Studio Anavami News and Blog - Anavami Center

Blog #4C Axis Mundi

Apr 18, 2022

Threshold, oil & cold wax with collage on canvas, 3′ X 5′

As we go into shapeshifting in the seminar, In-Bodying the Field in Marking, it is a means to explore the animate-field in which we live. As we change shapes in the imaginal realm we want some navigation tools, like a strong concept of selfhood and an anchoring in the physical body. This week we mark into the centering and grounding of axis mundi, somatically feeling it through gravity’s attraction to the center of the earth. This also gives us a sense of directionality and relationship in the cosmos. Like all our explorations in marking this is not claiming a new belief system but nudging our unquestioned one for a possibly greater perspective and insight into our relationship to life.

Our preparation for the axis mundi marking comprised of somatic exploration with guest facilitator, Carol Agnessens, as well as the evocation of several poets. Participants connected energetically to the feeling of aligning with the world’s axis relating to Emilie Conrad’s comment, founder of Continuum Movement:

It took me many years to recognize that the undulating fluid that I felt in my body…the undulating waves of primordial motion are the movements of love. Not emotional love but an encompassing atmosphere of love. A love that has its own destiny.

If that is a bit of a leap in this great time of stress and polarization perhaps David Whyte’s thoughts from Consolations would relate:

Besieged is how most people feel most of the time: by events, by people, by all the necessities of providing, parenting or participating and even by creative possibilities they have set in motion themselves, and most especially, a success they have achieved through long years of endeavor.

To feel crowded, set upon, blocked by circumstances, in defeat or victory, is not only the daily experience of most human beings in most contemporary societies; it has been an abiding dynamic of individual life since the dawn of human consciousness…

If the world will not go away then the great discipline seems to be the ability to make an identity that can live in the midst of everything without feeling beset…In this space of undoing, and silence we create a foundation from which to re-imagine our day and ourselves…

Creating a state of aloneness in the besieged everyday may be one of the bravest things individual men and women can do for themselves. Nel mezzo, in the midst of everything, as Dante said, to be besieged – but beautifully, because we have made place to stand….

This is the axis mundi that we are cultivating our marking.

Note about painting, Threshold. It is what emerged from the many months of marking pieces. The theme relates to exploration of selfhood, intimate relationship and ancestry which I am beginning to perceive as a plumbline or axis mundi. This piece came together very differently than from how I have been painting most my life. There was no planning or evaluating, but a kind of listening. I found myself using colors I was never drawn to before, like construction orange. It was more of a constant discovery. I was guided to overlay a fine netting and press it into the cold wax and then in several days later to take it leaving a texture. I still do not know where this marking work may lead in relation to artwork, but already it feels like deeper images are arising as collaboration with the field develops.

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Blog #4B Selfhood/Breathing

Apr 11, 2022

Exploring Selfhood through marking we incorporated our prints from last week of persona and shadow. We opened with an invocation from Undefended Love by Jett Psaris and Marlen Lyons…

Intimacy—direct, unmediated, heart-to-heart connection with ourselves and with others—can only occur when the heart is undefended. To cut through our personal differences, to reach the unveiled part of ourselves that is deep enough to express the most profound and untamed aspects of our being means learning how to love and be loved without defenses and without obstructions. It means cultivating the capacity to be emotionally present even when we feel exposed or vulnerable; learning to relinquish the many strategies we have employed to feel safe and in control; and finding the courage to love without guarantees or requirements. Through developing the capacity for intimacy in this way, we discover love is an abiding presence in the emotional center of our being, our heart and we can never feel emotionally disconnected, incomplete, or unloved.

Selfhood implies a level of maturity that identifies with a larger sphere. To guide us to this understanding we took the time for conscious breathing over and extended period showing and feeling how the exhale and inhale are distinct yet intimately a part of a whole that does not work without total union. Just as in breathing, selfhood denotes a larger container beyond cultural beliefs, national identity, age and occupation. It includes our character holding all the other selves.

We all explored selfhood in our own way, through sensing, remembering a peak experience that informed the larger self or simply by trusting our marking to reveal something that has been concealed. Most of us worked in the format of triptych which offered a sense of the temporal and/or change in space. In my own work I have found working in a series in the diptych or triptych format, where the pieces inform each other, additional nuances to appear. It is a way of add another ball to those that I juggle which focuses my concentration that often develops content vertically, as well as horizontally. It requires an attitude of reciprocal yielding and loosening of control.

