A Conversation with the Holy....Painting my Crown Chakra

This is my Chakra, so to speak.  I am a pastor after all.  I have spent years working through my own theology, working at connecting deeply with the Holy, wrestling with angels, listening to God’s Call and Guidance.  I continue to do that each time I put my hand into paint and put that paint on the paper, each time I sit down to blog, each time I open my journal, each time I walk the labyrinth, with every breathe I take.

I was excited about this Chakra...looking forward to what the Holy would reveal to me.  And then I began....

I decided I needed to be expansive.  My faith, my spirituality is becoming more and more expansive as time goes on.  I am no longer contained within the bounds of Christianity.  So I grabbed more paper than usual and covered the wall I was painting upon with paper.  It was a bit intimidating, but I was looking forward to it.

I grabbed a brush (which I rarely do) and began with circles echoing up from the bottom corner and down from the top corner.  Yellow echoing up.  Purple echoing down.  The image came from my dream the previous night.  It looked totally cool.  I liked it.  I liked how the circles met in the middle; how they created a vortex, a center, a Holy Place.  

And then the black showed up.  The next image that popped into my head was a solid black line across the entire painting.    I struggled with that line.  I know what it’s about.  I know what God and I are currently wrestling and I did not want that reminder.  But I put the line up because that’s what you do.  You trust the brush, trust the paint, trust your unconscious to speak to you through paint and brush.  I spread the black line with my hand, adding red and dragging that red up and down like fire. As I stood back I saw the eyes.  I continued with the red, making place where the purple circles intersect into eyes.  It sort of freaked me out, but I kept going....  

Adding the chalice.  First in brown, then filling in the drinking part with blood red.  That stopped me in my tracks.  I don’t actually believe that the Cup is really the “blood of Christ.”  I don’t.  It is just a sign, so why did I put blood in that Cup?  I don’t know.  But I did.

I have resisted religious imagery for so long.  Each time it has arisen, I have ignored it.  Somehow this time it just came out before I could stop it...  And then the water came.  Really?  

I stepped back and sat down on my stool....and the wrestling began.  God and I have been going at it for a while now.  I am making plans.  The Holy is laughing at them.  I am  trying to move away from pastoring.  The Holy is creating numerous opportunities for me to continue to pastor.  I am resisting.  The Holy continues to keep dialogues going with Search Committees.

I want the circles echoing out into the Universe.  The Holy is reminding me that those circle are showing up as the Chalice.  Accept it!  It is part of me.  This is my history.  This is how I grew up.  This is a major part of who I am.  I may be opening my heart to a more expansive experience of spirituality, a more open way to connect to the Holy; but the Holy is reminding me about my roots.  (After all, the Crown Chakra’s element is Earth.  We come full circle from Earth in our Root Chakra to Earth in our Crown.)

I did not want to accept the Chalice.  But I did need to open my heart to what the Chalice had to teach me.  My teacher reminded me of that.  Don’t get stuck on an image that shows up.  Accept it, thank it,  and move on.  Allow the next color, shape, and form to show.  Allow my unconscious to teach me what it needs to.  Trust it.  Trust the process.

The process was telling me to create light shooting up, shining forth from the top of the Chalice.  I did just that.  White, yellow and purple flaming up to the sky.  That felt better.

Then the purple filled in the remaining white space between the water and the black.  And I began to play with the blue, green and purple of the water, melding them together.  The blue began to move up the painting to the top left corner.  The green to the top right corner.

I continued to work at bringing the Light out from the Chalice.  Interweaving it with the blue and green.  Allowing those colors to become part of the Fire.

And then the bottom of the  Chalice started to bother me.  It kept telling me it wanted to reach the bottom of the painting.  I was annoyed with the Chalice, so i did not want to do that.  But it just wouldn’t leave me alone.  So I grabbed the brown and brought the bottom of the Chalice to the base of the painting.  Then the Chalice did not have the right balance between the Cup and the Base.  I worked at that.  It kept getting bigger.  Ugh!!!  It was bad enough to have it up there at all.....

The Chalice became all blood red by the time I was done.  Huge and blood red and majorly bothersome.  My teacher encouraged me to keep going, to not stop.  “What is the next color?  Don’t get caught in the story of the image.  Go to the next color, shape, form.”  Fire.

