to be or not to be…

To not be emotional is to be good, to be the quiet no fuss easy going child, to be the one who doesn´t cry or kick up or assert herself. This is not being emotional. To keep it inside, even though you might cry on your own, hidden away from everyone, because you don´t want them to know.

To be emotional and to cry is to be needy, to be the ´problem´ child, to be the one who makes a fuss and gets what she wants no matter what everyone else thinks.

To be needy is to be sticky and constantly wanting attention and then no one will want to be with you or play with you or love you. A little bit is ok, because we are all human and it is good to cry sometimes, but a lot is not ok and better get controlled.

The trouble is, after a while, all the unsaid emotions get so tangled up inside that I don’t know what’s what anymore, and they all get filed under ‘better get controlled because you don’t want to appear needy’ and then when I want to just take one out to express it they all fall out at the same time in a big mess.

I guess I am starting to get them sorted out now. Express them one by one, little by little as they come up until the mess becomes an interesting tangle to be sorted through patiently.

trust

i am organising workshops here in dublin for Luis Molinar and its fun, I like it and i am learning a lot about advertisng and what works and what doesn’t and the prices of things and what to say to people and how to say it and all sorts like that. Interesting and informative.

What I am also learning is letting go of the outcome. I wrote a post about ‘attachment to the outcome’ and this is the same thing. I am attached to the outcome because of taking it personally and judging my own self worth on the doings of other people. So if they choose not to come to event I have organised then I am a failure and I judge myself and make myself feel bad after and before the event. 

This means sometimes I actually don’t want to do the thing or go to the event because of my fear that it might be a failure according to the ideas my mind has about it and then I will beat myself up afterwards. They (the events) turn out good and I look back at the agonies I put myself through beforehand and see what a waste of energy that was. I could have been happy and enjoyed the time beforehand. 

anyway, onto the trust. I have a set of pieces by jonathan goldman which are the seven chakras, wonderful and a good focus to clear the chakras and meditate on them. I was listening to the heart chakra one and thinking green, peace and then I felt that this chakra was not only the love chakra but the one where trust is. If it is open then we trust and love. 

I sat there for a while feeling this trust and felt how nice it was, how warm and comforting and peaceful it was. How easy it was to be there and comparing to the usual state of anxiousness I am and worry about ‘what if’ and the future how much nicer it was. I made a resolve to stay there more often.

subjective versus objective

We are subjective beings, even when we think we are being objective we are still looking out from a lifetimes store of experiences and assumptions and learnt behaviours.

I was thinking about this when I was trying to describe the Toltec teachings to people as I wander around putting up posters and leaving fliers and talking to people who are interested. Anything I say about it comes from my experience of having done the work and felt the changes that took place in me. I feel freer and happier and more at ease with myself and others around me. I can say that to people but I can’t show them. Except of course by being who I am.

I was making an ad for the irish independant this morning, small space, vital I choose the right words. At the beginning i put the fact that it is an ancient mexican teaching of warriorship for changing your life. Then I thought about this and I realised that this what appealed to me. I loved the history of the teaching, the fact it has been aound for centuries being passed down from generation to generation, changing and staying the same with each transition. Maybe that won’t interest others, maybe it will but I have to describe it somehow to grab attention in 10 cm of space.

Same with my art work. I was remembering from art college when they taught us to look objectivaly at our work and cut through the padding to get as close as we could to what we wanted to express. I can look at my work objectivaly to a certain point and I am very grateful to have received the training I got but still when all comes to all I am still looking at my own work and there are certain things I cannot see because I am still looking subjectively.

So thats the thing, I really don’t know what someone is thinking about until I ask them and sometimes I don’t even know what I am really thinking about until I sit down and really ask myself. Because as with the art work there are things sometimes about my life I can’t see because I am the one looking at them.

The birds in the photos flew over my head very close and very fast and I could actually feel the noise of their wings. A very cool, very subjective experience.

clouds’ illusions

I was standing on a kerb yesterday waiting for Marie Therese to pick me up to go out to Ballyvaughen. A car passed by with a family who were black. Mother, father and a pile of kids in the back seat, my mind wandered off on little thoughts of immigration, and how ireland is changing and how I am never here either but living in another country to the one I was born in like these folks and then I saw another child in the back of the car and I remembered on long journeys when we were little the back of the car was the best place to lie down and sleep.

