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...