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Blog #4A Persona/Shadow

Apr 4, 2022

This week we investigate persona, our social role as the appearance one presents to the world. Personal is with what we most identify but have you ever watched yourself walk into a room through the eyes of others? When we see our persona from the outside with how others see us a new identifying shapes from how we are seen and how others respond to us. We explored marking through these personas with a couple of techniques that highlighted the object/subject split. We first did touch printing using both hands at the same time to print with our fingers and hands by touching the surface of a paper laid on an inked plate. The intention was to sense the face and body of our person, not depicting or representing but rather getting in touch with it, literally and figuratively. One more sentence on results.

cut masks for printing

Our meditation was from David Whyte, Consolations-Shadow

Shadow does not exist by itself, it is cast, by a real physical body…it is shaped by presence; presence comes a priori to our flaws and absences. To change the shape of ourselves is to change the shape of the shadow we cast… Shadow is a necessary consequence of being in a sun lit visible world, but it is not a central identity, or a power waiting to overwhelm us.

To live with our shadow is to understand how human beings live at a frontier between light and dark; and to approach the central difficulty, that there is no possibility of a lighted perfection in this life; that the attempt to create it is often the attempt to be held unaccountable…

monoprints from masks

We cannot talk about persona without talking about this shadow, that aspect of ourselves that we can easily see in others but with which we do not often identify. This includes the bright shadow or that brilliant and whole part of us that is often projected onto others or into the future but which we do not embrace in the now.

Print with mask and touch marking

We used printing masks to explore the shadow self and in preparation we looked at our literal shadow projected on a wall or floor with a strong light behind us. We took photos of different attitudes and postures, especially those we usually do not show to others. From these photos we made drawings the size of the printed paper which we cut out to create a mask, an area that blocks the ink when laid on the inked plate. We went with larger shapes with no ink so we could print over or into with touch markings. Following are some of the pieces from the group’s printing of touch-marking and shadow printing.

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Blog #3E Denial of Death

Mar 30, 2022

In our adventure of challenging the current paradigm we question the man-made cultural norms that dictate our lives. More than anything else, our greatest repression is the “Denial of Death”. Pulitzer Prize winner, Ernest Becker’s book by that title maintains. Human beings spend an inordinate amount of energy strategizing to ward off recognition of our mortality. Socrates said as recorded by Plato, “the practice of dying” is a phrase that describes one aspect of how we become “morally mature.” Socrates urges us all to turn inwards and face our mortality. The Greek philosopher is among many others insisting we live with death in order to clarify our motives in life. It is surely possible that denial of death is at the bottom of our materialism, consumerism, addiction and escapism.

Axis Mundi/Intimacy

We have been using poems by Billy Collins this month as he is an artist who plays the death card as he is coming to terms with dying, the ultimate loss, with humor. Making the life/death/life issue conscious and personal is central to other realities in life and is at the core of artist’s work, be it musician, dancer, writer or one of the artists of everyday life—chef, mother, carpenter. It also defines the different between skill and artistry. As materialists, we are used to perceiving and dealing with things like replaceable commodities, so our sense of loss seems minor in daily life. However, we all must process allowing our loss to make room to live when we feel and note loss. When not consciously felt and grieved loss becomes what Stephen Busby from Findhorn says constructs ‘the un-lived life.’

Baba Yaga’s House

Artists in particular, on the creative edge, cannot afford to deny the exchange that is required because it will stall the process. The creative process is on the edge of the unknown willingness to risk loss. This week we incorporated two earlier participant-lead refrigerator journeys, placing them in a part of the body to access in the imaginal somatic to blend into one piece through marking. We then deconstructed that piece onto a new substrate. This was to underscore how loss of the cut-up piece became material for something new. Despite the initial discomfort, everyone enjoyed the freedom of not knowing what was happening. Several of the re-worked pieces found a deeper resonance with more revealing content.

The first image above draws on two Refrigerator Field trips-one that brought me to Axis Mundi and the other to Intimacy. These were cut-up and reconstructed. Out of the ashes arose the image that reminded me of Baba Yaga’s three-legged house. She is the archetype witch of the transformative agent of the psyche containing the wise and the terrifying tester. This alerted me that when a threshold guardian shows up there is something around the corner.

