Wrestling with the Holy....

I am in major transition in my life.  

I am between careers and Callings.  I just ended one and am awaiting for the next Call to show up.

I am between relationships.  

I am between geographic locations, living out of my car and on sleeping friend’s beds.

I am living in the in-between

as Jacob was when he wrestled with the angels at the river Jordan -- half in Canaan and half outside.

That night, Jacob slept on the non-Canaan side of the river.  Jacob’s household slept in Canaan.  An angel of God arrived and wrestled with Jacob until morning...leaving him with a wounded hip, a mark of their struggle.

I stood in the in-between, borrowing my friend’s studio to paint for the weekend, knowing deep in my Soul that I was going to wrestle with the Holy as Jacob wrestled with God.  Earlier that day, I was asked by the Spiritual Direction program I am about to enter to talk about my connection to God.  My answer, “I am Jacob wrestling with the angel.  God is the angel.”

I brought all of my chakra paintings:  the first three layered one on top of each other, my heart, and my throat chakra.  My hope was to come away from this wrestling with one whole integrated painting...

I began by allowing the Universe to select where I was to paint.  I took my teacher’s basket of numbers and picked.  Thankfully I picked the large open wall.  I said a prayer of thanksgiving to the Universe and breathed a deep breathe of relief. Finally, it felt like the Universe was taking care of me....

I took my heart chakra and put it up on that wall.  Then I hung my throat chakra next to it.  I stood back and took it in.  It felt right so I taped them together and started my afternoon and evening of painting.

Those pink pieces of paper were haunting me.  But they were a part of the painting.  I left them alone.  I busied myself instead with integrating the two paintings together.  I began to use the different shades of blue and integrate the backgrounds of the throat and heart chakras into one chakra expression.  Then the flame began to migrate its base into the throat chakra painting. 

Then, I grabbed the blood red and “wiped” the slate clean.  I painted over the pink pieces of paper.  I worked at the flame some more, painting over the pink pieces of paper also.  When done, I stood back and took in the painting so far.

The background came together nicely.  I was shocked that I had not wiped out the star at the bottom, but had carefully and lovingly left it there...untouched.  I had been extremely careful to not touch the pink path as I worked on the flame and blood red circle.

Now, I felt like I was ready to address the flame and the “issue” of the pink pieces of paper.  They had to go somewhere.  And this would be my lesson for the night.  Accept what the painting wants, not what I want on the painting.  Accept what the paint wants to do, not what I want the paint to do.  Accept my life as it is, not how I wish my life had gone.

So, I forced the pink pieces of paper.  I put them in a spiral like I had wanted to the night before.  This time I consciously did not allow my unconscious to take over.  I did what I wanted to do with those pink pieces of paper.

And they formed a halo of the angel I was wrestling.  When I was done, I couldn’t get out of my head the fact that they looked similar to the brain-shaped labyrinths.  I found it funny how my unconscious still found a way to speak to me, to bubble up, to resist my resistance of it.

Apparently, I was not going to get away with ignoring my unconscious.  I was not going to get away from doing the work.  This fire, this circle, these pink pieces of paper had something to teach me.

Accept life for what it is.  Accept.

I’m reading this book on Centering Prayer.  The author writes this as she describes the process of letting go of thoughts in prayer:

“A surrender method is even simpler.  One does not even watch or label the thought as it comes up, takes form, and dissipates.  As soon as it emerges into consciousness, one simply lets it go.  The power of this form of meditation does not reside in a particular clarity of the mind or even in presence, but entirely in the gesture of release itself.....Letting go of a thought is a small but powerful symbol of our willingness in a larger sense to let go of our own stuff and return to that open attending upon God.”  (Cynthia Bourgeault, Center Prayer and Inner Awakening, p 20 and 26) 

The author then goes on to talk about how by freely releasing our thoughts as they arise in Centering Prayer, we are bringing our attention back to the Holy and allowing the Holy to reorder our innermost sacred self.  If we hold onto a thought or wrestle with something, we are holding the Holy at bay, keeping that moment of healing and transformation from happening.

This day of painting was about learning this physically through paint and paper.  The more I wrestled with wanting that flame on that paper, the more agitated I became.  I found myself pacing the studio.  I found tears coming up.  I found myself becoming angry, frustrated, unsettled.  I was pushing the Holy away.  I was not accepting that blood red circle for what it was.  I was masking it with a flame and pink pieces of paper.

I finally grabbed the blood red and painted over the pink pieces of paper and the flame.  I grabbed the blue and began painting over the base of the flame.  I took all “my conscious needs” off the painting.  I allowed the painting to be as it wanted to be, as deep down in the depth of my soul I knew intuitively it needed to be.

For days, I had been working at hiding that blood red circle.  I had tried to cover it up with purple.  I had put a flame over it.  I had put different configurations of pink paper over it.  But it needed to stand alone.  A big blood red circle in the middle of my painting.

It felt right.  And it felt unsettling.

This is the way I left it for the night.  Unsettled.  Simple.

A weight had been lifted.  I felt a deep inner sense that the blood red circle needed to stand alone, by itself.  That lifted a weight that I had been wrestling with.  I had finally consented to the Holy, accepted this as part of myself.

Yet, it haunted me.  I knew it was not done teaching me.  This blood red circle had more to disclose to me, more to bubble up out of my Shadow, more for me to accept and let go of.

But I was exhausted from wrestling for 3.5 hours.  I cleaned up and sat and took in the painting as it was.  I struggled with accepting the emptiness of the space the flame inhabited.  

I decided to trust the process.  After all, the process had not led me astray yet....