Then the next car had a young man in it and I thought about my brother who drives very fast and is trying to acheive something from his life.

The next car had an older woman in it who looked like my aunt and I wondered did she drive the same way as my aunt (my aunt constantly puts her foot on the brake so the car always seems like its trying to go but she stops it with little jerks of the brake)

A few more cars passed by before I pulled myself back and realised this is how projections work. I didn’t know these people at all. I had never spoken to them or met them or probably was never going to meet them but yet seeing them triggered a little story in my head which would change when the next one came into my range of vision. The story triggers an emotion and all of a sudden I am hooked on the emotion and the story and they have become my reality.

This realisation triggered a thought of ‘mm, must write a post about this’ the mind never stops trying to create the world, thoughts are like clouds they shift and change and move and dissapear and create shapes and illusions. They take us out of the moment and into the past and the future.

I shall leave you with a quote from Joni Mitchell

I’ve looked at clouds from both sides now
From up and down and still somehow
It’s cloud’s illusions I recall
I really don’t know clouds at all

back home

it was strange being here for the first day or so. Jet lag makes me feel odd and drained and I get waves of tiredness that empty my brain of all thought and the idea of dealing with the world or having a conversation or organising the things I need to do are just too huge to be done. Instead i crawl into bed and get warm or have a bath and relax.

I am getting there today though. Went to see my nephew (whom my brother calls ‘the bestest baby’) tonight and he is chirpy and cheerful and I am struck by the randomness of his actions. Maybe as we grow older we continue to act just as randomly but we learn to put structure and impose meaning on the chaos and pretend our acts have purpose and order. I remember there was a mad man who would race around guanajuato always with a bundle of papers in his hands, he was ragged and filthy but he always had something he was organsing, always something important that had to be done, someone who had to be talked to and I would see him and I would think about all the ‘important people’ running around doing ‘important things’ that had to be done or their world would end. I would think of him also whenever I was feeling important about doing something or organising something.

mark (the bestest baby) doesn’t have any importance about what he does, he just does exactly what he feels like doing at any given moment in time. Sometimes for his own amusement, sometimes to get attention and sometimes who knows why…

makng a decision #2

So i was telling the girls in the office yesterday that on certain kinds of rainy days in Ireland we say it’s a ‘soft day’. They thought this hilarious but then they come from a place that when rainy season hits the rains fall with a fierce purpose of inundating the world. Flash floods, instant lakes, life springs from nowhere to frantically grow for three short months. The idea of rain seeping its way downwards is an alien concept. It’s like walking through a cloud I explained. They got that, they live in high mountains so walking through a cloud is a casual occurrence and is walking through a damp grey mist.

I have been thinking about making choices. About the last post I put up and I would have to add that I don’t think a choice can be made until the moment arrives to make it. When that moment is, is of course another choice, but then choices are the only things that are truly ours in this world. How we choose to live our life from moment to moment. In the past I have rehearsed choices and practiced them in my head and ran over all possible scenarios to make sure I would know the right thing to say or do when the moment arrived. Of course when that particular moment did arrive (if ever it did) then it would be completely different to anything I had ever imagined and sometimes I would get it right and sometimes I would get it wrong. I would get it wrong because I was afraid to live in the moment. At that moment I would have been rehearsing another choice somewhere further up the life stream and so still in fear and making choices through fear.

I don’t want to make choices through fear anymore. I don’t want to be so attached to/afraid of the outcome that I am paralyzed in the moment and my head makes me spin in circles. Sometimes the choice is to do nothing and let it all pass by, sometimes it is to step in and grab and hold, and sometimes it is neither and something completely different. The thing is though that the impulse comes from the heart and not the mind; and that I cannot know until the moment arrives to make the choice.

What is at stake is everything. My life is at stake here. My wishes for myself, my path as a soul making its way along life, that is what is at stake. Not possessions or career or relationships or my self-image or my pride. These things in the end of the day are not important and when balanced against self discovery and growing to be the person I can be are small. It is not what I have that is important it is how I live them.

