What makes someone want to come to Painting from the Inside Out? Why not sign up for a class where you can walk out with new painting skills?
Because YOU count, not the painting. Granted, in a painting class you walk out with a painting you like. It makes you feel good. You hope the next painting will make you feel at least as good, if not better. And so it goes on, finding ways to make you feel better about yourself. How many remedies are offered to help us feel better! But what is really happening? Down under you are feeling stuck in your life. Perhaps now you are thinking Painting from the Inside Out can be an easy way to unplug blocked creativity without having to work and learn another skill. You have worked hard enough and now you want to have fun. You want to feel better about yourself. Perhaps this class will help.
But what if it doesn't make you feel better, but worse?
Questions arise: What color should I pick/ what should I paint? How easy it would be if we were told from the outside!
We can spend our lives running away from feeling worse. As mentioned, there are enough quick fixes and remedies that have promised this in the marketplace. What if it wasn't about better or worse but about inhabiting all of yourself.
How does this work?
Face it: wherever you go, whether you like it or not, you bring your self with you; you show up with all of you - with your frustration, your hurt; with your joy and your love; with your anxiety, your confusion and your not knowing.
You are the vehicle that holds all your life experience - including feelings and thoughts. The canvas remains empty without you dipping the paintbrush in a color and you moving it on to the canvas.
How can I show up with all of who I am? How does it work?
What is happening inside of you right here right now? What does your frustration/hurt/anger/sadness look like? What does your joy, humor, excitement look like? Does it have a color, a shape, an image, texture? What does this feeling, thought, sensation want to do? How does it want to be expressed? Or how does your "not knowing', your anxiety, your confusion feel and look? Can you just paint dots and not know? Can you trust that a knowing will emerge, a desire, an urge perhaps?
In this way you are making your inner space bigger to hold all of you. As your inner space becomes bigger, there is space to create.
If you could do anything you wanted now, what would it be? How would it look?
Try bringing all of you here now?