Create with Spirit

Healing Dolls

I just found out about Carmody Art (please click on the link - her work is gorgeous!) via the excellent blog The Art of Healing Dolls.

The Artist, Patty Carmody Smith, shared some inspiring words about a doll she made for someone asking for healing.  She made this incredibly gorgeous piece pictured here:

Here is a quote from her posting:

One evening when the piece was sitting with it’s first coat of paint on my worktable, I came into the room and saw something glowing in my peripheral vision, I looked and it was the doll reflecting the rays of the setting sun coming in the window. At that moment I felt that I was really on the right track with this piece.

During the week that I was working on the piece, my client was diagnosed with something that required surgery and a hospital stay of several days. Her husband picked up the healing doll and brought it to the hospital the day after her surgery. She called me a few days later and said that it had saved her life. The details given to me made me think that the doll was something that helped her to view the wholeness within her and to focus while having a difficult reaction to medications.

I am so inspired by work like this. Art really is a healing force in the world and it is such a gift to share it with others.

Jo Carson's Spider Speculations

I just had the wonderful opportunity to read Jo Carson's book Spider Speculations: A Physics & Biophysics of Storytelling to review for the Arts & Healing Network.

This is a book about many things including synchronicity and interestingly, before I received this book (or knew anything about it) I had a dream in which someone (some part of myself) had just published a book called Loving You: The Physics of Loving Yourself & Others. This dream has lead me on a whole new journey of learning how to truly love myself, and Jo Carson's book weaves beautifully into that path. What we feel has a big impact on our energy and this can heal even the deepest and most brutal of hurts.

When I worked with all the "bad" things in my life and asked, What is the root of this problem? I always came back to a lack of love and respect for myself. So my prayer became simple - How do I love myself?, which has already transformed my life in astonishing ways. It is impossible to describe in words, but in a nutshell, I have a new attitude about myself and my life. When I make choices with love for myself, I make the best, most healing choice, for me and for others.

Contrary to what our American culture teaches, making choices out of authentic love and respect for ourselves in not selfish, because there is no way to authentically love ourselves without loving others as well. It's impossible not to, because when it comes to love there are no boundaries. I am you and you are me.

Love also inspires imagination and creativity and those are two of the greatest healing forces in the world.

I also include humor in that list. From the book: Comedy is about survival. Find some way to laugh, or die.

Humor has always been essential in my life and has gotten me through some of the darkest periods of my life. It's all about reframing - which is also what this book is about.

It's written by a storyteller so at times it is a bit choppy and hard to read - stream of consciousness-style. But the subject matter is thrilling and once I read a few chapters, I really sunk into it and could get lost in the story.

Pay attention to the synchronicities in your life and follow up on them - you will be amazed what will shift in your life.

Bodycasting with Soul

If you ever have a chance to do a workshop with Kaleo & Elise Ching, do it! I was lucky enough to take several classes with them at John F. Kennedy University and my art changed drastically after I learned how to make plaster body casts.

Kaleo just sent out a message to let us all know that he has posted photos of many of the pieces that have come out of his classes on his flickr page. I was surprised to see myself and my cast arms pop up!

It's delightful to see so many amazing pieces. What gift Kaleo and Elise are to the world!

Re-Initiation into Dream Theater

I've been participating in a great conversation on Beth Patterson's blog about Dream Theater. Beth and many others were part of a wonderful experience we got to share at San Damiano Retreat Center a few weekends back.

I've been hesitant to share my Dream Theater experience in detail because it really was so intense and powerful, but the decision I came to (as I normally do in these situations) is that sharing my truth and my experience is helpful and inspiring to others and it does not take away from the power for me (although I am aware that there is some spiritual debate about that in dream and shamanic circles).

If you read the comments section on Beth's post (also known as Sista Mud!), she has a great description of Dream Theater, so I will refer you to that if you don't know what I am talking about.

It's so hard to talk about dreams and dreamwork sometimes.  It is often not "speech-ripe" as my father likes to say.  It's also hard to narrow down "the beginning" of the story. I'm reminded of that Tom Waits'  live introduction on his album Big Time: Well, listen. We're gonna have to go all the way back to the Civil War. This dream story feels ancient and circular - no beginning and no end.

But this is a blog! Meant to entertain and inspire and it is, by it's nature, a linear format, so here goes:

I had this dream the morning of March 12, 2008. I call it Tattooed Hands.