Two wise pieces of advice when making a decision

The first is from a film called ‘Ghost Dog’ where the main character is living the life and ideals of a samurai warrior. He reads from his book during the film the following quote

~ In the words of the ancients, one should make his decision within the space of seven breaths. It is a matter of being determined and having the spirit to break through to the other side.~

I think its to do with the fact that when faced with a difficult decision we already know which way we will choose but fear prevents us from making ourselves sure. The answer is in our hearts and in our inner being.

The second is from a carlos casteñeda book. When Don Juan tells him a warrior never regrets a decision. Once the choice is made then there is no looking back, only forward.

Both such simple pieces of advice and so hard to follow!

failure

I realized something yesterday. I will find the downside of everything I do. I make something or achieve something and then I will judge it against others or not being good enough and I will make it a failure.

Take threadless for example. I make t shirt designs for threadless and at the back of my mind I know I won’t win, I say I am not cool enough or I am too ‘girly’ for the mainly hip younger male crowd that seems to get designs printed. But the thing is I have good ideas I just don’t have the Photoshop skills to really make them shine and I find they improve slowly as I go. A part of me takes it personally when I get a low score and feel like I am failing again whereas really I am pitching to the wrong audience and there are lots of people out there who like my art and show support and I don’t count those but I count the people who don’t like my stuff. Failure.

Doesn’t mean I am going to stop making designs for threadless, it’s actually been an education to do them. I stretch my skills at graphic art and sometimes the best way to really see a design objectively and see how I could push it further or bring it closer to what I had in mind is to put it out there in front of people. And threadless has some really wonderful artists and designers submitting designs and I learn from them too as to what is possible. I just need to stop judging myself a failure.

I suppose that’s the balance. Knowing my capabilities and skills and how best I use them and where I can improve them and then the other side of believing in what I do right now and not belittling it because it doesn’t measure up to where I think I should be or what others are doing. And also to do things for my own pleasure and practice and not to be secretly looking for approval from the audience I am showing it to.

I remember when I was younger and my mum would always make sure we knew how good we were in relation to the others we were going in against in competition. She had them all pegged and pinned into the level of their skill and value as musicians. I was never going to win, I wasn’t good enough, but sure I could try anyway if I wanted. I did want, and I wanted to prove her wrong, but you know, I always ended up proving her right. There were always lots of kids ‘better’ than me. It became a measure of my worth and still is really but now I don’t want it anymore. To see something is to own it and to own it is to be able to leave it behind. I don’t know what I would have done in her place, if a child of mine was going in for a competition that I knew she wasn’t going to win. I think I would probably say nothing at all and just wish her luck and do her best and maybe I wouldn’t put them in competitions in the first place. Its not her fault, she was just following the track she was taught and it was fun also. We did loads of choir competitions and they were fun to head off to with the class.

Maybe that’s it, I am still in competition and wanting to win and never getting the prize because the prize doesn’t really exist anymore. I am in competition with myself for elusive perfection and self approval that I never give myself because no matter what I do there is always the part I failed to do. I don’t congratulate myself for having learnt the piece and practiced and got up and played in front of everyone I judge the fact I wasn’t the best in the eyes of everyone else out there. I don’t say wow well done I have had a few exhibitions and sold work and make art that makes me happy and fulfills me I judge myself that I don’t sell more or don’t have a big gallery behind me or am not ‘well known’ in the academic art circles which in reality I don’t want to belong to anyway. I wait for the world to recognize me when I am not seeing myself.

wow, just had a thought…. maybe thats why I paint faces all the time… I need someone to see me!

clinical worrier

I went for a massage recently and got the knot in my shoulder worked out. She is really good and knows what she is doing and sometimes when she has my shoulder blade and is pushing and pulling it out at the same time the pain is incredible but oh the relief when she lets go and the pain that was there beforehand is there no longer.

I think I identify with this knot I have in my shoulder blade. The constant nagging ache makes me frustrated and unhappy and uneasy and then, because I know it is there because of some unease in my emotional body I judge myself for having it and think oh why oh why can’t I get rid of this, I must be stuck with some block in my energy I can’t get rid of.