A red, yellow and orange flame coming up out of the Chalice, like the flame that came up out of the Ash in my Ash painting series...

The problem was that flames are really hard to make (for me).  That was the image in my mind.  It did not happen.  As I began to get agitated that it was not working, I heard my teacher’s voice echoing in my head “Start with the images in your head and open yourself to how they want to show up on the paper.  They may not turn out the same on the paper.”  I breathed out my resistance, my frustration, my agitation.  I breathed out my perfection, my want for that perfect flame.  I released it to the Universe...

and went back to my painting...to the flame that wanted to come out of this Chalice.  It was more like Fire, exploding up and out.  

Then came the gold.  I started with circles along the Chalice, but that did not feel right.  So I took painting in my fingers and made a solid line up the sides creating spirals.  That so tremendously helped.  The painting was beginning to come together.

Now it looked like a bundle of wheat just harvested, held together by the gold spirals, on Fire with the Spirit.  Hmmm....  I can get into that image.

There was one more thing that was hugely bothering me.  My eyes kept moving to it and back.  I actually put down my brushes and began to clean up, to give myself some space, to see if the painting was done.  But that spot kept bothering me.  It kept nudging my Soul.  Something needed to happen there.

It was in the top right corner.  The purple circle was bleeding through.  The black line was blocking the movement of blue and purple.

I decided to address it.  I put a gold circle up and began to pull the red into the circle so that the flame spread up and across the painting, bringing it all together.  Then I brought a spiral from the center of the fire out to the gold circle.  I stepped back and got really annoyed.  The spiral in the gold circle was upside down.  It did not work.  I did not like it.  It stared at me, hauntingly.  But, as is the process, once there it stays.  It is part of me.

I began working with purple down to the right corner.  Working up and down, working purple and blue into the black, integrating the up and down movement together.

Then I grabbed a white-ish green and put it over the gold circle with the spiral; pulled the red back out.  Added a bright pink into the flame.  Brought the spiral’s tail to the edge of the painting so that it’s beginning morphs into the circle.  I stood back and finally felt like I liked the painting.

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When I look at the painting now, I can see the Holy in me.  I can see that spark of Light and Incarnation flaming up out of me.  

The words of Hildegaard of Bingen echo in my soul:

“I, the highest and fiery power, have kindled every spark of life.  I, the fiery life of divine essence, blaze in the beauty of the fields, am aflame beyond the beauty of the meadows, I gleam in the waters, and I burn in the sun, moon, and stars. With every breeze, as with invisible life that contains everything, I awaken everything to life. The air lives by turning green and being in bloom. The waters flow as if they were alive.... I am also Reason, having the wind of the sounding Word by which all things were created, and I breathe in them all, so that none may die, because I am Life...”

(Vision 1:2)

Catching on Fire...

This round of Chakra paintings I have covenanted with myself to layer one on top of the other and watch what happens within me and the painting.  So I stood, looking at the semi-finished Sacral painting from the previous week, with my teacher’s comment from earlier in the day echoing in my heart: “You went back to the surface instead of working through what your bumping up against.”

She is totally right, of course.  I did.  I retreated into my inner garden -- the garden I retreated into to find a sense of peace in the midst of the storm I was in last week (and am still in this week).  That is okay.  I went there....to a certain extent, as much as I could emotionally in that moment.

I knew, as I looked at the painting preparing for the session that evening, I would be going back....back to that blood red....back to what I’m bumping up against.  I also knew I needed to move the painting, to change its direction.  The movement felt vertical not horizontal.  So I took it down and was “caught” by my teacher.  (She has a practice of letting the Universe choose where we paint.  For the last few weeks she has allowed me to paint in the same place because I continue on that same painting.)  With my painting in my hand, she decided the Universe should tell me where to paint.  Her wisdom was totally right.  I needed to move to a different wall, a different space.  I needed to be in a more open space, not in a corner.  I needed to not be able to hide from myself, to curl up in the corner and ignore what needed to be faced.

The Universe put me on the most open wall in her studio.  Hmmm.....  

I put my painting up in the middle of the wall.  As I looked at it the only color available to me was blood red.  

I was being invited back to the place I had left last week.  

