After a year and a bit following the lead of Carol Day and the Visionary Artist group, I'm returning to my original blog. Not to say the influence of that year won't overlap into my creative, online life, but it seems right to keep this area for that work. 

Carol is on another or an ever expanding journey so her website is different and the courses are changing. I love her example of perpetual change. 

Still catching up with the Bodyfulness course and seeing how it connects with our work in the Visionary Artist, I want to tell you about Betty Martin - or record for myself in this place what I am learning from watching / participating in her presentation and reading into some of her work. She works with intimacy and relationships in an embodied way, but the wisdom of what we can learn from our fingertips in connecting (or not) with another person is definitely transferable to Life in General. 

One of the biggest insights is a memory of a realisation (re-realising?) I had some time ago, in a particularly good existential focusing therapy session. i was dealing with lots of dilemmas in my workplace and definitely struggling with my compliance, my wish to serve and to please, to deliver the goods and to be good. It was ever thus, it sometimes feels. By the end of this session I had a sense of the power of 'no'. The power of just saying that single word, without apology, without explanation, just to simply say no. it's a hard thing for someone with my background, to say so clearly. But I have done it and I know it is possible. As I walked through Regents Park, heading for the Bakerloo Line and home to Guildford, I realised that if i really say no, whole heartedly, without reservation, etc., it leaves a whole areal of life to which I can say 'yes' in the same whole hearted way. Obvious, you might think. And this is definitely one of the things that Betty explores in her book and across her excellent website. 

This morning, going about my business, it occurred to me that I'm often saying 'meh' to life - an expression my younger son uses to say it makes no difference to him one way or another. Coasting along in neutral, having no particular preference, may sound like some sort of enlightenment - having no preference, one can protect oneself from suffering. But - and it is a big but - it also means I am not developing those muscles of love and joy - the capacity to be fully alive. I am blocking the way to possible learning and change. 

Oh, and connection - touch and being touched. 
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Here's the diagram - far too full of information and much better presented by Betty herself. Click on the image to go to the website. There are some engaging videos so you can do a mini-course just by following her illustrated talks as she  builds up the model before your very eyes. i really like her generosity, her boundaried way of interacting (of course) and enjoyed the way she responds to participants' questions when she is working with the Bodyfulness group. 
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I am enjoying catching up with the bodyfulness course, watching recordings of each of the sessions I missed, over the last few weeks. 
My insight from today's session with Efu Nyaki relates to that experience I had with my visionary artist friends, when I was looking at the recording of them, without judgement (when my own image was not looking back at me from the screen): how different it felt to witness.
Efu says,

'When you see without judgement, you fall in love'.
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I want to be present to myself, without judgement, so that I can see and be connected without judgement. I was watching this session as a recording, so I was not able to undertake the practice as she suggested it of choosing someone to look at from the participants and just see them. I am still avoiding that test of presence on Zoom - to see and be seen, without judgement. But if anyone could facilitate it, Efu could. Her experience with trauma victims and in applying family constellations in many different contexts perhaps gives her the sort of groundedness which allows her to create an atmosphere of trust and safety on Zoom. 

This often happens. I think a story is finished, then I go back to it a day or so later and find the ending and the transitions can be more focused, more calm. Usually I delete the latest draft and replace it with the revised version, but this time I am starting a new post with the new image that's been put into the story. Click on this one and see if you can feel the difference between this story and the earlier version, see how it's changed. 

I have just caught up with a session from the Bodyfulness course I couldn't quite be present for (maybe there's a recurring theme, here - part of doing it in my own way in my own time?). it was definitely the best session yet - and all of them have been good, useful, interesting - and participative, in varying degrees. This session was facilitated by Christine Caldwell - the populariser / inventor of the term 'bodyfuness'. She wrote the book and leads somatic counselling courses based at a university in Boulder Colorado. If you click on her name, above, there's a link to an interview with her. It's over an hour long, and more intellectual than the way she worked with our course, but it IS a richly distilled summary of all that she knows from neuroscience and psychotherapy. You can always just search for your own links to her work, if you prefer something more visual or embodied! 