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Blog #3D In-Bodying the Field: Fridge Field-trip & Embodied Knowing

Mar 23, 2022

Blog #3D In-Bodying the Field: Fridge Field-trip & Embodied Knowing

Axis Mundi

#3D Blog: Aspects of the archetype of artist

The Japanese movie Hokusai’s Daughter conveys how passion and commitment go beyond all social customs and interpersonal needs. Katsushika Oi, the main character in the movie is like many artists- often on the edge of societal norms. This is not just a rebellious or revolutionary reaction but instead arises as an investigative state of being at the boundaries of what is known.

Look at the life of your favorite artists to see their sacrifices. They are visionaries, not in the sense of dramatic tragedy but often in loss that is consciously negotiated. The transfer of energy with the sacred is the meaning of sacrifice.

Intimacy

Many artists have lived their lives on an extraordinary edge. Canadian artist, Emily Carr at the turn of the century, tromped through the wilderness to paint Native Americans. Because American artist Alice Neel worked in the era of Abstract Expressionism her paintings were ignored for decades, except by other painters. This year there was a retrospective of her work in New York at the Metropolitan Museum. Mexican artist Frieda Kahlo painted from her physical pain and anguish through a folk art tradition. Japanese artist Katsushika Oi went against all customs established for women as she developed her interest in color. It is interesting to note that sociologically the framing of the sacred trade of artist varies greatly in society’s discussion of different expectations of men and women. Just look to art history and museums of the world to see the percentage of women. Not being recognized or seen is in itself a tremendous loss for an artist. But there is something much more valuable that is the impetus for working.

This week in circle we marked combining disparate subjects from imaginal journeys into one piece to experience the possibility of holding dichotomies is a wider embrace. We introduced death and loss, grief and sacrifice as part of this process which we will explore more next week.

The images that follow are from participants in this six-month course. They are not depictions or illustrations but, rather, experiences of the act of doing and feeling. They are a way of resourcing and exploring, as well as, embodying the experience.

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Blog #3C In-Bodying the Field: Conjunctive Knowing

Mar 16, 2022

I have been sitting in an ice-cold stream pounding kuzu fiber on a rock with a wooden mallet for hours in a small paper-making village outside of Nagoya, Japan. Why exactly am I doing this I wonder. It feels like a traditional apprentice initiation, but it is more than that. It is about conjunctive knowing, instructions directed through the eye movements of my taciturn teacher. It is part of an apprentice systems across time and place to embody knowledge by watching, listening, smelling and tasting, learning through the body.

Apprenticeships in the seventies in Japan was very much like it had been for hundreds of years. They honored the tradition that someone who came seeking mentorship from the master would not necessarily be taken on, but they were to be fed as long as they stayed on the porch. Sometimes this was all it took so that perseverance could be demonstrated to the master and acceptance found. There was a sense of perseverance but also of discovery of self within that I developed during my time studying with various masters. My pottery teacher would say to listen to the sound of the brush touching the bisqueware to know how thick to make the iron oxide. It took me two years in calligraphy to realize myself how important breath was. Once my tea ceremony teacher stopped in her preparation for guests and listened to the wind. We went outside and she handed me the rake for the first time. She watched me rake up all the leaves in front of the tea house and then stood there with the silent message that we would stand here until I finished. I looked around madly for any missed leaves. Finally, I reached over and slightly shook the maple tree. A few red leaves fell on the path and my teacher bowed and enter the tearoom.

Awareness of knowing through the body rather than the mind, has been one of the many gifts I still carry with me from my time in Japan. Gnosis is the kind of conjunctive knowing that in the Bible refers to sexual relations, knowing a woman. It is a union, not just taking in information but a knowing through the body. This same idea is how information and skill are transferred in the cultural arts of Japan and many places in the world. Sweeping the floor and making tea is becoming attuned to not only the master but the materials, the shop and sometimes hundreds of years of experience. It is also developing a telepathy between workers.

In the studio we are using somatic practice and embodying imagination as our entries into knowing through the body as we develop conjunctive learning. We trust our hand to reach out for a color or marking implement and are developing awareness of conversation, even flirting with other elements in our field so that we can play together. This way of working is bringing in many surprising elements, especially for people who have worked from personality for decades. One thing that strikes us is that we often don’t immediately relate to the marking before us. Our old ways of perceiving what works artistically is not important. The gage through the last few years of this practice is more toward authenticity, what is evoked and felt in the body and what stays with you as an afterglow or even shadow. It is because we are in a greater collaboration and it can take a while to see it.

The following images are from participants in the In-Bodying the Field Six-month Seminar, relating journeys through the refrigerator through mark-making.