I was being invited back to the spot and moment when I fled.  

I was being invited back to learn more about this sorrow and wound that I am currently living in.

I was being invited by the Universe to work through it this time...

Not to flee...

But to stand in the midst of the waves that crashed up against me threatening to knock me over.

So I grabbed the blood red.  I knew what I needed to do.  I painted the entire painting blood red.  Covered it from top to bottom, left to right.  Covered it completely.  Hands stained red.  Blood red under my fingernails....

Then I grabbed the white.  That was the color I fled from last week.  I grabbed it and began to allow my hands and Spirit rub the white into the painting.  I began about a third of the way down the painting and began to rub into a column of white.  I curved it.  It felt like I was creating a tornado flowing up and down my painting.  Then came the circle. 

When I stepped back, I saw the shape that the white made and that took me down:  an “S”.  That makes sense.  My heart is breaking from an ending of 10 years.  I feel that loss deeply within my Soul.  I want to ignore it.  Move forward.  Leave that pain behind me.   Look to the future.

Problem is my heart is broken in two.  I’ve been pushing hard the past month and a half to move (literally).  To do that, I’ve been stuffing down that sorrow, the fears that are rising up in me about being alone, about not having a plan for what is next, about leaving all that I know for something completely unknown and unpredictable.  

The blood red and white are inviting me to face those fears, to feel that pain, to invite my Authentic Self, my Soul to show itself and teach something about this space I’m moving toward; about Future Me.

So I grabbed the black.  I created the storm cloud over the “S.”  

And that is when the heart appeared.  I put the heart in the top corner and stopped dead.  Tears rose.  I felt frozen because I knew what needed to happen to that heart.  I knew I needed to break it.  But that made it real... a little too real...  physically breaking my heart.  

I took a deep breathe.

Then another....

And another....

I stood up on the stool and ran my fingers through the heart, breaking it....

And that sent me back to the floor....back to the tears....back to what this series is all about...

I sat there, tears flowing, awaiting the next invitation; feeling that broken heart.... until black arrived.

I pulled black down from the cloud to the bottom of the painting, like the Pillar of Smoke that guided the Israelites through the Wilderness in Exodus.  

And that started the movement...the movement through to a glimpse of Future ME.

Fire came next.  A Pillar of Smoke by Day.  A pillar of Fire by night....

Fire starting at the base....flaming up the painting... 

Red.....

Orange...

Gold...

Flaming up....moving my energy up the pillar of smoke, up....

Up....

Up....

To Green that flowed from my broken heart... like a waterfall

Falling down the painting....

And Light....bursting forth in the top corner....

It was supposed to burst forth from the fire... at least that is what I wanted to do.

It didn’t do that.  It burst forth as I ball of Light.  And not bright yellowish white Light, but cloudy grey muddled Light.

That brought me to a place of stuck and agitation.  My mind kicked in.  The Critic began to tell me that it was ugly, that it did not work, that I had messed up.  

And I began to feel contained.  I resisted it.  My teacher asked if I needed to add paper.  I said no.  I was fine with what was there.  She knew I was bumping up against my box.  I was ignoring that.   The Light bumped hard against that box I’ve been working at bursting out from....

So my Soul, which has learned that when I don’t listen one way, it will try again a different way.   My Soul knew I needed to burst out of the box I had put myself in with just two pieces of paper.  My Soul knew I needed to be expansive. 

So...it gave me brown.  I had no idea what to do with the brown.  I just knew brown.  I put it over the black.  Brown from top to bottom.  And I began to pull it out and up.  I began to realize that I was creating the trunk of a tree.... My Future ME.

And I felt contained.  The paper was too narrow to create a tree with branches like I wanted to.  So I added paper.  My Soul won!

I covered the side panels with blood red so they would integrate with the painting.  I pulled the brown trunk onto the panels.  Then I began to allow the color, the fire, to flame up through the tree...

Red....

Orange....

Green...

White purple...

Covering my broken heart....

covering the ball of Light...

The tree became the Light....

And I found myself again...in the midst of the tree... as the Tree... 

the Tree of My Life.... 

Grounded in the Earth 

reaching up to the Universe

burning 

bursting forth

expanding

My divided Soul... the Sacral Chakra continued

It took two days to really paint my way through my Sacral Chakra.  I have had this happen before -- where it has taken more than one session to paint the Chakra.