When I'd finished the bodyfulness session, this morning, I was almost late for a writing date with my buddy, Pam. Wondered about postponing as I was quite buzzy and knew I needed to write something about what I was experiencing. i didn't postpone and I will add an attachment to a slightly edited version of what I wrote in 25 minutes, in the company of Pam. Her prompt 'My Green' was perfect for creating a story that expressed what I am learning. Body Narratives.  

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I've been enjoying the shoulder-stretching belly-rolling liberation of completing something that's been cooking for weeks, rumbling around like the threat of a storm/ It is finally done. This post is a sort of tidying up operation to give some of the background to the digital story - what was not included, what is not present, is as important as what is actually said and shown.

I've loved that people seem to like the story and to 'get' it in their different ways. Satisfying. New thoughts, information, connections - triggered or prompted by my uncertainty, perhaps - have kept me buzzing, since I posted the story.

While I was making the story, Berni and I did some Voice Dialogue work (online), each of us exploring what Poet, Actor, Diviner and Core Self might have to say about our journey and our next steps. We (Berni and I, not the archetypes!) have done voice dialogue together in  the long distant past. It was great to remember, and to feel the energy, inhabit the voice and move around in the spirit of these parts of ourselves. As ever, the process is as important as what came out of it. And, talking of process, I noticed, that I am very able to be fully present to myself and Berni on Zoom. Have I jumped that Zoom separation hurdle once and for all by speaking out, or is it just that I have known her so well and for so long? Particles and Waves!

I want to honour some of the family and friends from outside our visionary artist circle, too. This is not an Oscar speech - just an acknowledgement that none of us can create anything alone.

The wave and particle story was stirred up by an article sent by my sister, Jacky, to feed my brain - or explode it. Jacky and I share a space where maths and wacky go so far out that they meet each other coming back. She sent me an interview with Carver Mead - '...the microchip industry's most influential and creative academic' and, it turns out, an intelligent sceptic about particles and waves. The final paragraph shows how one physicist connects with the joy of uncertainty. Read the whole article - but maybe in small chunks!
Not angels, but angles
Once angels were the explanation, but now, for us, it is a "force," or "field." But these are all constructs of the human mind to help us to work with and visualize the regularities of nature. When we grasp onto some regularity, we give it a name, and the temptation is always to think that we really understand it. But the truth is that we're still not even close. Isn't it wonderful that nature is like that? It would be so dreadful if nature were so dull that we, with our pathetic little prejudices, had it all figured out already.

Pip and Tony of Patient Voices, taught me how to make digital stories, earlier this century - it feels a very long time ago. They offered comments and amends on my first draft particles and waves script and always support and inspire. Making this story helped me articulate the importance of focus, for me. I enjoy my butterfly mind, so the balance between structure and flow in working with words, images and software is, or can be, a transformational process.

Juliet, another long time friend, witnessed the hiatus of my PhD, when hard data, evidence of knowledge produced were required. She supported me through that process and helped my voice come through, to argue for embodied, shared knowing. In the present, in the creation of this story, she also helped me realise that the academic battles of my past were not part of the story I needed to tell right now. Focus! Instead, I made a soul collage card to represent the male academic gaze that reduces everything to parts and examines them for truth in separation. It's not one of my most beautiful cards, but it expresses that part of my story.  I'll keep it small, so you don't have nightmares.

Here are some other 'references' as links to websites, that first inspired and now extend my story. 

Warm Data - Nora Bateson's rich and human take on systems that connect - I have done a couple of online People Need People  sessions, at the invitation of my sister, Jacky. 

Energy System Science for Network Weavers: A Summary Another gift from Jacky. 

A YouTube video of experiments to capture the wave-particle duality. 
This link came from Julia, who needs to find the facts of everything, to dig down and see how it really works so she can actually use it. This is the wonderful friend who brings me down to earth - let's go in the garden and do something!

