Poor life choices make awesome legends.
Our future self is forged in the fire of stories gone wrong and failures we tried so hard to avoid.
Include everything within the context of mystic-badass-in-training.
Your legend belongs only to you.
Don’t confuse failure for sadness and happiness for success.
There is so much more to life than that! You got this!
~ Shiloh Sophia
Comment on this conversation HERE.
Are you trapped in your patterns of belief?
In how you think things are? What if you are wrong?
What does transcending your ideas look like?
This is what is in my cup today. It woke me up at 5:30 am.
Had to go write this out.
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about. Ideas, language,
even the phrase “each other” doesn’t make any sense.
~ Rumi, 13th Century
Our ideas, traditions, and beliefs may be keeping us from accessing a whole other world of potential experience. Expanded Sensuality and Access to Genius may be hiding behind ideas of light/dark, masculine/feminine.
Are you up for a deep dive into possibility?
Chances are you’ve had this conversation before. I know I have. But somehow I keep “forgetting” and or going to sleep on how to really LIVE INTO this other way of experiencing what could be possible if I moved beyond ideas of cause and effect as the only two potentials.
Let’s look first at a list of this kind of thinking.
Either/Or
Masculine/Feminine
Light/Dark
Cause/Effect
Free/Caged
Success/Failure
Lack/Abundance
Right/Wrong
Healed/Sick
Fear/Love
Flow/Strive
All/Nothing
Win/Lose
Above/Below
Inside/Outside
Black/White
This/That
Doing it right/Not doing it at all
The list goes on and on; add your own.
I know these are not categorically accurate,
rather I am just showing
how many things we have that are LIKE THIS.
Here’s what I want to ask us.
Knowing there isn’t likely an answer.
However what it does to the mind to ask,
Is for me, where the juicy stuff is.
What’s over there in the in-between.
In the in-between spaces and places.
Life happens in the middle of them.
Or is there another place?
When an electron changes what it is doing
because we witness it, we only see it here
or there. But there is a whole other ‘thing’
it is doing, a whole other set of potential
behaviors that we don’t get to see.
I’m after THAT in my work.
What we are not seeing.
The space between the visible
and invisible is where I like to hang out.
World between worlds, that is where
I paint from and teach from, and ask
these questions from.
What if….
It’s not either or
but something mysterious
and beautiful
between the two
that transcends
the titles and their
assigned meanings.
Is it a reductionist view
that may be limiting us?
Or something else?
What’s the dynamic bridge between?
For you? What arises?
If you are around a lot
of people, and I am,
in our conversation you
will likely hear, on an
average day in an average
café – some of the above
as ways to describe our experiences.
I am not in the flow.
There is either fear or love.
We have to bring the light.
I don’t want to fail.
I want to work in the feminine.
I don’t want do things the masculine way.
Really, it is in many conversations.
Dare I say, most?
Listen for it now – personal descriptions
that are held in this paradigm.
Yours and theirs, ours.
If I was doing this right, I would be creating abundance.
This shouldn’t have to be so hard, if I was in alignment there would ease.
If I do this, then that will happen. And I don’t want “that.”
Lost of assumptions here that are creating invisible constraints.
Do we need them?
What is being lost from this way of viewing the universe?
Even though we know only about 5-7 percent
of what is knowable about how the universe works,
What about the other 94% of what we can’t see?
Can we learn to live more in there?
Even those of us who claim to be conscious
find ourselves within these limiting language parameters.
How do we move along the continuum?
And what of beauty?
Do you have a view of beauty that is ready for revision?
Set that word free for yourself and this conversation
may light up in new ways…Beauty has everything to do
with allowing us to see what we are not seeing….
Jonathan calls these either/ors a divine dichotomy.
“They need the other state in order to be.
It makes no value judgement between
what’s right and wrong, but the middle path.
Equilibrium, balance, harmony, not stasis”.
I love talking with Jonathan…
When I first met him I would give him
two choices, this or that, he would almost
always say, YES.
In Newtonian physics for every
action there will be an equal and
opposite action. Our yes moves us
beyond that previous model of
if this, then that. Is this true still,
yes, is it not always true – yes.
Cause and effect is not always true.
There’s more.