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Blog #3B In-Bodying the Field: Fridge Field-trips-Soul Boat

Mar 9, 2022

Last week the In-Bodying Marking Circles we ventured through a refrigerator door for what we started calling a field-trip. It was an experience in the Imaginal Field felt and explored in the body with continued expression in marking. Each of our trips was unique, from a glass lemon-aide pitcher in grandmother’s fridge, to a trapeze artist in a circus, to the inside of a car. This week each circle had two guided field-trips initiated by participants patterned on their journeys.

Blog #3B In-Bodying the Field: Fridge Field-trips

In the Wednesday Circle, Lucy’s as guide lead me personally to the lap of the hungry ghost, that Buddhist archetype of unsatisfiable desire. This was dramatically counter-balanced in the second field-trip, led by Jess, with the delightful soul energy explored on three substrates. And so, I found myself facing the last substrate working with the energy of desperate longing and buoyant tenacity and vision of soul. Concentrating these experiences in different parts of the body is a way to hold these energies while allowing for something new to arise. This is well beyond emotional expression of playing with color and marks. The embodiment ignites a leap of insight leading into unconsidered territory. It takes time, slowing time to hold these energies in the imaginal body. This practice of seeing how the piece wants to be completed is a bit different from what we have been doing, as we have been unconcerned if a piece is finished. Considering how to complete a piece takes invites in the unknown, possibly through an acasual or synchronistic event. It is like the capping haiku line that leads to something that embraces the banal in a greater light. The third substrate resolved the contradiction with the soul being held by unsatisfied desire. The final image suggested an offfering of a nest or boat.

Images of In-Bodying the Field Participants

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Blog #3A Imaginal Field: Refrigerator an Archetypal Portal

Mar 2, 2022

Mark-marking this week continued to cultivate somatic intelligence as we access the Imaginal Field. By becoming-like other things, we expanded the felt-body response by cultivating vision into the unknown through imagination. It is an ancient portal that the age of reason has upstaged, and yet is alive in science and all the arts, music, performance, literature and every aspect of life that is carried to artistry, like architecture, landscaping, cooking, parenting or even politics.

This shape-shifting is becoming easier as we recognize how many ways we slip into each other and address other with empathy and compassion. It is an ancient way of learning, expanding perception and gaining new insights. Through Marking, we soften the demarcation of inside and outside, experiencing more and more how our defined physical body is really integral to a greater biosphere.

In the arts, an archetype creates an immediate sense of familiarity, without need to ponder why a character or event is understood. Archetype can be defined as an emotion, character type, or event that is notably recurrent across the human experience. Consider the archetypes of things around you. The chair that holds you for comfort and ease to do things like eat, work, converse or travel. It is a structure adapted to human body, a kind of a container to easily enter and leave. It has a history beyond function and culture denoting social status and even termination of life. Our inquiry is interested in the metaphor and poetics of archetypes in relation to the Imaginal Field.

Your home, a safe private place, like a nest or a shell, is what Gaston Bachelard marks as the place to dream. In the introduction to his book, The Poetics of Space. Richard Kearney says, “Poetics, for Bachelard, is not a matter of anonymous floating signifiers; it signals a relational dynamic between beings, involving vital dimensions of intimacy, secrecy, desire and repose.” And later, “Imagination is at its best when it is incarnate, elemental, opening out into time and space, even when the space is elsewhere—before being, beneath being, beyond being, more than being.”

This week we explore universal archetypes as organizing principles, which unite physical matter with consciousness. We used opening a refrigerator door, that everyday utilitarian object, as the start for everyone to step into a unique Imaginal Field. My refrigerator contained containers, preserving sustenance and enjoyment. This container has a physical inner structure but also a metaphoric structure related for me to the psyche. I thought of how different the freezer compartment is from the shelves on the door or the vegetable bins. The archetype of refrigerator gave us a poetic fulcrum to investigate being in our marking.

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In-Bodying the Field Blog #2D: Reciprocity, Shape Shifting

Feb 27, 2022

Shape-shifting may sound like an ethnographic study where a shaman transforms into animal, while in truth it is fundamental to our everyday experience. Shape-shifting allows for the ability to change form or identity at will. It is a part of spiritual practice, parenting, the arts and just about any aspect of life that is carried to artistry. Compassion and empathy are ways of shapeshifting.