Finally (though I welcome other complementary links) I have to connect my story with Carol's new website, Creative Earth Ensemble. I love the harmony and serendipity of what unfolds. 

Phew, it's been a journey!
But I'm going to rest here a moment and tell you a story. Our story, if you've been a fellow traveller on this course. Our story through my eyes. A three minute video that captures some of the visual stuff I've done and hints at some of the overlaps between us. Just  click here or on the image to the left.
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As always, I'm seeing more imperfections than art, more shortcomings than wholeness, but here it is. as finished as it ever will be, probably. Nothing is certain. Please watch and comment, either by email direct to me or, if you're feeling brave, on this blog. I think there's a comment button below. 

Note: I've used this part of the blog for this course, and as far as I know, only this wonderful group (and a few fellow travellers and close friends who weren't on the course). I don't share the link around widely and I trust no-one else will. I hope if your face happens to appear in the story, you won't mind AND that you will tell me if you would rather be removed. 

We are invited to consider what we have loved about our year, how we yearn or lean into what we might do next, where there are things which need more attention. Carol has given us some questions and prompts for the four weeks till we meet again for the last time, officially (and, of course, virtually).

Last week's meeting was interrupted, for me, by extreme sickness caused by my mistakenly eating gluten. How did this mistake happen? My old habit of trying to be good, rushing about trying to finish things after the lethargy of the season, exhaustion from the (low-key, in my case) revelries of Christmas and family visits. Whatever the reason and however it came about, there was a loaf of bread containing Gluten on the Free From shelf in my local co-op, I am usually rigorous in checking ingredients on anything unfamiliar but I simply pressed 'override' on my intuition - too busy, too hungry, too impatient to check. So I return to lethargy, big time.

The recording of the last part of the session (thanks, Carol)  was brilliant to watch. And i realise how far forward I sit when we are 'live' together, how anxious I am to see and be seen, and how this somehow interferes with my actual presence, in the body. Being able to just enjoy my friends and fellow travellers from the comfort of a screen that couldn't 'see' me was absolutely inspiring. 

To honour this, I hope to create a short video of my journey as a contribution to that last session, as a way to appreciate my journey - what I would call a digital story. (There are examples of what might be a digital story in my other blog, for example, here - an early story about olives and change or in this longer video about somatic movement). I have only just been catching up on this blog, making the story visible in this easier form - words and pictures in chronological order. (from the bottom up, in case that isn't obvious). A digital story require the sort of focus that I just don't seem to have right now. 

As I look through my notes, here and in various pads and scraps of paper, as I review my notice board of paintings, photos, words and stories, the first thing I would say is that I AM NOT A PAINTER! But oh how I have enjoyed playing with paint, with colour, with texture. My new-year fold-out concertina picture (above) says something important, to me, about weaving the future, using whatever comes to hand. The image(s) above incorporate the spider web, weaving, water, and a sense of looking forward through weaving and back on this year from a place of contentment (the figure on the right comes by collage, courtesy of a local Picasso exhibition). 

What i do love  and where I feel most at home is textiles, fabric, wool, knitting, sewing. I have a soft box to create, using these materials. The image at the head of this blog is one face of that work in progress.

My crazy way to experience astrology is also something I have loved and feel moved to do more - to design my own course in my own way and my own time.

And the 'proper' course that I have begun is called Bodyfulness. Supporting my long term drive to fill myself with myself, as awareness and as peaceful connection inwards and from all that is. All the somatic work I have done fills me with that yearning, some of our journeying has moved me more towards this, as has painting and all the other practices I now enjoy. Trusting the body and its wisdom has been my biggest learning from the year we have spent together, and I know that there is so much more fun to be had - serious fun.

I wrote earlier in the year about my exploration of astrology - trying to make sense of it with a mind that skitters off at a tangent when mathematical terms like 'angle' or 'degrees' arise. A mind that can never remember which sign is in which house (or planet - or should that be the other way around?) and how to use the words in which order! So my little experiment with mapping problems and remedies into a wheel and then imagining how this might be linked with a map of astrological houses looks like this (above). Messy, huh?