So, getting rid of it by massage I know is a short term solution but how nice not to have it and I realized yesterday I actually felt a peace with the world and with myself and only later thought that maybe it was because the knot had gone. Me without the knot in my shoulder. I guess I will go more regularly to her for a massage and let her heal my physical body so I can feel happier and more able to look at the emotional parts I can heal in me. A balance, I know sometimes I don’t want to go and get a massage because I am pushing myself.

I had a revelation about what to say to Paul too while I was getting it, it all seemed so simple. I was being frustrated with him too, wanting to push and not knowing where I wanted to go and I suppose by way of an apology and by way of accepting my own stuff I realized I just actually needed to tell him I was a worrier and a bit neurotic and my mind made me wrong all the time and made me feel bad about myself (no matter where I was or what I was doing) that from the heart I really wanted to be with him, that I was working on it, but that’s who I am. What a relief.

Is there a term like clinical depression that applies to worriers? People whose mind makes them wrong and judges them all the time? Because sometimes it’s like there is two of me, one part that goes with the flow and is happy and knows what she wants and is going there one step at a time and lives from the heart and then another side who I feel I have to fight all the time to stay on the first course, who is fearful and frustrated and extremely angry at what? I don’t know, life in general I guess, the two year old anger that she can’t control the people outside of her, the fear that she might get forgotten or ignored. The part that pushes me and says not enough or not fast enough or not good enough.

I feel she has got smaller. Maybe something to do with the dream about the evil head I had a few days ago. Maybe I have got stronger and am not listening to her and lately how I have been feeling is like a last temper tantrum trying to stay I control. Hope so. I don’t want her anger anymore, or her fear, I know it’s not real. I choose to be happy and when all lies and manipulation and control and fear have been left behind there is only truth and nothing can change that. My truth, who I really am.

a piece about a blank piece of paper

What is it about a white sheet of paper? or rather maybe a sheet of beautiful watercolour paper with the ragged edges and the rough texture or a sheet of handmade paper with the leaves caught in it and the unevenness of the crafting of it. They are a symbol of endless possibility and reflect nothing except what is inside us waiting to come out. Maybe that’s why it scares me slightly, I want to practice on cheaper paper, but then cheaper paper doesn’t inspire me the way a good sheet of paper does and so anything I do on a cheap sheet of paper (like a photocopy paper or a sheet from a sketching pad) is so-so, it might be a good drawing but if it were on the best sheet I would be inspired to continue, put my energy into it to see where it goes.
It is the same with paint. Cheap paint just isn’t worth the effort, a brush stroke with cheap paint is just a smear of colour, colour that sits dead on the page and can be called colour only from the scientific understanding of the word ‘colour’, but good paint, like a good watercolour or oil paint or an expensive oil pastel goes onto the page like a song and shines and glows and entrances me into its depths. I could stare at it all day, and have done sometimes, I remember painting a canvas Prussian blue once and just sat and looked at it. It didn’t need anything else.
And my embroidery, I use silks and felts and wonderful satins because they inspire me and when I wander into a fabric store my fingers itch to hold and stroke and grasp cool blues and pale greens and watery smooth chiffons. I always end up spending more money than I thought I was going to.
And so to life, why use cheap things when good well made objects that were made with love are so much more satisfying and continue to be loved for years. Why eat crap food when good food makes me feel good and whole and healthy. When I want to do something I have to do my best and do it on the best materials available to me even if it takes a little longer. The end result speaks for itself.
That’s the other side of the good sheet of paper; it reflects my fears about myself. Am I good enough to give myself the really good sheet of paper? Or should I wait and practice on the cheap sheet and save the good one until I am better? If I use the good sheet that is saying to the world I am worth something, I value myself and give myself the best.

Forget the cheap sheet, it is a trick and a trap, nothing that is done on the cheap sheet will shine or inspire me and so I will always think I am not good enough for the good sheet or the good paint. I have found that I have to use the good sheet of paper and use good paint and with that leap of faith the rest flows from a place of trusting myself. So what if I mess up? Its only paper…. There’s lots more in the store… and in life there is always opportunities to fix mistakes.