The Buddha in me...

Quiet, calm, authentic, empowered, assured of my place in this world and beyond : that's what looking at the face of the Buddha does to me... So I was inspired to paint the head of the Buddha statue from the Ixopo Buddhist Retreat. On a really big canvas. In my favourite colours : turquoise and verilian. To remind me of this expanded, radiant sense of myself.

It is a work in progress.

After the first sitting, I quickly rubbed out the left eye when I stood back and realised something was wrong.

And then it hit: rejection, confusion, self-doubt, "I am not good enough" and complete disempowerment! In an instant! From a place of real peace and "rightness" to turmoil, chaos and "wrongness".

My response to rejection shrinks me to feel like cockroach poo - lower than low.  I immediately go into doubt and a shriveled shrunk-wrapped version of myself. The opposite of what I was feeling a second before that.

I like Buddhist principles but do not consider myself a Buddhist. However, they are really onto something when they emphasise the importance of being present. If I had remained present after the first painting session, instead of judging and berating myself, I could have worked through to the next stage of the painting with ease and corrected the problem easily.  Instead, I stayed away for 2 weeks with a nagging sense of failure.  When I eventually went back to the painting I realised that I could have left the eye where it was and corrected the cheek line and the painting would have come together easily.

Talent and ability are one thing, but the way we feel about ourselves makes these things null and void if we don't believe in ourselves.  To me, this world is made up of talented, radiant, amazing people wearing grey coats of disbelief and hats of stuckness preventing them from realising their great potential - the God in them.  Maybe talent and ability come after we align ourselves with this part of ourselves.  It makes sense to me.  And , of course, this theory is proved to me over and over again as I witness others on their journeys of self-discovery.  Their magnifcense emerges as they spend more time in the calm, expanded place of peace and co-creative alignment and then they shine through their human suits and give of themselves to themselves and bless all around them, just by being themselves.

I want to live in that place.  But I am a work in progress who rubs out her eye sometimes and cannot see that its just the cheek line that is off, easily corrected if I had stayed present.