Symmetry

The poem below came through me as I arrived in a little cabin on a lake in Vermont a couple of days ago. I came here to meet with my shamanic/spiritual teacher, and was already beginning to experience a shift in my awareness, away from my regular life, yet quite different from a “vacation” space.

I used to write a lot of poetry, but had stopped for many years. However, when I found myself by that incredible lake, I found that poetry was the only thing that could possibly come close to articulating my experience in any kind of authentic way. If I had tried to journal about it, something would be irrevocably lost in translation.

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Symmetry

(actual spot where I stood)

As above, so below —
Still water and sky
Shape perfect symmetry.
The stuff of paintings
That seem too perfect
To be real.
Within moments
Tender shades of cream and apricot
Morph into detached, steely grays.
A chill as the sun sets
Evokes a sudden unease
A sudden shift in awareness.
The passage from romantic pinks
To a cool hearkening of nightfall
Touches some deeper inner disquiet
That’s been unseen for years
Hidden behind familiar scenery.
This unexpected crack
In my tourist-like admiration
Of a picturesque, postcard-worthy spot
Is an offering —
An opening for me
To see the real landscapes
As without so within.

Knowing and Being Known

Something I struggle with in the analytic domain – and thus, ultimately, with being human – is the awareness that one can never fully know another person nor be fully known by another person. As Lewis Aron writes in A Meeting of Minds, this is an area all analysts must be aware of. The desire to be known is counter-balanced by the desire to remain private and retain one’s own self that belongs to no one else. Thus, this issue – and this blog post – is rife with paradox.

Once we emerge from our mother’s womb, we begin a lifelong struggle between aloneness and connection. Human beings are social creatures because complete aloneness is too painful, and yet we require alone time in order to know ourselves. Not having enough time and space to know ourselves is painful too. This balance is something all of us contend with – whether consciously or not.

The rest of this entry is now part of my Kindle ebook, titled “Learning Psychoanalysis: Explorations of a Psychoanalytic Candidate” and can be found here: https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B08X3TNH83

Risking It All With a Paintbrush

I would like to share a personal experience I recently had while painting. Those of you who are not into art, read it for the metaphor. This is about a whole lot more than just painting.

I had been working on a painting over the weekend, to express some strong emotions about the following week. Monday was going to be a challenge for me, and I really wanted to finish the painting before I saw my analyst on Monday afternoon. Monday’s session would mark a kind of anniversary that was extremely painful for me, an anniversary I wished weren’t happening. I don’t usually make time restrictions on myself when I paint – I like to give myself time to feel into the work and let it develop as it will, in its own time. However, this time, the time pressure was part of what I was expressing, which is why the time restriction felt right. (For the sake of privacy, I am not sharing what the anniversary was, or the title of the painting, but I feel that this will not take away from the experience I am sharing.)

I should tell you a little bit about how I paint. I begin when I either have a feeling I want to express, or the beginning of an image comes to mind. Sometimes it’s something as simple as wanting to make a stroke on the canvas in a particular way, with a specific brush or implement, or in a particular color. I paint in the abstract and never know what the finished product will look like. I just know what it doesn’t look like. I choose colors and textures I am drawn to in the moment as I paint, and in a way, “relate” to the canvas and to what’s already on it. It’s entirely based on how it feels. And I keep going, adding and changing things until I feel a shift inside me when I look at the painting. At some point – be it in the space of hours, days, or weeks – eventually something always “clicks” and the painting feels complete. It can be frustrating, because I never know when this shift would happen, but I have learned to enjoy the process and see what develops. Often (but not always), I take progress photos while I work – such as before making major changes. A mid-way photo of the painting I’m describing is to the right. (You can click the image for a larger view.)

The colors I have been most recently drawn to are navy, red, black, and white. Several of my recent paintings have had this color palette, as did this one. As I worked on it, for quite a while I didn’t like how it felt. It felt too similar to my previous paintings. And while even Picasso had a period when he painted in similar tones for some time, the painting just didn’t feel right. And time was pressing. Something needed to shift in the painting to finally express what I was feeling, but it kept feeling too similar – almost too “polite”. Knowing that I would show the painting to my analyst and to other people has somehow kept me constricted. I was afraid to paint something too gruesome, too painful to look at. I was ex pressing painful states, and yet I didn’t want them to be too painful to those who would look at it. It was a struggle. Feeling frustrated and saddened by this, I added more navy-colored downward “tears” to the canvas, in the hopes of making the shift I needed. It felt a little better, but still not quite right.

Suddenly, I noticed that I actually felt a similar kind of pressure that I often feel in the last 10 minutes of a session with my analyst. It is the urge to be authentic and express what really matters before my time is up and I have to get up and leave. As the morning inched toward the afternoon and I had less and less time remaining until this self-imposed deadline, I felt the urge to “put it all out there” without beating around the bush. Not knowing how to make the painting make the needed shift, I took a thick, coarse, dry brush, and began to make diagonal swipes across those navy “tears”. It felt like an enormous, desperate risk. I felt like I might deface the entire painting and possibly ruin the work of many, many hours. However, the internal pressure was too great, and the dissatisfaction with the previously too-familiar and too-polite painting was just too painful. I decided that I would rather ruin the painting than settle for something that felt wrong. I had both nothing and everything to lose. It’s only paint on a canvas, but sometimes the feeling really is this intense.