I'm driving up a steep hill [just like in San Francisco, which I did learn to drive on] in an old VW bug from the 60's. I'm with my Uncle John. I have to slow way down because there is another car in front of us that is going really, really slowly. I am getting more and more pissed off because I cannot keep the car in gear and we keep stalling. John puts his hand on my knee and says, "I know that guy. He's having a hard time." My attitude immediately shifts to empathy for the man in front of me.

We stop the car and get out, because honestly, it's faster to walk at this point. John disappears and I begin to walk up the hill, which has turned into a mountain. The path starts to get muddy and I realize that I am walking the path of a pilgrimage. There are brown-skinned women - they look Mestizo or Mayan - flanking both sides of the path. They are dressed completely in white.

I realize that I am essentially "cutting in line." These women are on the pilgrimage too and they are waiting, whereas I am walking on the muddy path.  I feel bad, but I can feel good energy coming from these women - they want me to keep walking.  At one point I slip in the mud and fall flat on my face, and no one helps me up, yet I still feel nothing but encouragement from them.

I get to the top of the mountain and there are older women in a circle. I realize that they are here for me. They have been waiting for me. I walk to the center of the circle and one-by-one they walk up to me and take various parts of my body. Holding my hand, or elbow, or ear, they "divine" my future. But they are speaking a native language that I do not understand. I notice that their hands are elaborately tattooed in blue ink. It's a square Aztec kind of design and it is breathtakingly beautiful against their dark skin and white robes.

I realize that I am supposed to be blind, but I am not. I try closing my eyes, to pretend that I am blind, but the overwhelming sensation in my body is almost too much to bear. It feels like nausea and it feels like I am spinning out of control and then I wake up.

The night of May 2, 2008, I was at the Mercy Center, doing another dream workshop with my Father and I woke up with the memory of this dream and a feeling of urgency to work with it in some way. I ended up staying up most of the night drawing on my hands in blue ink and taking photos with my cell phone. 

I had a lot of insights that night about my creative life and how I would like to make more time for ritual and ceremony in my life.

Flash forward to the weekend of the San Damiano workshop. I found out that we were going to do Dream Theater and this dream popped into my head with a solid BANG! I felt bad about putting my name in the hat to be chosen because I was a Teaching Assistant and didn't have to pay go, as others did. But my soul kept asking that I write my name down. When I started to fill out the slip of paper, the pen that was given to me, didn't work. "It's a sign!" I thought. "I'm not supposed to work today." The man who later played my Uncle John in the dream theater experience asked me what was wrong. "My pen doesn't work. It's a sign..."  He said, "Yeah. A sign that you need a new pen!" and handed me a new pen. Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!

So I got to share my dream with everyone and use the Dream Theater process. Everyone present got to play various parts of the dream.

In Dream Theater, people play different parts of the dream (both animate and inanimate objects) and then the Dreamer has the option to shift in and feel what it is like to be that part as well.  It's a very Gestalt kind of technique and it is amazing how visceral things can feel when I pretend to be "mud" or "the beginning of the path."  I again, refer you to Beth's comments on her post, describing what it felt like to be the mud that I fall into.  Amazing!

So what was my experience like?  Honestly, it was one of the most intense and transformational experiences I have had in many years. I was very moved by falling into Sister Mud and feeling how deeply I was held, even though I had fallen down. I learned that falling down is part of the process of transformation. It's not about being perfect and walking the path with no injury or pain. It's about falling down and getting back up again and continuing on. And it's about knowing that Mother Earth is most definitely here for me. She will hold me whenever I need her.  I just have to go lay down on the ground or even, let myself fall.

When Sister Mud and I changed places, I got to feel how amazing it is to be mud! To be rich, living earth! I also had a moment of feeling how powerful and joyful the Earth is. Growing up in the 70's and being around very hard-core environmentalists (and being quite conscious of the earth myself), I was used to a paradigm of the earth being a victim. Like the Earth was going to get so hurt at some point that she would die or break. But when I embodied Mother Earth in that moment, I felt strong and powerful and not like a victim at all. In fact, I felt this very visceral truth that all the digging and mining and poisoning that is happening to the Earth doesn't actually hurt her at all. It's all interaction and she loves interaction of any kind. There is no good or bad in her consciousness.  Now of course, this doesn't mean that I'm going to go around telling people to do whatever they want to the Earth because she likes it all. I got the distinct message that no matter what, the Earth will be fine, but people are going to die off very soon, if we keep things up the way we have been going.

