Mostly lost and occasionally found yogi, teacher, artist, recovering yoga studio director, big-picture thinker, community builder, and all-round problem solver, I have always had trouble reading maps.  I haven’t let this stop me from navigating. So, get in!  We’ll figure it out together and have a big adventure along the way.

The Beginning of a Journey

Does this sound familiar?  I had lost my artistic mojo.  After a burst of creativity, sitting down to paint had been almost painful.  Nothing flowed.  I was just grasping for ideas that would fade before the paint reached the canvas.  Occasionally I made myself complete a painting but eventually I didn’t even bother squeezing the paint on the palette, since I would lose interest and waste the paint.  But I had my yoga, my family life, things to do.  I was as empty as these dried seed pods.  (I completed this painting during this time — it took me, no kidding, a YEAR.  Every time I look at this painting, I’m amazed at how tortured it was for me.)

On the advice of some very wise people at Tranquil Space, I picked up Julia Cameron’s book The Artist’s Way:  A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity, (Penguin/Putnam, 1992) and I am now recovering the joy and spontaneity that my creative life had been until I got in the way of myself. And I’ve come to see that to become found, you really must be lost in the moment.

I have also come to see all of my life as one big creative project.

Practicing art and practicing yoga demand that you turn yourself off — get yourself out of your own way.  My art had become all about ME.  What did I think?  What did I want to say in this painting?  What did I think was interesting?  It’s just like how a pose becomes all the more difficult when I find myself thinking about what I look like or how much better I am at this pose now than I was in the past. The lesson is just to be in the moment.

Just practice. Come to the mat and find it.