I began to make these diagonal strokes across the entire painting. It was both frightening and liberating. For a few moments, and in the safety of an 18” x 24” space, I was literally letting it all be out there. I wasn’t being “polite”. I wasn’t worried about overwhelming someone with my intensity. I just let my feeling go forth. So you won’t be surprised to learn that with such authentic expression, the painting transformed into what finally felt real. I let out an intense gasp when I suddenly saw the entire painting differently. My “click” finally happened. The texture changed, as did the depth and dimension of the entire work. It almost felt like it grew up from a more childlike, repetitive, familiarly-restricted feeling to a more mature, more authentic expression.

I am hopeful that the metaphor is self-evident, but for the sake of completeness I will re-state it. The familiarly-restricted, “polite” painting was like being familiarly inhibited and polite with another person, holding back my truth in fear of being too much, causing pain, and being too aggressive in my self-expression. Making those diagonal strokes felt like a risk, it went against all of the above – both literally and metaphorically. Under the pressure of time – the awareness of which was painfully present for me – I wanted to be as authentic as possible. While this was a special moment for me – a breakthrough – the insight is (ironically) quite timeless: risking it all and putting myself out there was so much more worthwhile than hiding behind a familiarly inhibited way of being.

(If you would like to see more of my art, please visit my Artwork page — I have recently updated it with more of my pieces.)

To Be Understood

Back when I worked as an acupuncturist, my analyst once asked me what it is that I wanted for my patients. I gave it some thought, looking for an answer that was deeper than “for them to get well”. Of course, I wanted them to get well, but what did that mean? In a few minutes, I came up with an answer that spoke deeply to something in me – I said, “I want for them to feel understood.” My analyst asked me to keep going with this, but I couldn’t seem to get further with it at the time. However, this session has remained in my memory for years and I have thought about it frequently ever since. Now that I am a psychoanalyst in training, I feel that I’ve begun to get a little further with this idea – and its real expression in my work.

I think that being understood is a core human need and desire. From the point of our birth, we are working hard to communicate our needs and inner experiences to those around us. First we cry, smile, gesture, and make whatever sounds would get us what we need. Then we learn words, which happens with incredible speed, because we quickly figure out that the better we can articulate ourselves, the more we can get our needs met. And this work doesn’t stop once we’ve learned how to speak as children – it continues for the rest of our lives. I think that through continually attempting to be understood by others is how we come to know ourselves. In fact, I am coming to know and understand myself better through writing this article – and it was for this reason, in part, that I decided to write it.

The rest of this entry is now part of my Kindle ebook, titled “Learning Psychoanalysis: Explorations of a Psychoanalytic Candidate” and can be found here: https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B08X3TNH83

The Fear of Boundless Pleasure

This weekend I decided to pick up one of the canvases I had and paint something. I was inspired by a Facebook friend of mine, whom, incidentally, I’ve never actually met and have no idea how we know each other. Still, he posted a photograph of a painting of his online and we discussed it in some detail because I was really moved by it. The painting was quite large – 40” x 44”. The size of it – or rather, the idea of its size, since photos on Facebook are no larger than half of a computer monitor – was both intimidating and exhilarating. A few days later I found myself longing to make a trip to the art store to get myself a larger canvas. The largest paintings I’d done so far were 6”x6” hamsa drawings – beautiful but at the same time very contained. Inspired by my friend’s abstract art, the wish to give myself free reign with my paints was too big to ignore.

In an earlier entry I reflected on the fear of taking up space, wasting space, using up materials, and other manifestations of, essentially, not allowing myself to fully be who I am and fully express myself. In that entry I wrote about overcoming that fear when staring down a tiny 2”x2” square canvas. I’m not the greatest artist, but what I created satisfied something very deep inside me. The texture of the canvas, the fact that the surface was 3-dimensional, and the fact that no one would punish me even if I’d wound up messing up, really affected me. It was as if I created a new pathway in my body-mind along which impulses had never traveled before, but once it was created, I couldn’t forget it. I look at that tiny painting every day and remember this not-at-all-tiny experience.

The rest of this entry is now part of my Kindle ebook, titled “Learning Psychoanalysis: Explorations of a Psychoanalytic Candidate” and can be found here: https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B08X3TNH83

Taking Up Space

When I was at an art supply store the other day, I saw these tiny canvases for sale. They were literally a 3-inch square, and they cost all of $2 each. I thought they were really cute and totally non-threatening, as opposed to getting a big, “real” canvas to paint on. I don’t think of myself as an Artist with a capital “A” – I draw to express myself, more like visual journaling, rather than to “make art”. I usually only show my works to one or two other people, and only those who really know me. But the tiny canvases, literally called “Itty Canvas” seemed innocent enough. I even

Blank Itty Canvas

bought two of them. (I didn’t, however, buy the itty easel that came with them – that would have been too much. Maybe if Tinker Bell comes over to paint, she could use one of those easels, but not me.)