I also learned to really honor my slowness.  After the Mercy Center retreat, when I stayed up all night drawing on my hands and taking photos(!) I came home energized and excited about my life and immediately got incredibly sick. I was so angry that I was sick. I couldn't believe God would knock me down when I was feeling so good. But now I realize that the dream is also coming to tell me that slowing down, just like falling down, is also part of the journey.  Sometimes I am that man in the car in front of me who is having a hard time, and that is OK and natural and will pass.

The divination part of the Dream Theater was amazing. There really are no words for that aspect. All I can say is that I feel intimately connected to every person involved. All the women who blessed me into what I can only say now is some kind of womankind earth ministry. And the two men present, who spun me around, to give me the feeling of dizziness but really succeeded in keeping the woman playing nausea at bay and supporting me when I felt too dizzy.  The spinning actually kept me upright, whereas if they had stopped, I surely would have fallen down.

And yes, oddly enough, no one played the tattoos on the hands. I would be curious to know what they represent, although one wonderful person pointed out that the Aztecs often sacrificed the best healers and if the ritual felt anything like that blessing/divination/re-initiation that I felt, I would have happily given my life at that moment. Tear out my heart! Eat it with hot sauce! Devour me!

So there is my experience of Dream Theater. I highly recommend it to anyone who has the chance to do it. It's incredible to be the dreamer, but it is almost as powerful to participate in someone else's dream.

I'm considering doing a Dream Theater Group soon, so be sure to e-mail me for more information.  Thanks for making it to the end of this long post!  

Inspiration with Julie Taymor

Sometimes I hit dry spells in my creative life.  I fall into a kind of darkness and dis-inspiration and when I have those moments, I turn to experiences that inspire me.  It could be a favorite book (I just finished Neil Gaiman's American Gods for the 2nd time), it could be going to see an incredible exhibit (most recently, Pricked: Extreme Embroidery at the Museum of Arts & Design in New York City), or re-watching a favorite film, which is what I want to go into detail in this post.

I had to do a mass mailing of fliers for my new Dream Group Series (yes, the old fashioned paper in an envelope with a stamp way!) and while I stamped and folded, I re-watched one of my favorite movies, Frida, which was directed by Julie Taymor.

The last time I watched it, I didn't have time to explore the 2nd disc of bonus features, so today, as I continued with my little creative assembly line, I watched many of the bonus features, which included a very touching interview with Julie Taymor and Bill Moyers, the reporter and friend of Joseph Campbell .  I have just discovered that you can read the whole interview right here!

Julie Taymor is an incredibly inspiring artist to me (as is Frida Kahlo!) and listening to her describe the moment she realized what being an artist really means is so powerful, I am going to share that quote with you here:

I went to Bali to a remote village by a volcanic mountain on the lake. They were having a ceremony that only happens only every 10 years for the young men. I wanted to be alone.

I was listening to this music and all of a sudden out of the darkness I could see glints of mirrors and 30 or 40 old men in full warrior costume - there was nobody in this village square. I was alone. They couldn't see me in the shadows. They came out with these spears and they started to dance. And they did, I don't know, it felt like an eternity but probably a half hour dance. With these voices coming out of them. And they danced to nobody. And I went oh, my God. The first man came out and they were performing for God. Now God can mean whatever you want it to mean. But for me, I understood it so totally. The detail on the costumes. They didn't care if someone was paying tickets, writing reviews. They didn't care if an audience was watching. They did it from the inside to the outside. And from the outside to the in. And that profoundly moved me then.

MOYERS:  How did you see the world differently after you were in Indonesia?

TAYMOR: Well I understood really the power of art to transform. I think transformation becomes the main word in my life.

Transformation because you don't want to just put a mirror in front of people and say, here, look at yourself. What do you see? You want to have a skewed mirror. You want a mirror that says you didn't know you could see the back of your head. You didn't know that you could - almost cubistic  - see almost all the same aspects at the same time. It allows human beings to step out of their lives and to revisit it and maybe find something different about it.

This is so inspiring to me.  If I had to choose one word to describe my life, the way I have lived it and the way I wish to live it, it would be Transformation.  We are always changing - it is the only thing we can rely on - so we might as well be willing participants and be conscious and active in our changing, which is a big part of transformation. And being an artist and truly creating from the inside out and the outside in as she says, is what making is all about. It's what I mean by Create with Spirit.  It doesn't matter if the critics like it - or even see it!  It's about truly creating.  I know Julie Taymor's most recent film has gotten terrible reviews, but I now know that I still need to see all her movies, because most regular movie critics don't get it - they don't get that they are seeing real art on the screen, not just entertainment.

She goes on to question why the paper has an "Arts & Leisure" section: Why isn't it arts and science or arts and the most important thing in your life?