When I ended the first night, I had just put blood red on the painting.  I had covered up the gold block and allowed for the blood red to show up, as well as the tears that bubbled up with that color.  

I had no sense of closure.  I had little sense of peace within my Soul.  I was unsettled, unnerved and heading into the unknown...

I had a restless night with little sleep.  I was up at the crack of dawn journaling...writing and writing and writing.  I attempted meditation but I couldn’t settle.  I was agitated, restless, unnerved.  I couldn’t sit still, except to write (and writing requires movement).

I arrived to paint agitated, unnerved, unrested, teary.  The little sleep I had was fraught with images of bubbles bubbling up through my painting, so that is where I started.  I started by literally bubbling the blood red paint up from the ocean floor, allowing it to bubble however it needed to, like air bubbles coming up through water.

That felt okay to me.  It calmed me:  the repetitive movement,  the bubbling, the dots, the circles, making different paths through water from ocean floor to surface.  I let the bubbles rise from all over the mound of blood red earth at the bottom of my ocean.  Then I paused...

There was this entire section to the left untouched.  I didn’t know what to do with that.  Bubbles would not naturally go in that direction.  Bubbles go up and follow the current of the water.

I walked over to the paint brushes and checked out all the toys.  I found this really cool swirly thing and grabbed it.  I spent a great deal of time swirling up the water in the left of the painting....dipping the swirl into blood red and swirling it on the painting.  It had this cool effect, integrating in with the movement of the water.  When I had swirled up all the water, I stepped back, sat down on the floor and was smacked in the face by the drastically clear divide in my soul.

Look at it!!  

It is clearly divided.  My heart broke.  Tears bubbled up.  There was no stopping them.  I sobbed and sobbed and sobbed.  I found myself moving farther and father from the painting.  Soon, I was across the room, up against the wall leaning on the stairwell crying my eyes out.

I’ve been bumping up against this for a while now.  I am torn.  Torn between two locations physically.  Torn between two spiritual locations.  Torn between callings.  Torn out of relationship.  Torn....in.....two....literally.

So it was not surprising to see it.  But it was hard to see it.  It sent me down.  Down deep... deep into the grief and loss of the past two months... deep into the constant transition I’ve been living in... deep into the pain of my Sacral Chakra... 

My teacher checked on me, after letting my cry it out for what felt like a long time.  I needed to do that...get all snotty and all.  I haven’t been taken down like that in a painting experience before, but my soul needed that cleansing cry.

She encouraged me to get up and put the tears on the painting... let the paint express the wound, the divide, the sadness, the grief, the loss.  Let it all come out through paint.

And this is what happened:

I covered the painting in blood red.  Blood all over my hands.  Blood all over the painting.  Now my Soul was whole, bleeding out all that divided it.  Whole, bleeding out all that tearing in two.

Once I had covered the painting, I was down.   Again.  Down on the floor.  Stuck to it.  No energy.  Just tears flowing freely.  No breathe. Just tears bubbling up and out of my body.  Stuck.  Plastered.  Unable to physically move...

And I laid there, crying...until I felt the need to move.  I kept trying to talk myself into moving and could not do it.  I looked to my teacher and guide and shared what was happening.

She encouraged me up off the floor.  She said just put something on that paper.  Trust your unconscious.  Trust the paint.  Trust your hand’s movement with the paint.  Trust the process.

I forced myself off the floor.  I made myself stand up.  I grabbed the white and began to work it into the blood red and rub my fingers to mix the colors together.  I did it a few times and stopped.  I was having a hard time getting into the painting; engaging this blood red.  I was hugely resisting.

My teacher encouraged me to just grab paint and work through it.  She told me I couldn’t stop now.  I needed to work through what was happening or it would get stuck in my body.  So I kept going with the white.

Then I grabbed another color and put a circle on the paper.  Then another and made a circle.  I changed colors rapidly putting each color on the paper in circular form.  I covered the painting with circles of different colors.  

I ran out of room on my painting so I just painted around it.  I didn’t add paper.  I just painted directly on the cardboard.  I felt my Spirit bursting from that box of blood red.  I felt a freedom, so I kept going.

