Through My Water Glass

I took an art therapy class ten years ago from an artist named Leah Matson, who was also a licensed therapist.  There were about seven of us women who sat together in a room for three hours on a Saturday afternoon and did art and talked about whatever came up.

Each week it was a different medium, watercolors, acrylics, oils, pastels.  Once we made masks.  I remember when Leah brought out the oil paints I cried.  The smell of the linseed oil brought back a flood of memories.  I used to paint with oils when I was a kid.  I painted the things I didn't know, like the giant panda bears that the United States received as gifts from China, Ling Ling and Hsing Hsing, straight out of the National Geographic, which is where I got most of my subject matter back then.

But now, at the table of the seven women, I painted from somewhere inside me a murky green landscape that looked like mud, and then I put a leaf on top and painted more mud over that.  I hated it.  I watched as one woman painted portraits in intense, chalky reds with bright blue auras, staring faces with other-worldly expressions that had an aboriginal feeling to them.  Another woman painted a soft and lovely landscape with a luminous figure in it and then suddenly etched across the surface of her drawing in yellow pastel the words "take dominion."  I was so enamored of her and her startling impulse, the action of marring a beautiful painting with force, that I asked her if I could have her painting.  Sometimes we see in others the latent qualities that we need to develop in ourselves.

Later, I began to see Leah on a one on one basis.  I had started my book but was too identified with my writing to allow myself to make mistakes with it.  To be identified with something in psychology means that you can't separate yourself from it.  You don't know where you end and the other begins.  During one of our sessions I remember Leah asking me if I was shy and my feeling very upset by that.  Shy was so far from who I knew I was but for some reason it was true.  Completely.  I felt desperate, as if I were at the bottom of a pool and couldn't make it to the surface.

The mystic Meister Eckhart wrote:

"When the soul wishes to experience something, she throws an image out before her and enters into it."

My book The Red Coat is an image that my soul threw out that I stepped into, like a bubble rising to the top.    

Tonight, I went through my file from Leah's class (I have a file for everything!) looking for that murky green painting but couldn't find it.  I must have carried it around for years and then finally threw it out.  So I imagined a photograph I could take that would capture the feelings I had back then and I decided to snap a picture through the bottom of my water glass!

So tell me, what picture does your soul want you to enter?

Her Voice

Lots of women suffer from having, or feeling like they have, no voice.  I had no problem when I was young getting up in front of a crowd and telling stories, but when I was older and began to look more closely at myself I didn't like what I saw and my creativity froze.  I was terrified to speak up.  To make noise.

On the darkest part of my journey to be a writer, I worked with a personal coach named Breck Costin who assigned me the path of "voice."  He said whenever you are on your path it will bring up the worst feelings, but staying firm on the path will heal your life.  For me, the feelings were mostly feelings of worthlessness and fear of repercussions for things I said.  Breck taught me that having an awful feeling about something was no reason not to do it.  And what was even more remarkable was that it was not important to succeed at it.  The important thing was to bring up the terrifying feelings that you were pushing away.  That's all.  In fact, Breck often coached people to fail.  Play to Lose, he always said.   

I am a good student and did what I was told and tried my hand at failing all over the place.  One of the things I did to bring up my awful feelings was to take a voice acting class near the Warner Studios in Burbank with Bob Bergen the "voice" behind Porky the Pig.  In class we had to get behind the microphone in the recording booth and audition for parts in front of the others -- I was terrified but astonishingly adept at all the animal parts, I guess because I could sympathize with dumb scared animals.  Anyway, I got the voice of the dog in the class production.  It was humiliating to never get picked the female roles, but I tried not to show it. 

My willingness to fail, to feel the awful feelings that came up whenever I was on my path -- to play to lose -- finally opened up my creativity.  Focusing on the path rather than the results, it came as a complete surprise when my friend Cynthia Wylie asked me to narrate the audio books for her newly launched online game for kids.  You can hear my voice narration by registering to play and then going to the schoolhouse and clicking on one of the books at Bloomers! Island.

Incidentally, Cynthia is up for a 2011 Excellence Award from the Association of Virtual Worlds.  Please support her efforts at teaching children gardening concepts and vote for her by selecting her name at the top left of her profile... and then tell me...

...what is your path?

For my picture, I chose a picture of Wolfie, the wolf dog I rescued in the Venice Canals where I lived with my son.  Here he is hiding under my house.  He was undernourished, flea bitten and absolutely terrified of people, but for some reason he came to me.  I wanted to keep him but he kept jumping over my fence, so I found him a loving home in the Santa Monica mountains with an eccentric old lady.

I will always love and remember him.

Good Enough

We were at dinner party with friends last week and two of the women, one a therapist and the other, a mother of two who had just been told by her marriage counselor that she was a perfectionist, were discussing the ravaging effects of perfectionism on women's lives.  The therapist was saying that women unduly suffer from this compulsion much more so than men apparently, and was encouraging our other friend to accept "good enough" as a standard she could hold herself to, rather than the impossible expectations that were holding her back from accomplishing anything at all.

I thought of that conversation when I sat down tonight to write this week's post, which I admit is late.  The fact is, I'm not sure I can keep this up.  Something's got to give.  Although I'm still on track to finish my book by year's end, I'm getting pressure at every turn.  There's so much work to do at the office right now, this past week I've had to come in early every day and work straight through my lunches, which means I've had to swim at night, which means I've had less time to write in the morning and to paint at night.  Moreover, there doesn't seem to be an end in sight to the research piling up at work!

The only way I'm going to be able to get through this is to work much faster.  Which to me can only mean one thing: not good enough.

In "Addicted to Perfection," Marion Woodman describes the problem as personified by Lady Macbeth who is "glued to the sticking place of insatiable power, unable to countenance failure to the point of rejecting life."  This archetype or pattern functions in modern women, petrifying their spirit and inhibiting their development as free and creative individuals and arises, Woodman argues, from the cultural one-sideness that favors productivity, goal orientation, intellectual excellence, spiritual perfection, etc. -- at the expense of listening, receptivity and relatedness traditionally recognized at the heart of the feminine.

I can just blaze through all of this and end up shocked and demoralized like the chalk lady I saw in the cement sidewalk on my way home from work on Thursday night, or I can try and imagine what "good enough" might look -- or feel -- like.

Can you?