Why indeed?

Crafting Companions

In the Dream Art Group I am facilitating, we do an Art Check-In every week.  One of my intentions with this is to integrate art-making into our daily lives.  In the past, I have facilitated workshops where the art is made during the group time, and while that is also a very powerful experience, I found myself disappointed when I noticed that the art-making wasn't happening after the group had completed.

Now, don't get me wrong, I love making things...but having an art assignment every single week is pretty intense!  I'm really getting pushed in new ways.  Here are some really powerful things I have realized:

• Making art can and should be as important as going the gym, feeding myself and kissing my husband.
• When I make time for art every week, it becomes a lot easier to drop down into that creative space - and the results are that I feel more grounded in all aspects of my life.
• My dreams LOVE it when I make art in response to them.  My dreams have become richer and more powerful.
• We've only been meeting for 5 weeks and I am already amazed at all the new art in my house that I have made!

The last couple of weeks I have been making these little goddess dolls. The first week, I made them out of cloth. I used some old fabric I had lying around and I filled them with rice and lavender, as I HATE the toxic batting that craft stores sell to fill dolls with.  I also embroidered them and added little crystals on some of the chakra points.  I don't know why I made these dolls - I was just following my creative intuition, which is what I do every day, in some way.

The next week, I decided I wanted to continue with this goddess figures, but I wanted them to be more sturdy.  The cloth dolls felt too floppy.  For some reason, I wanted something I could hold firmly in my hand. 

The next little goddesses I made were created out of Sculpey.  I love Sculpey.  I grew up with my father making Fimo creatures.  I remember him making lots of little characters for his Dungeons & Dragons game and I also remember a face of Jesus hanging on the front door of our house with a cartoon bubble over his head (also made of Fimo!) that said "Love Your Enemies!"  I remember him sitting with his X-Acto knife, cutting out tiny black letters to put on that white background.  It was meticulous! The Jesus face also had tiny drops of blood and a tiny crown of thorns.  Now that I have worked with a similar medium, I am astonished at the amount of detail he crafted with those characters!

The other issue with having a week to make a piece of art, is that I often don't have time to be that meticulous.  I usually only have one afternoon to really get into making (I have 3 jobs!), and I usually want to get my general concept completed, with the intention to get more detailed later.  That time to get more detailed doesn't seem to ever come (I guess with all things that are important to me, I have to MAKE that time!). 

So this past week, I used Sculpey (I prefer it to Fimo, it's easier for me to use - it stays softer longer) and I made some solid, little goddess characters.  The first one I made seemed to have a long tail like a sperm.  Why am I making little Goddess Sperms?  The next one was a flat triangle shape and the third one was a little round lump with tiny breasts.  The third one is very satisfying to hold. 

At this point, I finally realized why I might be making these funny little creatures.  I recently had a terrible experience while pregnant.  My husband and I have been taking a break while I heal, both physically and emotionally, and we finally feel ready to start trying again in earnest - this week in fact! I still have a lot of fear around what could happen this time, and I realized that I was tapping into a very ancient place in myself and making little fertility/pregnancy totems.

Archaeologists have been finding little Goddess figures for many years.  Their original purposes will never really be known, but when I have looked at them in museums and books, they have a very voluptuous, fertile feeling to me (like the Venus of Willendorf).  Many of the replicas are very satisfying to hold. I realized that I am making my own versions of these little figures.  Perhaps to help us get pregnant? Perhaps to be angels and guides watching over us so we don't have another painful loss of a pregnancy? Perhaps to hold on to when I am giving birth?  I don't really know, but they make me very happy.

I have put them next to our bed, so they can watch over us.

 

I think I am going to make more this week.  We shall see what new goddesses I create.  I found some stone-colored Sculpey and some excellent new face molds!

What are you making this week?

Embodying the Diety

This posting was originally published in my monthly column on The Chaplaincy Institute (ChI)'s website which can be found here: http://www.chaplaincyinstitute.org/pages/newsletter.html.

By the time I was ordained at ChI, I was very clear about my ministry and what I have to offer my fellow human beings on this earth. I know for myself, and others, that creating / making, can be a spiritual practice. It certainly is for me. That is why I co-created the Church of Craft (www.churchofcraft.org), in which congregants meet once a month to create together in community. It started in October 2000; now there are churches all over the world.

Along with the Church of Craft, I have my own spiritual practice of art-making which is closely connected to my dream life. I’d love to share one of those experiences with you.