My friend, who does large scale landscape says the way she chooses the plants is to run them through her body. As she imaginally becomes like the plants she can see if they are appropriate for the overall plan- how is she (as them) through the seasons, as size, as color, as movement. Closing our eyes is actually a powerful tool we have all used, where we have felt for a moment that we are there doing it ourselves-as we watched ice figure skating or dancing, swayed to music, “run” the track or thought through a difficult problem. Einstein mentions imagining as integral to his theory of relativity where he pictured himself riding a light beam had him gain insights that he was not able to gain through logic alone.

In-bodying Marking this week focused on becoming-like-something with which we had a natural affinity. The words of David Abram, Becoming Animal, set the stage for the exploration in this Imaginal Field:

“The boundaries of a living body are open and indeterminant more like membranes than barriers they define a surface of metamorphosis and exchange. The breathing, sensing body draws its sustenance and it’s very substance from the soils, plants and elements that surround it; it continually contributes itself, in turn, to the air to the composting earth…breathing the world into itself, so that it is very difficult to discern, any moment, precisely where this living body begins and where it ends.”

Abram’s words helped participant to have a body sense of those times throughout our lives when we have changed shapes, like playing as a child, intimate moments with a loved one and being absorbed in a book. In the current ecological crisis movies like Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life and Louie Schwartzberg’s Fantastic Fungi make it much easier to access feelings of belonging to the earth as never before.

The following marking pieces are explorations of being-like something else by participants in last week’s marking sessions. Many found a new sense of making-marks that stemmed from the new perspective. The experiences were varied but there is an embodied quality in the marks that shows through as sensing.

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Blog #2C In-Bodying the Field, Reciprocity: Flirting and Animism

Feb 20, 2022

There is a way to explore animism in the practice Marking by flirting. The definition of animism we are using it is the essence of an object or entity. It is the spirit that energizes, even if at first it is beyond our sensorial recognition. Rather than a belief we are cultivating more an attitude or practice as we become comfortable and adept in the Imaginal Realm. You could also say that it is a poetic approach. Poetry of the plastic arts, music, literature and performance all seek deeper and meaningful connection through the intelligence of the imaginal realm. Through marking we explore the reciprocity of the life and essence of the field in relation to flirting.

Flirting can be subtle or blatant, social, sexual or aesthetic behavior involving spoken, written word or body language communicated in creative exchange by one person to another. We are extending it to what we usually think as objects. It suggests an interest in deeper relationship or simple unfolding amusement. In the spirit of Reciprocity notice what catches your attention, your eye, or perhaps kinesthetically, your body. Not just people or objects but how the light slants through the trees, the stance of a crow, a gesture that brings back a memory. Because flirting goes back and forth you need to give some space to whatever you are flirting with to respond. Let your imagination start an exchange. Give the encounter some leeway to play, transforming into new possibilities. Engage in the exchange for deeper relationship in the Imaginal Realm.

Some approaches in Transpersonal Psychology and Process Therapy look at physical symptoms not as pathological but invitations for creative encounters that offer important insights and information. Arnold Mindell talks about symptoms as dreamings. They have important information for guidance for assimilation and integration. Flirting is a way to engage secondary process, which at first lies outside of our immediate awareness. If our true self is nonlocal, then anything that catches your attention is you, an edge of the bigger-you. Flirting goes back and forth, so take up the baton.

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#2A & #2B Reciprocity: Coherency and Organizing Principle

Feb 14, 2022

In February we are exploring Reciprocity, the exchanging things with others. It is fundamental to the Marking practice and allows us to acknowledge the field as the collaborator in all our markings. We are inviting relationship with an animistic universe. The core of this point of view is contrary to René Descartes philosophy where he maintained that the only exchange is between humans as dualism of two finite substances, mind and matter. Many now in distinct fields like David Abram, ecologist and philosopher, Merlin Sheldrake, microbiologist and writer of history and philosophy of science and Arnold Mindell’s transpersonal psychologist, process therapist and writer for social change disagree with that limited view. Many other fields are expressing that the interconnection with our environment is already in place and instrumental to personal and planetary well-being. Our practice in marking is to perceive an open system where we can exchange energy or material with all life and objects in our environment.

In David Abram’s chapter on reciprocity in Becoming Animal he sets the stage for a different organizing principle where we cannot always apply logic perceiving, as nature is mysteriously interrelated. There are various ways to understand this greater connection. Heart Math Institute Research Director Dr. Rollin Mc Craty speaks of “an energetic alignment and cooperation, to manifest intentions and harmonious outcomes.” Through biofeedback research Heart Math suggests an organizing principle, which brings the brain, mind, body and emotions into balanced alignment and changes our relationship to everything. He calls this state as coherence.