When I was done, I stood back and took a breathe.  I had painted (in abstract form) that meadow my Spirit Guides took me to in my meditation the evening before.  

I felt more peaceful.  I felt less agitated.  

I felt safe in my internal meadow in my Soul...for now...

I had stared down my divide self.  Quaker author and spiritual guide, Parker Palmer writes this about the divided self:

“Afraid that our inner light will be extinguished or our inner darkness exposed, we hide our true identities from each other. In the process, we become separated from our own souls. We end up living divided lives, so far removed from the truth we hold within that we cannot know the ‘integrity that comes from being what you are.’

The divided life is a wounded life and the soul keeps calling us to heal the wound.”

My Soul called me to begin to heal the divide.  I touched upon it before each time woundedness showed up.  I touched upon it once again in this painting -- more blatantly.  I have continued to touch upon it in the next painting, my Solar Plexus.  

I think this journey through the Chakras is calling me to take the next step in healing my divided Soul and Life.

Going deep...

This is my second time through painting my chakras.  This round is a weekly painting instead monthly, making it a bit more intense.  This round, I decided I wanted to do one painting, allowing each chakra to layer on top of the other -- curious about what the finished painting will look like.  It was hard to paint on top of my Root Chakra.  I am still so in love with that painting.  It was so beautiful (and still is).

As we sat on the floor engaging our bodies and spirits through yoga and breathing and meditation, preparing to engage our Sacral Chakra, the words that came up were movement and flow.  The image was the ocean, water flowing, waves crashing.  The color was blue -- all shades.  This makes sense to me.  The second Chakra is about movement and flow.  Its element is water.  

More than that, I am standing in the middle of a storm with waves crashing all around me.  Sometimes I can keep my footing as those waves crash against me, into me.  Other times I am knocked completely over by the waves or maybe the rip tide....I’m not completely sure.  Other times, I can flow with the waves and current, allowing it to guide my life energy.

Well, this week was one of those knocked over weeks.  It began with a curve ball coming at me hard, changing my plans; sliming my Spirit.  I knew I was not in the same heart space as the previous week.  I wanted so much to create another beautiful painting so I set up some meditation time prior to painting, to get myself more centered; to release all the slime that was blocking my heart space.  It was a tremendously peaceful meditation, vivid, powerful.  My Spirit Guides blessed me with quite the vision and I felt ready to paint....

So with movement and ocean as my starting place, I changed the direction of my paper from up/down to left/right.  I took it off the wall and placed it sideways.  It changed the look of my Root chakra.  The movement already on the painting brought about an experience of waves, of movement.  I really struggled with putting paint on it.  I knew I had to.  The color was blue, blue like water, ocean, waves...

I began by putting blue on the red and orange in the center of the painting, allowing for various shades of blue to begin to form waves.  I followed the flow of my root chakra, leaving the green, purple and gold untouched.  I added a gold circle in the middle of the wave.  It felt great to put it there, like the sun shining forth over the water.  The spiral inside made it all the more powerful to me.  

I began to work around that gold ball.  The orange chain began to bother me, so I attempted to make it flow with orange.  That was not quite right.  Blue was the color I needed to be in.  Blue like the ocean.  So I grabbed more blue and covered the painting in various different shades moving like waves, like the ocean.  All the time, leaving the gold ball in its place; admiring it; becoming attached to it.

And that was when the painting took me deep....deep down into my Shadow....again.  I became stuck. Blocked really.  Blocked because of that gold ball.  It was blocking the movement of the painting.  I could not get the waviness I was looking for.  I could not get the flow.  It was in the way.  Yet I wanted it there.  I played with the spiral, changing its color.  Nothing worked.  The problem was the gold ball.  It had to go....

I could feel the block in my body.  It was between my heart and my belly.  Blocked.  The flow of energy was not moving.  My heart was not connecting in with my Sacral Chakra.  Something was in the way.  A gold ball....with a spiral....in the middle of the painting.

I sat on my stool blocked.  Stuck.  Angry.  I paced back and forth around my painting.  Agitated.  Angry.  Blocked.  I sat again.  I knew the gold ball had to go.  I took a deep breath grabbed blue and painted over it.  I worked with blue and purple to get a flow going.  I sort of got it, but as I worked at it I became more agitated and angry....  