In 2002, I had been doing a lot of work with my female power and understanding the creative and destructive force of passion and anger. On the night of Imbolc (a holiday from the oldest times about turning obstacles into openings) I had a dream that I titled “Craft Kali.”

I am sitting in a waiting room with a bunch of other people, waiting to be born. There are lots of good magazines to read and wonderful music playing on the speakers. All of a sudden, the Hindu Goddess Kali’s voice reverberates through my head as she tells all of us that it is time to be born. We all get up and form a line at a curtained entrance. When it is my turn, I go through the curtain and slide down a long, curving slide. The walls are lined with burgundy felt. As I slide down Kali’s birth canal, I think how crafty she is to use felt on the walls of her womb! It feels good against my hands as I slide down, and I’m not so worried about what will meet me on the other side. I am born on my parent’s street, the street I grew up on in waking life. On the corner is a large Victorian house that I often dream about. There are no doors but many windows, and I peer inside at all the beautiful art nouveau furniture and wonder how I can get inside. Kali’s voice booms through my head again, telling me that this is my ministry and I need to get to work. I am nervous and worried about this prospect, yet I also feel elated and excited.

On awakening, I really felt the need to connect with the deity Kali, which at the time I knew very little about, and understand a bit more about why she might be appearing in my dreams.

Whenever I begin the process of making art with my dreams or with spirit, I start with the most accessible feeling. In this situation, it was the feeling of the felt (and there certainly is a play on words there, isn’t there?) as I was being born. I went to the fabric store and bought an array of red and burgundy felt—the store was having a sale on felt and I brought home bags of it for less than $10.

Once I got home, I spread the felt out on my craft table and there it sat for about a month. Every time I sat at my table, I would stroke the felt and remember the dream, but nothing more came to me. At the time, I was taking Art & Symbolic Process with Charles Miedinski (R.I.P.) at John F. Kennedy University. The symbol I was working with was “the vessel.” Some of the burgundy felt became a vaginally-shaped vessel covered in photos of myself as I grew from a girl to a woman. This project brought up a lot a lot for me around my body as vessel, and what I chose to put in it, and what was put into it against my will.

Through this transformative process, I had another dream. This dream was very direct: I woke up hearing Kali’s voice in my head again, asking me to let her enter my body. Needless to say, this scared me a bit, as she is typically depicted with a string of severed heads around her neck! She is the creator, but she is also the destroyer, and that aspect of my femaleness frightened me.

Fortunately, I had some wonderful spiritual artist friends who immediately suggested that I do a full-body, plaster cast of myself as Kali. They helped me, and it became a very intense, all-day ritual as we cast my entire body—including two versions of my arms and legs holding different positions and mudras. While making the cast, we burned incense and played bhajans to Kali. It was powerful! We were three powerful women, making art and collaborating with this powerful deity energy for 8 hours straight. We were all shaking with the energy by the end of the day.

I felt as if I was “dancing in the flames.” As discussed in Marion Woodman & Elinor Dickson’s wonderful book Dancing in the Flames: The Dark Goddess in the Transformation of Consciousness: “Feminine consciousness is the transformative energy that can contain the energies of matter and, through the fire of love, connect them to the energies of the soul.” I was allowing my own fiery passion to dance through my body, letting it purify, destroy and create inside of me.

I ended up showing this body cast in several shows around the Bay Area. At each opening, I was asked, “Aren’t you embarrassed to have your naked body on display?” But when I looked at this amazing work of art, all I saw was the fierce, feminine power of Kali-Ma being embodied in my own flesh, and that felt extremely powerful and wonderful! In fact, it was quite a transformation for me to show my body in this way, since I have struggled with body issues from the time I was about 8 years old.

Seeing Kali-Ma in my body form helped me to see my own body as a holy vessel. Since that experience, my body image has greatly improved. I am not so hard myself when I look in the mirror. I learned how to love myself in a new way. Through that transformation, I opened myself up to love and intimacy, and ended up meeting the most wonderful man in the world, and marrying him! Before creating this piece, I wasn’t capable of opening myself to the kind of intense, deep love that a true marriage has to be.

I continue to do artwork like this, working intimately with my spiritual practice and the spirits and deities that guide me. I look forward to sharing more experiences and ideas with you in future columns!

References

Dancing in the Flames: The Dark Goddess in the Transformation of Consciousness by Marion Woodman.

Singing to the Goddess: Poems to Kali & Uma from Bengal, by Rachel Fell McDermott.

The Dreaming Way: Dreamwork and Art for Remembering and Recovery, by Patricia Reis & Susan Snow.