle (who I consider one of the great teacher/philosophers of our time)

“Be present as the watcher of your mind — of your thoughts and emotions as well as your reactions in various situations.  Be at least as interested in your reactions as in the situation or person that causes you to react.  Notice also how often your attention is in the past or future.  Don’t judge or analyze what you observe.  Watch the thought, feel the emotion, observe the reaction.  Don’t make a personal problem out of them.  You will then feel something more powerful than any of those things that you observe: the still, observing presence itself behind the content of your mind, the silent watcher.”

Eckhart Tolle