Reiki in the Studio

In my last post, "A Light Touch," I talked about the correspondences between practicing Reiki (a hands-on healing technique) and working with watercolors. (The Reiki Program at our hospital is directed by Kathy Lorenzato, music therapist and Reiki Master.)

The following week, the number of patients referred to me for Reiki treatments curiously multiplied and the week after that, there were even more. While I can see that Reiki clearly helps; patients quivering in pain slowly relax and fall asleep, even skeptical teens, who eye me suspiciously at first, doze off as well...I've become curious about how acting as a conduit for this mysterious energy affects me.

I notice that as energy pulses through my hands, it takes on different visual patterns in my internal awareness. At times it feels like a horizontal ellipse, pulsating and then changing to a vertical elliptical pattern. Sometimes small circles of energy seem to be there and other times the circles grow larger, for no noticeable reason that I can perceive or figure out.

I became fascinated with these internal images and wondered what it might be like to try and express them on paper.

I've been experimenting in the studio for several days now, making 'collage sketches,' trying to elicit these inner images.

Of course, art takes its own direction and as soon as I set about with my intention, an entirely different form showed up. Where these attempts will end up is beyond me, but in the meantime, I'm going to continue to follow the Reiki  thread.

6 Degrees of Progress

For the past several days, I've been working on a plan for my upcoming workshop: Still Point in a Changing World. My original idea for the workshop was to offer participants an opportunity to spend time in their studios, (whatever their definition of studio might be) on a daily basis for the period of 21 days.

A common notion states that a habit requires 21 days to set. (In actuality, some habits can take longer, but I thought that this time period would be  workable range in people's lives.)

I wanted the studio practice to be akin to a meditation practice; something that they could return to day after day from whatever flurry they found themselves in and locate a point of stillness.

It was inspired too, by my own practice of  watercolor, which I'd conceived in a time of hospital fatigue.

I'd wanted to do something simple, daily and beautiful, with which I could find refreshment, nourishment and tranquility. I found it in the watercolors..

However, I realized that I couldn't just say to workshop participants : "Ok, get yourself a box of watercolors, find something to paint and just keep it up for the next 21 days." Instead, I decided to read about mindfulness and creativity and found myself covered in reference books.

At the same time, the Jewish practice of the Counting the Omer began. (This ancient practice takes place between the holiday of Passover and the later harvest festival of Shavuot).

An artist friend of mine, Laura Hegfield, introduced me to a Facebook page entitled, "A Way In," where Counting the Omer has been re-imagined as an invitation to mindfulness practice: paying attention not only to each day as it passes but also to the individual spiritual qualities which were assigned to it by the 16^th century Jewish mystics.

I became fascinated with the simple words and phrases which were offered up each day like a carefully crafted ceramic bowl.

I decided to weave some of the meditations (along with others from a variety of sources) together with prompts for each of the 21 days. Each day of the 21 day workshop will offer a meditation and studio practice for artists to explore.

I couldn't wait, so I decided to start experimenting myself.  I'm working on Day 10 and you can see the results above. If you're intrigued, you can register here for my workshop and discover what the rest of the days, and the other five workshops, have to offer.

States of Mind

Last  week I pulled my car into a parking space at the gym. I stayed in the car a few minutes longer to listen to a report on the late journalist, Mike Wallace of 60 Minutes fame, who had died a few days before.

I was struck by his comment made in response to another journalist asking Mike about old age. He had replied that, of course, "it's all down hill from (t)here."  I'm paraphrasing because I can't find the original quote, but those words resounded in my mind over the next several days.

I challenged them-- "that isn't true!"--but I realized something had changed in the person who set off to Europe at 17 by herself and the young woman who created human size nests in her apartment in her twenties.

I tried to figure out what was different, particularly artistically. As a younger person, one confronts a series of firsts. Each new experience can be a source of peak emotion--residue passion that can be channeled zestfully into a new piece of work.

As Twyla Tharp notes in her excellent book,  The Creative Habit, "As we age, it's hard to recapture the recklessness of youth, when new ideas flew off us like light from a pinwheel sparkler. But we more than compensate for this with the ideas we do generate, and with our hard -earned wisdom about how to capture and, more importantly, connect those ideas."

In my fifties, I don't run into many firsts anymore, but there sure are a lot of second chances. And revisions.