This week for home-reflection we played with the Sun as orientation of directionality. It is metaphor for knowing where we are in a more expansive way than the binary left/right or back/front. We also used the Polyvagal theory as a metaphor. It points out that the vagus nerve running through the autonomic nervous system is the internal control center. It is the orientation of the critical functions of human physiology determining our reactions creating the difference in how our brain receives and responds to information. It is the guide to whether we are centered, connected and feeling safe or go into flight, fight or freeze. The polyvagal exercises help to keep us in that safe center so we can respond appropriately when necessary. It is a metaphor for our planetary sun as the central component of life. It is understandable how the myth narrative of our planetary people points to creation myths of the Sun-God from Egypt, Norse, Hindu, Mayan and the central figure in Christianity of Jesus Christ.

Coherency, although often defined with logical interconnection or sense of understandability has a greater context. An aspect beyond this is the meaning of coherent as closely attached or connected, which is not always logical. The stories by which we make sense of the world, formed by inherited beliefs, are not always congruent with a greater perception, connection and exchange within the biosphere. Sometimes these are not brought to full consciousness until a great tragedy or decision must be faced. These beliefs are most often expressed symbolically in our creation myth. In our work this week we incorporated those myth stories as we explored our relationship with animism and allowed us to expand our reciprocity beyond just the mind matter approach to interactions.

In-Bodying the Field Blog #1D: Re-wiring, Metaphor & Bear of Gravité Poem, Tacking into the Wind

Jan 24, 2022

As we Mark we are rewiring the way we perceive reality. What better paradigm than the academic training of visual arts and how deeply ensconced in materialism and economic machinery that world often manifests. Our interest is tacking in on the winds of intuition and the sensorial connection of the body as we develop the imaginal that leap of vision. Heart orientation is central to this process and as the HeartMath Institute explains through its innovative research in stress, coherence and heart-brain interaction, this requires some tools. We will look at their resources for optimal performance through coherence. The three most powerful techniques are Freeze-Frame®, Cut-Thru® and Heart Lock-In®.

Traditionally, the mythology around artwork is a dramatic angst of hair pulling, addiction, depression, revelation and elation. There is validity in this model in the arts that embrace the soul-searching roller coaster. The angst of the artistic process is aggrandized as we are looking for something outside of that model, an allowing of the full spectrum of emotions while we cultivate a resilience through coherence. We need not be lost to art but rather create approaches of marking as a way to cultivate sensibilities by developing a different level of awareness and response. In HeartMath the state of coherence is associated with sustained positive emotion and a high degree of mental and emotional stability. As we are rewiring how we perceive the reality that we have created simple HeartMath techniques can be adapted for our process. This is not to flatline but to know coherence and have the awareness to recognize how it nurtures authenticity, creativity and innovation.

We are not going for a product at this stage, nor are we going for good, it’s working or even finished. It doesn’t mean that those feelings are not a part of what we do, but we are not making artwork with that kind of navigating. We are experimenting, exploring, changing habits developing new awareness. The first step is to realize when you are working the old stuff, which usually brings forth comments like; I don’t like it! It is dark, light, no values What does it need? Can I make it work? Etc. It is valuable to realize when you are in judgement, working a strategy or trying in any way. If you are identified with the work then it is not what we are doing. Instead, we are developing a new relationship with who we are and the collaborative work that we do-collaboratively as well as a sense of release from detachment that will allow us to look deeper as we move through the rest of these marking sessions.

One of the tools we use is poetry, which acts as a leverage to create a more nuanced context for our work. In the In-Bodying Marking we often use poetry to shift out of the everyday mind and find that the use of words can extend our ideas beyond the literal. Jane Hirshfield’s short Ted Talk shows how this works as she asks how do metaphors help us better understand the world? And, what makes a good metaphor? she explores these questions with writers like Langston Hughes and Carl Sandburg, who have mastered the art of bringing a scene or emotion to life.

In exploring gravity & levity for a future In-Body marking session again the Great Bear emerges from my painting. It is not so much as the quality of poetry but the experience with the secondary process, which will be brought forward in another blog.