I found myself sitting on my stool with my head in my hands tears flowing.  I just couldn’t get the beauty of that image of movement and waves.  I wanted so bad to go back to the vivid image of my meditation (to an inner garden and meadow).  I wanted out of this hell I was in.  I wanted the block gone.


I found myself scraping paint again, trying to scrape off the anger.  Scraping off the yellow green at the bottom of the painting; the same place I scrapped last week.  I scrapped it back down to the white of the paper.  And I sat.  Again.  On my stool.  Staring.  Head in my hands.  Agitated.  Angry....

My teacher asked the color of my anger.  Red.  Red was the color of the block.  Shape?  No idea.  Form?  No idea.  Red.  Shade? and she began to name some.  Blood red...  That was the shade.  It shocked me.  Blood red.

I couldn’t pick Blood red out of her paint choices.  I stood in front of all the paint attempting to figure out what blood red was.  She picked it up and handed it to me.  I was in disbelief so she put some on her hand.  It looked like blood.  The same color.  A similar thickness and consistency laying in her hand.  Ugh!

I was about to put blood on my hands.  My own blood.  I was about to bleed on my painting.  My own blood.  

Courage.  I breathed to myself.  

Courage.  I breathed deep into my heart.  

Courage.  I breathed deep into my belly.  

Courage.  I poured that blood red onto my hand.  

Courage.  I put it on the painting.  

Courage...I breathed with each stroke of my hand on the painting....

tears rising, bubbling up from deep in my Soul.  

Courage... as I worked to bring that blood red into the waves and movement of the painting.

The movement is there.  The block is lessened; not quite gone.  Better.

The tears are bubbling up.  


How, I did not yet know.  But I knew they were going to bubble up from that Blood Red rock at the bottom of my inner ocean... 

What I knew was that I was done for the night.   Exhausted.  I had faced my block and moved it as much as I could.

I also knew that the next morning, I would be back.  Back to paint again. Back to address this bubbling up of tears.  Back to face the blood red paint.  Back to wrestle with the Shadow of my Soul.

I had no sense of closure at the end of the night.  I had little sense of peace within my Soul.  I was unsettled, unnerved and heading into the unknown...

And the tears keep coming...

So I am continuing with this “practice” for the 40 day Creative Experiment with BrushHeart Intuitive Painting.  In my last post on this practice session I wrote about resistance and learning what that resistance is.  Click here to read that blog: http://sabbathcenter.blogspot.com/2012/07/on-being-stuck.html

I have continued to follow the path that opened for me as I invited the resistance to show itself, came face to face with its fleeting nature, and painted it out.  I painted it out, blogged on it, and then went and re-painted my root chakra, before returning the next day to this experiment.

What I have learned this last week is how each painting teaches and informs the next one.  “What do you mean?” you ask.  Well, the “rules” of this experiment are to add at least one brush stroke a day for 40 days.  When I went to add a brush stroke the morning after painting my root chakra, look at what happened:

Notice anything? 

What I noticed was how the themes from the previous night were still showing up.  I started with light blue, almost indigo circles.  The tears began to wash away the Shadow that was choking my Chakras.  That chain of tears.  I allowed it to form and run and flow wherever it needed to.  And it flowed around the darkest of the Shadow, around the place where my Spirit and Soul and Energy were being most choked, freeing it to imagine itself into something new and beautiful; inviting it into movement....

The blue began to burst forth and flow.  Followed by that orange.  Yes orange.  Interesting.  And for me, even more interesting that it took the shape of an angel’s wing.  (I’m still reflecting upon that....)

And it continued to unlock and invite flow....  movement.... opening....

 

A bursting forth of my Soul into freedom.

I have to admit that I do feel movement within me.  Movement toward some unknown Future Me.  Movement into manifesting my dreams, hopes, visions in life. 

I feel myself returning after so many years of being dormant; of being pushed into my Shadow; of being shut down; of slowly dying that Critic death.

I feel the fire burning again; flaming up from deep within.  (Another theme from my root chakra painting showing up.)

 

My heart burning, like a candle flame.  Expanding me out, out into the Universe, out of my cocooned self of old; into something new and exciting....