I look out my studio window and I'm struck by the the beauty of tree branches with their tightly clustered knots of of budding leaves and their shadows cast  upon the wall of the house. At twenty, I doubt that I would have gotten so much pleasure from such a simple sight, at least not for long. Tharp continues:

"If you find, in your own work, that ideas you didn't have room for at a particular time nonetheless lingered and arose later, you are coming close to an idea creative state, one where creativity becomes a self-perpetuating habit. You are linking your art. Everything in your life feeds into your work, and the work feeds into more work."

This is the beauty of  hanging in there for the long run...I'm nearly two months to the day into my year of watercolor and I'm still painting.  I'm stalking my studio with more ideas than I have time to chase. Irises are blossoming in the garden and outside my studio door, the creeping Hydrangea has reached the second floor after a 16 year climb; a green enclosure for me to contemplate when I step outside. A glorious first after all.

Going Through, Not Passing Over

I've been thinking a lot about holidays this year, particularly the Jewish holiday of Passover.

Passover is a time of spiritual renewal, of looking back in order to see ahead. A broad theme of Passover is freedom, something so vast, that I've scarcely tried to contemplate it; being someone who prefers to find the macro in the close-by mundane.

I'm also someone who seeks to understand what spiritual traditions have in common rather than how they differ.

The Friday before the holiday weekend, I met a child in the hospital where I work whose artwork contained just these confluences of large and small, distant and nearby, to which I would add, past and present. This young six year old girl had lost her father to incarceration and her mother to death by addiction.

When I first heard about her, I wasn't sure what to expect. Certainly not the vibrant being who walked into the playroom eager to engage in the activity I had chosen: creating a paper Easter basket.

I like this activity because by creating a series of folds and cuts in a square piece of paper and manipulating them, you can create a real container.

Flora sat down and pulled one of the folded pieces over to her place and began to copy the words, "Happy Easter," onto one of the squares. With great detail and many felt tip markers, she painstakingly created designs and drawings on each surface of what would become the inside and the outside of the basket.

I find it intriguing that at this stage, while the child is painting or drawing, the inside and outside are not yet determined. Enclosure can go either way, depending what she chooses to do. A metaphorical exercise about the public and private selves.

At any rate, after Flora had filled both sides of the paper, I stapled her basket together-but she wasn't done quite yet. she took squares of soft, pastel patterned fleece and glued one to each surface of what had turned into the inside of the box.

She proudly showed me her basket, asking, "but where are the eggs?" I went on my own egg hunt and found several colored plastic eggs. I handed them to her and she tucked them into the bottom of her basket.

It seemed to me that this small child exquisitely exemplifies the theme of Passover. She lost her original home and was forced to leave for a new one (she is lovingly cared for by a relative); she had created her own safe transitional home in the basket.

Six Degrees of Creativity 2

In my daily life, I work hard to carve out studio time. I treasure these precious hours of creativity that bring sanity and grace to my hectic, scheduled life and I didn't think there was room to add "one more thing." However, when I was invited to teach a class for Six Degrees of Creativity 2, I was intrigued and tempted. Six Degrees of Creativity 2 is an on-line art workshop and community, sponsored by the Art Therapy Alliance and includes six different workshops. Each is offered by a different instructor from the art therapy community and explores hands-on art making concepts and techniques as means for social change and transformation.

Although I thought long and hard before taking on that "one more thing," I knew that teaching one of the six classes could add a new dimension to my studio time, especially since I could choose what I wanted to teach. So, what did I want to learn more about?

I like to teach around my current studio obsessions, but for a class lasting six months, I needed to find something that would provide continuity, no matter what my immediate focus. I decided to explore how to help artists and other creatives build and maintain a studio practice; nurturing a conscious habit of doing something over and over --or what Csikszentmihalyi called "flow:" that single minded immersion into an activity.

Writer Elizabeth Bishop came up with wonderful line. She said that, "the thing we want from great art is the same necessary for its creation, and that is a self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration."

I decided to call my class, Still Point in a Changing World: Creating a Mindful Studio Practice. We'll concentrate on cultivating that perfectly 'useless' or mindful concentration that drives a studio practice.

Six Degrees of Creativity goes on sale April 1 - June 30, 2012 and you can find out more by clicking here.