Tacking into the Wind by Majio

Great Bear with delicate feathered wings
holds me to his will for neuroplasticity
teasing me with dopamine until like Pavlov’s dog
my vision narrows and I am a circus two-stepping-bear
who I cried for as a child at the Russian Circus

The only motivation is survival and that is dim and twisted
my mind is no opponent, yet my animal body lurches
beyond the myopic blinders to slide from under the weight
to move until dancing takes hold, it is not fun it is not easy.

Markings first show from where I have come
then where I am…..way becomes the path
I tack into the wind

In-Bodying the Field Blog #1C: Slowing Down, No Inside/Outside & Life-force & Bear of Gravité Poem, Cup of Tea

Jan 17, 2022

Slowing Down is the over-arching theme this week and we explore how it relates to inside/outside and KI life-force. Slowing down is accessing deep primordial space that is ever present with no inside or outside

“The innerness of the so-called world is nowhere so evident as in the life of our body. The air we breathe one moment will be breathed by someone else the next and has been breathed by someone else before. We exist as respiring, pulsating organisms within a sea of life-serving beings. As we become able to hold this more and more steadily in our consciousness, we experience relatedness at an elemental level. We see that it is not a matter of trying to be related, but rather of living consciously into the actuality of being related. As we yield ourselves to the living presence of this relatedness, we find that life begins to possess an ease and a freedom and a naturalness that fill our hearts with joy.”

M.C. Richards from Centering

Inside/outside is an expedient labeling that is useful but can also distort understanding of the whole. This is demonstrated in the concept of notan, where any mark is integral to the space around it, not separate but instead informing each other. We can easily see how locking into place as subject/background or object/space distorts the whole. This week in our marking endeavors we are exploring inside/outside in relation to body and like notan we are interested in the wholeness of container/contained and place in the field.

Another point in our context with marking this week is how life-force or ki or chi relates to this wholeness. David Abram, in Becoming Animal, describes the shadow as not just a flat stain on the cement but really the volume of lightlessness. In the same way our markings, whether actual physical, material or in metaphor, are not simply residue. A meager delineation of inside/outside or object/background would stunt the information that is held in the whole constellation. We are seeking a volume that connects mark to history, place, event and context and is graphically evident in drawing where we see how the non-linear time of the psyche interacts and constitutes that volume.

In the imaginal field consider that there is no outside/inside but as you breathe there is a constant flow of contraction/expansion. Just at last we felt the constant give in our relationship to the substrate of our marking and marking implements, we considered the requisite yielding.

Cup of Tea
By Majio

dropping down into the arm chair
           into the lap of the blue-winged bear
                   cup of tea in hand rises and falls
                            with the lever of my arm
                                   to absorb the sudden change
                                           of altitude, without spill

steam streaming upward
liquid surface flattens,
brought to my lips—which open
to admit… pool in my mouth
shooting like a shot
down my throat—chest
into the center of gravity

In-Bodying the Field Blog #1B, Imaginal Realm: Psyche and Social Change & Bear of Gravité Poem, Lavender Bath

Jan 10, 2022

These blog posts articulate the on-going context of

In-Bodying the Field, Marking Seminar

Blog Post #2: Imaginal Realm for Psyche and Social Change

In-Bodying the Field has the intention to radically shift how we perceive reality using visual arts. Marking is the instrument we use in this audacious endeavor. Marking is defined as traces left by motion or pressure but also as a metaphor. Imagining a musical instrument is apt, although we are less concerned with a rote practice of technical skill and rather seek an embodied evocation realizing another level of relationship. Marking is potentially a conduit that bonds us through the body to the greater biosphere accessible all along but usually bypassed by the Over-culture. We are seeking a practice without a goal but with a strong intention. The world seems ripe for this as we see others pursuing these same goals. In Moral Imagination, imagination is used to embody and explore the unseen, to create a greater connection of us. It is an adventure into creativity for change inviting new possibilities outside the solely reductionist, rational and linear modes of putting together information. It is a practice of collective imagining in order to increase radical kinship with the human and more-than-human worlds, present, past and future.

In this process of In-Bodying the Field, we explore creative expression through somatic inquiry to shift our understanding and perception of here to unexamined systems as a way to participate in the world as collaborators rather than sole agents by:

embracing proprioceptive intelligence to nurture more creative & innovative understanding beginning with the body.
opening a dimensional portal through the imaginal realm.
expanding these perceptions and orientations through mark-making.
cultivating awareness of lived experience as in-formation through than the familiar and habitual.