But at home, those canvases suddenly felt really big.

The rest of this entry is now part of my Kindle ebook, titled “Learning Psychoanalysis: Explorations of a Psychoanalytic Candidate” and can be found here: https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B08X3TNH83

My Symptom, My Friend

For the past few weeks I’ve been preparing for an audition for an important, dream concert. Initially I was not going to audition because in the past the competitive aspect would contaminate my love for singing as it has in the past. But the wish to perform in a big, glorious concert won me over and I decided prepare a duet with another singer.

So we’ve been rehearsing happily for several weeks. Then, about a week before the auditions, I started getting a tight knot in my throat. I knew it was stress-related because it came and went rather than being a steady pain. When I watched TV and ate warm soup, it disappeared and I forgot all about it altogether. But in the second to last rehearsal, it was so bad I truly worried about being able to perform. I kept swallowing to see if it was still there, and that made it worse. I began to worry about my throat nonstop and became quite despondent. It was the last thing on my mind before I fell asleep and the first thing on my mind when I woke up. The more I obsessed, the worse it got, but with the auditions been so soon, I couldn’t not worry about it.

The rest of this entry is now part of my Kindle ebook, titled “Learning Psychoanalysis: Explorations of a Psychoanalytic Candidate” and can be found here: https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B08X3TNH83

When There are No Words

A mother and baby begin their relationship nonverbally – through touch, facial expressions, and sounds. The mother has to learn to understand her baby’s needs without words. Slowly the child learns to express him or herself through gestures and then words like “ba-ba”, “no”, and so on. The parents are excited at this, not only because they are happy to see their child developing properly, but also because it’s a joy to understand one another better. How much better it is to have the child say, “My tummy hurts” than it is to hear him cry and not know what’s wrong! The parents can understand how to help the child and how to meet his needs better. Thus, there is a constant drive on the part of the child to develop more and more language so that he or she could make his or her needs known as well as express and share internal experience, and the parents eagerly help (ideally!).

Recently, I’ve been reflecting on some past relationships that had to end for one reason or another, and the almost-cliché statement that there was a “lack of communication” rang true. With one of my past boyfriends, we went for an entire year without talking about the fact that I eventually wanted to get married and he didn’t. When things got tense between us, we just couldn’t get past the discomfort to sit down and talk about it. How could that be, that two grown people literally had no words? We cared about each other, yet without talking there was no relationship.

The rest of this entry is now part of my Kindle ebook, titled “Learning Psychoanalysis: Explorations of a Psychoanalytic Candidate” and can be found here: https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B08X3TNH83

It’s a Lot Like Life

I am an amateur singer, a classical soprano. For the past few weeks I have been rehearsing two different duets, which is a new experience for me – I’ve only done solo pieces before. That in itself is a learning opportunity where I work on figuring out how to blend and balance while still retaining my own part in the piece. In our last rehearsal the pianist was very late, and the other singer and I tried to find a recording we could sing along to on our phones (thank god for YouTube!) The best I could find was some other pair of singers, so we tried to sing along. It didn’t work so well (the phone wasn’t loud enough) so we wound up mostly listening. Since we had done a bit of singing before this, I was struck by the difference between my voice and the soprano’s on the video. Her voice seemed relaxed and somehow freer than mine. Suddenly I realized that there is a lot more tension in my voice than I had been aware of.

The rest of this entry is now part of my Kindle ebook, titled “Learning Psychoanalysis: Explorations of a Psychoanalytic Candidate” and can be found here: https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B08X3TNH83

“Only Do Not Know”

Have you ever had an event that meant so much to you that you picked out your clothes for it the day before?

Tonight I am wired, because tomorrow I am running a meetup, called “Self-Discovery in the Present Moment”. I plan on showing the group a slide show with evocative images while very carefully-selected music plays in the background. After the slide show, we will all make a piece of art – whether a drawing, collage, or a combination. And after this, we will talk about the experience. Most people who are signed up are not familiar with a process like this, but I think that even those who are will find it to be deep and enriching. At least that is my hope and intention!

So much happens internally when one makes art of any kind – whether a realistic drawing, a scribble, a collage, or anything in between. At some point the inner critic usually rears its head. There may be an involved inner dialogue about the symbols in the drawing, thoughts about having to share the drawing with others, resistance to having to “produce” something (or an eagerness to!), and a million other possible internal scenarios. That’s what I want to help people notice in themselves at this workshop. I find this process infinitely deep, continuously interesting, and forever unfolding. I also find that the presence of another person (or people) helps immensely to articulate and express this process.

The rest of this entry is now part of my Kindle ebook, titled “Learning Psychoanalysis: Explorations of a Psychoanalytic Candidate” and can be found here: https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B08X3TNH83