Today is, apparently, a time when it's good to reflect on the connections between Jupiter Capricorn and Venus and to understand which house these might manifest in for our own individual map or constellation. It's also quite close to new year and I'm still trying to be good. I came across a little video inviting me to create a sort of treasure map or visualisation of these elements in my chart. Did some dabbling, wrote down some words and then created a collage that maps the houses, in the spirit of the words I gathered in my enquiries. The key words were growth, abundance and faith (Jupiter), powerful, flowing. Magnanimous, supportive, consistent, reliable (Capricorn) - trusting in your own way / checks and balances. It was an illogical but strangely satisfying process, imagining an overlap between the image of the wheel and this collage. I hope you can see a sort of circular progression, Dark Lilith overseeing all from my 11th house, mysterious wateriness and risk-taking in idleness, and, of course, a rainbow. I love the woman in the centre, hands on hips. What is she saying? Will she dance? In circles?
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Soul Collage, Chakra cards. Time for something to shift, something to change. Here is my under the earth, blind and yet seeing, base chakra card, created, perhaps as long as ten years ago. The soul collage process for 'chakra cards' involves a series of guided visualisations, a request for an animal for each chakra and a symbol or gift to recall the energies, as required. There is, for sure, a connection between this image and the story of Lilith, below the earth, all the underworld mythologies and sense of acceptance. It is as it is. Rather than judgement. The mole as a chakra animal, the blind woman and the fires. Lots of dark wisdom and alternative ways of perception.

This card holds a lot. And yet I somehow thought I might try creating another soul collage card for my base chakra energies, something a bit lighter.  It's watery - a jellyfish, with some amazing earthy landscape framing. I like the amorphous, illuminated effect and think I can have both cards representing different aspects of my base energies. 

And just as an example of crossing the dark / light boundaries with a different sort of card - not connected with chakras, particularly but definitely an archetype that continues to emerge in my work. Persephone, who spends half her life in the underworld and the other half above ground. Oh the metaphors! She has the seductive air of Eve / Lilith, offering the apple, inviting us .... where?
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Lilith, first wife of Adam, was created by God from not-totally-pure earth, Whereas Adam, naturally, was made first among all creatures, made from only the purest earth.

So the story goes.

The story as written by men, some time after the event, says that God made both Adam and Lilith. This is in accordance with the Abrahamic religions. According to His-Story, Lilith refused to obey Adam in all things. We do not know the form(s) or the extent of her disobedience, but the result was her banishment to the Underworld, the nether regions of Hell, where, as imagined and described by those who came later, punishment involved fire and brimstone, sulphurous fumes, horned demons poking with sharp implements. The price of disobeying.

The God of Man decreed that women’s ways are inferior. God separated his creations, created hierarchies, ensured that there were tensions between them. Man felt uncomfortable with these tensions. Eve, his new wife, seemed to know her place. Man wanted, felt entitled, to his place as the first and best. God created many. Man decided that anything other - anything not-man - is impure, sinful and rejected. Sometimes useful but always inferior. 

In another version of the same story, a non-gendered deity created many from one. Loved all equally and allowed change to emerge from the tensions between the many creations. 

SheHe sat back and watched with delight. 

In this story, Lilith with a mind-body-spirit that is uniquely hers, evolved from her origins, experienced in the moment, connected with all things in ways that are hers alone. She accepts that Adam’s experience is fine for him. But feels that her experience is different and, for her, preferable. She thanks him for his friendship and, without a backward glance, descents into Earth - dark and fruitful, fermenting, complicated and underground. Emerging, she continues to nourish soil, merging with the roots, the fallen leaves and the fungi, she swims fearlessly in murky water, breathes the air and the smoke from her sacred fire. 

She listens carefully to the sounds around her, making sense at the core of her experience. The wisdom of all  life flourishes at her core and radiates all around.