As conduits of the metaverse marking is a means of participating as artist and shamans of ancient times who serve, heal, guide and inspire the community. We found a great resource in Josh Schrei’s The Emerald podcast. The Body as Metaverse speaks of several issues that are germane to our process. For example, our interest in changing the story is leveraged by his discussion of mythic narrative and his deep understanding of those stories as living narrative.

The podcast, Body is the Metaverse, talks about the deep mythosomatic function that we long for that the digital Metaverse or virtual otherworld does not provide. They spark our understanding of our morphing stories as we use myth as a reminder of the greater context. This takes us into nature, into our planet, into our belongingness and therefore into our body. We offer up our experience to others. But at this point, most importantly, we experience for ourselves how the body is the connection to the life of the world that we are an integral part.

https://player.fm/series/the-emerald/the-body-is-the-metaverse

Lavender Bath as Bear of Gravité by Majio

Having gone to bed by myself last night
you can imagine my surprise this morning
when I awakened to a bath being run.

It was a lavender-salts baths with a single candle
sitting in the tub half fluffy above the water line,
water be-draggled below it, was the Bear of Gravité.

To say I joined him/her is misleading, for I as I stepped
into the fragrant steaming bath, I became bear,
seated in stillness, blue feathered wings folded
upward, over-lapped pointing vertically

Total stillness brought one end of the double flame
to bob on the surface without candle in the lavender bath.
The slightest quiver shattering the light language
script on the water surface from intimate whisper
to haggling amongst the market stalls.

So began conversation between movement and light
that only the Bear of Gravité can have.

The inclination is to focus on the screen
of the water’s surface, breaking, dispensing,
fetching, reconnecting the light like ideas,
but what about the language between the candle flame
and the water’s surface and the light in the water?

The air-light, falls not just down but out, up…
it can be cupped, divided, sprinkled or eaten, while
the wet-light defusing loosening its concentration
to mix with lavender.

And yet it is the tension of the screen of surface
that is the playground for marks, a screen of reflections—
stretching, squeezing, melting and twisting,
an original appearance in distillation of essence.
Candle light marks on surface of lavender bath

In-Bodying the Field Blog #1A: Introduction to In-Bodying Marking, Yielding: Gravity/ Levity with Bear of Gravité Poem

Jan 3, 2022

Gravity/Levity-Yielding with Bear of Gravité Poem

Anavami Center, In-Bodying the Field explores not only marks, but entries into marking that for a practiced artist can redefine relationship to materials, images and the world. For the unpracticed it begins a fluid interaction with the world that in time will transform your present definition of art and your participation with it. For everyone it has an impact on how we see and perceive ourselves in the world. The work that arises from this kind of exchange is playful, adventurous yet ever risky. A challenge to most by not trying to be right or good. It flies in the face of the social norm and to most hits at the core of self-identification. At the same time, it opens new ways to witness creating.

Five years of implementing and exploring in this way I have found that I am much more aware of my relationship to everything in my world. I am not separate, nor could I be. Like many of you I have known this theoretically for a long time, but it has not been alive as it is now. I am not making art but participating in the creative exchange with which I am in relationship.

In this six-month series we start with the basics of marking making as yielding that orients us in space. Our mind/body is a fluid edifice of incessant motion that sources our capacity to mark in the greater field to which we belong. As we gain deeper insight, experience through exploration into markings it becomes clear that it is fundamental to all exchanges of information, communication and expression. Using our body, transmitter, receptor, and archive, as the template of the Universe…. the history of evolution of our planet is within us we will explore the template of the cosmos through what is most intimate to ourselves. The intention of this work is to discover our individual voice as we develop expression of the poetry as we live on the planet at this time.

Investigating gravity in our marking circle, both somatically and in terms of shapeshifting, a series of somatic experience with poems arose for me. The first being:

Blue Winged Bear, mixed medium, canvas, 3’ X 6’

Bear of Gravité

the great Bear of Gravité

sat on me this morning

like the Chinese ghost

who sits paralyzing you in your bed

I appealed to her blue feathered wings

to flutter and lift into the air

but not the slightest movement

nor levity

In time I found my way into her vast heart

Huge—full of stars and planets

un-named things of color and darkness

I did nothing there….

for a long time…. but feel into the space

and when I was no longer pinned to the bedsheets

I got up for a cup of tea…

Images of In-Bodying the Field Participants

These blog posts articulate the on-going context of

In-Bodying the Field, Marking Seminar

Blog Post #2: Imaginal Realm for Psyche and Social Change

Gravity/Levity-Yielding with Bear of Gravité Poem

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