I subscribe to “Notes from the Universe.”  This guy Mike Dooley sends daily emails, with a message for you from “The Universe.”  When you sign up you give it your name and some dreams of yours, and the notes occasionally come personalized according to what you entered!  Today’s note from the Universe for me was this:

“What I most want you to dream of, Christina, are possibilities that thrill you. Rich, glorious, amazing possibilities.

What I most want you to feel, is happy.

And what I most want you to know, is that you’re loved.

Always,
    The Universe”

You can subscribe to Notes from the Universe at this link: http://www.tut.com/theclub/

From a Chakra Workshop I just facilitated - one of the possibilities that has showed up now that I'm aware I'm a possibility shaman!

Hi everyone!  Things have just shifted so much for me since I opened The Art of You Studio. I’m still offering workshops and seeing people in sessions there!  And yet my intention has become so much clearer. My work is coming into focus.  I thought I was opening an Expressive Arts studio. Which I suppose I still have!  But more and more as I worked I realized that I was doing energy work with art. I now use art much more consciously as a type of vibrational medicine.  Recently I was informed by The Something Bigger, that I am a “possibility shaman.”  Everything snapped into place for me.  Without a doubt I AM a possibility shaman.  Got it!  Now I’m exploring all the possibility that mantle offers me!!!  So I started a new blog for my new direction.  Please consider joining me over there and watching possibility shamanism unfold! That url is: http://possibilityshaman.wordpress.com/

So, you know that awhile back a cool guy came and interviewed me for possible inclusion in a documentary he was making about Awareness.  The whole process of the interview provided such an amazing means for me to get a look at myself and my relationship to my work.  Then about a month ago, the guy, James, sent me the short video clip of me that he created as possible material for his documentary about awareness.  Seeing the video started a whole new process in me, and got me thinking.  And I wanted to write about it, blog about it, and share it with you all in some way. But each time I had a realization, it made the realization before it seem moot. And that went on for awhile, so that each time I went to write something down to share, what I wanted to share shifted too.  My journey has had so many twists and turns, and feels so nuanced!  But now the thought train has slowed and I want to at least get a nutshell version out there to you folks!

At first when I saw the video, I judged myself very harshly – on what I said, how I looked, and whether or not I had been a good reflection to the field of Expressive Arts. Eventually I came around and gave myself credit for doing well in a video interview, which I had never experienced before. And I realized that I am able to share about Expressive Arts in a meaningful way and present a “professional” image. But in the end I also realized that my interests have changed. Or, better said, I have become much more clear about my interests. I am clear that, in essence, my work is about consciousness and self awareness. And in essence, it’s about helping a person change the story they live from. And, perhaps at its most basic, my work is about helping people to shift their energy, their vibration. And I knew all this, or was becoming more and more clear on this, before James approached me about the video interview. And of course I’m still exploring it, and hope it will always be in the process of evolving!  But the video was and is incredible assistance in helping me to think about my true intentions and true work. 

At this point the question is not whether I am a “good” Expressive Arts Facilitator, or a “good” Theta Healing practitioner. Or whether or not I can present a good image of either, or “fit in” to either professional community.  For me now at the heart, it’s a question of how can these two modalities help me to help?  How can these two modalities create the circumstances, for myself and others, to know themselves as the Vast, label-less beings that we are?  How can these modalities be used to create freedom, self awareness, joy?  And how can I use these tools, along with others that I have learned, to contribute to the essential things I am most interested in – awareness being one of those?  Right about the time I was getting solid on this shift in myself and my work, this completely apropos quote came in an email from a friend: “Our glory has nothing to do with our appearance or our occupation. Our special qualities come from an inner source. We must take care to open and bloom naturally and leisurely and keep to the center. It is from there that all mystery and power comes…”  Thanks for the quote, Jeff – and Amen to that!

I am so grateful to have had the opportunity to participate in the documentary in any way.  The whole process showed me how much I’ve changed my orientation, and how much I have grown in such a short time. I’m also grateful to have such a beautiful, high quality video about my work to share with the world. Because, though some of my perspectives have deepened, as has my work, the video is a wonderful introduction to the kind of work I do at The Art of You.  As a dear friend of mine said:  “The video is good: you were very articulate about what the work offers to people –  expression from the soul, authentic expression, the contribution this makes to consciousness–and your painting as an example was magical.  I think as you said in your email message with the video that you have evolved into a different place 8 months later.  You look different, your words about the work in class are richer and fuller–a natural evolution for a growing creative, conscious facilitator.” 