I don’t have answers. I have questions
I hope inspire us with to think in new ways.
Getting this hidden thinking conscious is my hope.
You likely have had this dialogue before.
My café’s are about cups of questions.
Curiosity is my probe into consciousness.
We are told it is so. This either/or.
This is what we already know.
A fixed world.
Then there is what we don’t know.
Let’s create a new framework.
Is transcending this limiting thinking…
Presence? Choice? Being?
What if this was really about discovering
YOUR way…..a way consistent with your being
and your story, that you are causing?
Would access to your way of moving
move you beyond the light/dark,
the right/wrong? Would a whole
series of choices be revealed for you
that were hidden before?
(Our new class MYTHOS is an invitation
to create your own MYTH anew.)
Limiting language is keeping us
from seeing what there is.
Art, poetry, music, and creativity
reveal to the senses, the alchemical bridge
between worlds without cancelling
one thing or the other. We see both places
and the way between.
The dynamic interplay
of pre-conceived polarities
is resolved if only for a moment.
Then it’s gone again.
In my teaching painting video yesterday
I was working on something impossibly hard,
for me, hands – and telling them not to
be afraid to try it. Then I was like –
wait – you can be afraid – because clearly
I was afraid, but did it anyway.
On camera.
It transcended fear/love and became
courage. It was neither love nor fear,
but movement to new place. I could
have stopped at “don’t be afraid” but
I realized I WAS afraid – and so there
was more truth in – feel the fear and
do it anyway. It takes conscious
effort to choose to go to the next place
on the path, and find language for it
that takes you there….
In a conversation recently someone
asked me, isn’t it all about love?
Aren’t you just guiding people into love
with your work?
I said – no – strangely enough.
I am not trying to get them anywhere
but to the next right place for them on
their path. If I have a preconceived
idea that I am leading them to LOVE
even if I am operating in love, then
I have laid a constraint on their experience.
They may actually need to go into anger
or despair and the last thing I want to do
is make them feel like they need to go
into love in order to get where they are going.
I try to remain a free clear space for them
to do their own work without my ideas,
or beliefs, influencing their outcome.
Even good ones. Well meaning ones.
‘Wouldn’t it be nice if’, ones.
I learned this spiritual perspective
from a transgender being
named Francis on her way to becoming
a woman in a red dress and high heels.
I will write more about her as an early
teaching another day.
The more I write the deeper this is going
and I am leaving for a trip tomorrow so
I need to stop this tirade and my cup is
empty. Or is it full, of possibility?
Signed with the last sip of coffee,
in a star-streaked morning
with the sound of a dove contrasting
with the sound of the world waking up.
You may have heard me speak of this,
and I will speak more soon, but yes,
we did buy a small building for a school.
Hence, why failure is up for me.
I have failed LARGELY before when I
chose spaces, both larger in many ways
than I was ready for. But here I am.
Here we are.
It’s been a curious time and I am grateful
for my ever shifting framework capacity.
Of working with my story to change my view.
About moving boxes. About traffic.
About having a cold for eight days during it.
About leaving for a trip when I’ve just moved.
My framework continues to provide a FRESH
view of each experience. Like plate tectonics
I set myself free of meaning over and over.
COOL. This is the core work of my community
of Cosmic Cowgirls – this work of story and
metaphor. Inherent in the name, Cosmic
and Cowgirl you have stars and earth, a woman
straddling the worlds. Our community
experience and research is ROOTED in
these kinds of inquiries.
About how poor choices can become great
legends to unfold. IF we choose.
I have chosen.
This is different than creating your
own reality as you want to see it
or desire it. I don’t think doing that is all it
is cracked up to be actually. There
is something else only your imagination
can show you about how this works.
Your own myth reveals to you what
you can’t see. Now that’s cool.
By entering an imaginal world,
we find the hidden things that
have been waiting in the wings for
our attention.
“I’m warning you I am weightless, and the wind is always shifting.
So don’t hang anything on me if you ever want to see it again.”
~ Ani DiFranco
Our new class MYTHOS is such a joy, as I came together with my dear friends and colleagues of over 8 years, Jenafer Joy and Stella Mac to bring you MYTHOS – a summer adventure in painting, writing and possibility.
REGISTRATION Coming in JUNE 2016
