Drawing Toward Insight

A Guide to Visual Meditation

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Fatigue. Making lines and shapes for primary emotions is fairly straightforward; they just appear at the end of your fingertips. As I focus on what fatigue might look like (without thinking too much), I saw that it included elements of depression and distance. Distance from the creative spark that keeps me energized. Now I know how to recharge.

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I can’t draw

“I can't draw a straight line.” If I gave you a ruler and a pencil, I'd  bet real money that you could draw a straight line. Did someone tell you that you couldn't use all your resources to do it? “I can't draw a stick figure.” When was the last time it would have been helpful for you to do so? “I can't draw to save my life.” Good news: It's quite unlikely that you will be asked to draw or die. When people give me these reasons for not wanting to draw, I ask what drawing is. Is drawing an activity reserved only for those we label artists, forbidden to the rest of us? Is drawing the first step in making a beautiful piece of art? Most people eventually come to a definition like this: Drawing is making a accurate representation of something we can see. Let me suggest to you an alternate approach. Drawing could be as simple as making marks that represent a thing, an emotion, or an experience. When children begin to draw, they do just that. They choose colors and type of lines that call to them. Bright, happy yellows and pinks, dark or sad blacks or purples, swirling, soft lines of joy and peacefulness or jagged, heavy lines of frustration and anger. It is only when adults take the crayon in hand to show us how something “should” be drawn, that we begin to think we can't draw.  Because we didn't exactly reproduce the symbol we were shown What a tragedy. We replace the emotional, intuitive mark-making with trite symbols: a heart for love, a lollipop tree, a square with a triangle topping it for a house and call it drawing. No, making those intuitive marks, lines and shapes that describe something inside you, that is drawing.

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From a recent Drawing Toward Insight workshop: 

When we were asked to do a self-portrait, I found myself starting with a mark I like a lot — an arc that often feels like a leaf or a crescent moon. This time is seemed to want to be the moon so I went with that flow. Other lines and shapes followed. Some turned out to be the moon itself (half-dark, half-full), others that grew into stems, and finally a mass in the background that wanted to be an Adirondack mountain. I didn’t plan anything but as things formed on the paper, I found myself thinking about the moon, its affect on planting cycles, and the place that I live. The overarching feeling was an association with Mother and the cycles of nature, nuture, and groundedness. It was a pretty good self-portrait, I thought. After we’d shared our drawings we took a short stretch break and when we came back to the circle, Marybeth suggested we revisit our work in search of a different perspective. She asked us to rotate the paper and to see if a new thought or feeling would emerge. I turned the page a quarter turn once, nothing. Again, nothing. And then the third time, there is was. Inescapable. An eye. I got chills for a second. When I shared it with the group there as a little gasp. They saw it too. Just as inescapably I as had. As I waited for insight, it came clear that it represented me — all the facets of me that I saw in the self portrait — as a watcher. Someone who not only watches but watches for. Being a Watcher  struck me as very true but also as a greater responsibility, sometimes, than I wanted or was even comfortable with. Being a Watcher, it seemed, was not something a person just did from time to time as needed. It was an archetypal charge from the Universe. Ugh. The evening ended on a lovely up note and we all went our separate ways. I replayed some of my favorite parts about the session on the drive home. But it bothered me — there was something I’d missed in my interpretation of the eye. And then it hit me — there had been a fraction of a second as the words for the image gelled that I’d forgotten or, maybe more hosestly, had chosen to ignore. It wasn’t me who was the eye, watching. It was The Eye, watching me. I’m still processing that.

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The lines and shapes in these pictures were made as preparation for an Insight Session. The goal is to get into a meditative mindstate, where the world… and you… are slowed down and able to access what you really see and touch and feel. Two of the images in the first pic were made by touching the object with one hand, feeling the edges and overall shape, while following those movements with the other hand with pen and paper. Eyes closed. The other two were made by looking at the object and drawing around the edges, but never looking at the paper except to reposition the pen when reaching the end of a line. The second pic was done by touching my face with one hand… eyes closed… and moving my pen with the other, following what I was feeling with my hand. Try one of these today. Move at a snail’s pace, in a place with no distraction. Feel your breathing slow and a sense of peace begin. Remember, the goal is not to make a precise replica of your object, but to observe it and record it as you feel and see it. Try an organic object (even a body part) rather an a manufactured one; they are much more interesting. Post your results here,we’d love to see them and hear how the process worked for you. You’ll be surprised at what you do when you stop worrying about what it’s supposed to look like.

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Morning Meditation. 

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Analog Drawing

I don't want to talk about it.

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So try not to see something in particular; try not to achieve anything special. You already have everything in your own pure quality.

Suzuki Roshi, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind

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Visual Meditation: flowing toward the joy

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Morning Meditation

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“It’s a relationship, with me on the bottom. At first I thought the green was reaching, connecting, but now I think it may be more forceful, pushing almost?”

- workshop participant

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Morning Meditation: the people and parts of my life that will overlap today ... With a few free-floaters, apparently.  I hope it all turns out as dreamy and soft as I have imagined it here 

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Reasons I didn't sleep last night

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Morning Meditation: what’s really happening in the mirror. Taking the time to see what is really present, rather than what the eye and mind expects to see. Modified contour with watercolor brush. Follow the line, slow your hand, slow your eye, slow your breath, discover what shapes appear. 

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Experiential Memory. Analog Drawing is a great way to document feelings about an experience.  Today I’m very energized. I’ve been attending a painting workshop led by a painter I’ve admired for quite some time, Robert Joyner, of painthog.com. Check out his work; I love it. Anyway, this little drawing will help me remember the emotions and energy of today when I want to relive it a bit in the future. 

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analog drawing: high anxiety

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Morning meditation. A soft, gray landscape with barren, dead trees. Peaceful feeling.