A thank you goes out to videographer James. Thank you for moving around the world, spreading your passion and igniting the conversation about awareness.  I’m grateful for your incredible skills as an interviewer and as a film editor and creator. Thank you for the great gift of the experience AND the clip itself.  I learned so much about myself, my relationship to my work at the studio, and my relationship to image and label.  Thanks, James. You told me that it surprised you that the people you interviewed for the documentary were all being positively affected by the process. I’m not surprised at all, as it sure has been a springboard for my own expansion.  Congratulations!  Your film isn’t even quite done, and hasn’t been made “public.” But it’s already bringing more awareness to everyone who’s had the fortune of coming into contact with it. 

Love, Awareness, Delight and Respect,

Chris

Simple meditation altar

I go through phases with my art. Sometimes, like recently, a particular painting will grab me and I work on it for weeks or months. Sometimes I get obsessed with sandtrays and do them all the time. In one phase of my life I had a simple wooden bar stool that I used as an altar, and I made a new altar everyday. I used simple things – rocks, flowers from my garden, food, trinkets. My medicine there was in arranging things, you could say. Maybe I am in a new “altar” phase. Last night I found myself quite spontaneously creating an altar space for my daily meditations. I usually plop down anywhere for that, but I have felt drawn to have a specific place. There I was, with bags of beans and orange lentils – completely absorbed. It’s simple. Very simple. Like the quick poems I write in my journal. Or the small songs I make up on the spot. Or the moments I take to sink into dancing in between the dishes and the laundry. Even very simple art has medicine. Magic. Presence-making. And the seeds for more alive living.  Hooray for the magic of beans!

Me and my sugar skull

So many cool happenings are available if you look around. Fabulous workshops and unique offerings abound!  My husband Eric and I just went to such a great sugar skull making class.  They gave some background about Dia De Los Muertos (Day of the Dead), and then taught us how to make sugar skulls.  Sugar skulls are traditionally used on altars for Day of the Dead.  In Mexico, people don’t make their own skulls. They buy them from sugar skull vendors who make skulls using molds that have been passed down through their family’s generations of skull makers!  Day of the Dead is a memorial day – a day to remember and celebrate those who have passed, as well as to celebrate death as a natural part of life. The necessary other-side-of-the-coin of life.  The day of the dead was originally thought of as the time when the veil was thinnest between worlds.  And it was a time when it was thought that the dead literally returned to celebrate with loved ones.  The tradition carries on, and feasts are still laid out on graves and in homes to make a big party for the returning deceased.  Marigold flowers are supposed to attract the spirits with their color and fragrance, and are often scattered on the ground as a trail between the deceased’s grave and the home to lead them home for their party.  But mostly people just set up shop and have a big festival in the grave yards. They decorate the graves and make big altars with food, drink, sweets, pictures of the deceased, and anything the deceased would like while visitng – cigarettes for example.  Families stay over night in the graveyards even, with dancing and music and lighted candles.  Originally Aztec and Mayan, it was absorbed by the Catholic church when it moved to MezoAmerica and became All Saints Day.  The Catholic church tried to stop it, but the people wouldn’t give up their holiday.  To this day, some families spend two months salary on the items that will go on the altars. 
Anyway we had a great time.  If you are interested in sugar skull classes, contact Anna Ibarra at 619-517-4080 or aibarra1@cox.net She has a company called Que Milagro, Creations Inpired by Mexican Tradition.

A little closer up

A recent painting that painted itself using my hands!

So, usually when I make art it is very quick.  An entry in a journal.  A dance I do around my living room.  A collage or painting that I begin, and maybe don’t complete, as I work by myself or with other folks at the studio.  But every once in awhile some piece of art just grabs me and won’t let me go.  It demands that I finish it.  and is not satisfied to be left as the strokes that I had time for in a class or a single journal sitting.  This painting was one of those.  I worked on it when I could over the course of maybe three weeks.  I don’t think it has a title. And it definitely painted itself. I made the initial, playful strokes. And after that, the images just popped onto the page. First the white “moon” face.  The peacock right after. Then the sun. Etc…. I would just be staring at the white paper and it would “tell me” what was next and where.  At one point, right where the flames and butterflies are now, I tried to insert a fetus.  The reddish “rings” surrounding the moon and cascading down from her suggested a womb quality to me.  So my clever mind thought “ah, a fetus goes there.”  But it was so unlike the rest of the painting. It was labored and forced. And I judged it, and disliked it! While on the other hand, all the things that the painting “told” me to make I never judged at all.  I just paid careful attention as I allowed them to come into being. 

Working on the paintingAhhg! It wouldn't let me go until it was done!

Ahhg! It wouldn't let me go until it was done!

Cindi receiving her turn at Theta Healing from Karen

We had our Theta Healing and Expressive Arts Workshops this weekend. They were amazingly rich, and restorative for so many people! The following, divine writing is what one participant, Cindi, experienced and wrote after she received her Theta Healing. Cindi says: “I laid back down and felt my eyes fluttering (like Karen’s which I have never experienced before) and then felt prompted to put pen to paper…the writing came very fast….

You were not sent here to Earth as a penance, but rather as an act of divine unconditional love to be with your beloved. We are with you always, you are our precious family also, and we can never be separated. We are all part of the whole, who is God. We are the living breathing essence of our creator and therefore all one. What you feel, we feel as we can be no different. What happens to one, happens to all. So let your joy shine, your inner beauty radiate and we shall feel that too. Our energies are flowing together just like drops of water merge in the ocean, or a grain of sand upon the shore. The whole is the beach full of sand. Which grain then is more important or less than the whole? My dear, you have come so far to be in this human skin, it was by your choice, but we have never left you, you have never left us. Do you see? You are living inside of time, but there is no time. Do you see? We love you, your beloved family and your heavenly family we are all one~
Love,
Your Angels

Wow. Thank you so much, Cindi, for sharing this. And thank your angels for us too.

Creativity

4 women, their bodies, and the different, creative results

The other day I was talking to a friend and heard myself say “I am not really interested in creativity. Creativity is sort of just a bi-product of what I do.”

After I said it, it kind of hung in the air. I thought “Where did that come from?” And “What did I mean by that?”

Creativity. When I thought about my associations with the word, I realized to me the word “creativity” meant being clever about making something. It meant being “talented” at making art. And the thought that hit me hardest was this – I have been thinking that “creative” means that someone is good at “consistently producing something pretty.” Eeek. No wonder I didn’t want to have anything to do with that word.

But when I dug deeper into the word, creativity yielded all the things that I DO try to support in the studio. Creativity. To create. As in, to make something new. Newness. Yes, newness. Not something already figured out in your head, but something that arrives from the unknown. To create means to step out of the mind’s plans and desires to do something clever, make something pretty. Yes, and that it a key thought – true creatvity doesn’t come from the mind. It comes from giving permission to allow whatever arises in you to arise, even if it doesn’t make sense.

Michele Cassou (sort of a zen intuitive painting teacher) calls the place of creativity “Point Zero.” She says “You are at Point Zero when you let yourself feel, no matter what the feeling brings. Then, your feelings and perceptions mix and dance in you in a way you couldn’t have imagined and can’t explain. If you let your feelings be, they birth their own creation eagerly, as if they had been waiting for a long time.” (Page 22 from Point Zero. Creativity Without Limits, by Michele Cassou.)

Feelings, not thinking. They can guide you to places that your mind can’t fathom. Feelings (and the body they are felt in) tap into whole other worlds and kinds of intelligence! I’m starting to ramble here, but what I am excited to realize is that this place of not knowing, of standing in the blank space and LISTENING to all of these intelligences to produce something that your mind couldn’t come up with by cleverness – that IS creativity and it certainly is what I hold space for in the studio. So that the newness can arrive. The option you didn’t know you had. The expanded world with the expanded choices that your mind couldn’t conceive of. Creativity – to create. To bring forth of out the void. I definitely am interested in helping people step out of the closed loop of their minds, the limitations of stuck story and thought. Oh yeah, baby! I am way excited about newness. So I guess it turns out I really do care about creativity. I just had to check out my distorted understanding of it.

The picture above is of 4 different paintings by 4 different women, created in the same workshop. Watching each of them create these paintings was a huge eye-opener for me, and came just days after I began to mull over the word creativity. They all began with the same suggestion for a warm up (lying on a piece of paper and moving around as they needed to in order to trace their own bodies on that paper) I had been thinking of the suggestion as a warm up, but each woman became absorbed in the outline. And each woman CREATED a painting out of the blankness of the paper and her own deep listening to her unique inner impulses and directions. That is always so facinating to see the vast, PERSONAL newness enter the room.

Oh yeah. I am a BIG fan of creativity now that I think about it.

Dancers in a Soul Motion workshop. The class I took is partly based off of Vin Martin's Soul Motion work, and partly based of Gabrielle Roth's work.

Okay, so I am not supposed to use the photo I did here. I got it from Vin Marti’s site, Soul Motion. But it would have been inappropriate for me to take a picture in the class I took on Sunday. Besides, I was too busy dancing.

Here is some background: About two years after I got my masters of fine arts in dance, I started developing a foot problem, which turned into a hip problem. Short story, I haven’t been able to dance as I used to, and it’s been a long period of personal and spiritual discovery to have to let go of my identity as a mover and embrace the moment.

I’ve been feeling better recently. Stronger and more resilient. I decided to go with a friend to take a dance improvisation class she has been raving about for years. I probably would have gone sooner, but the class is in Venice, LA – I live in San Diego. And of course, I didn’t take the class until now because it evidently wasn’t the right NOW until now.

I had some anxiety going on – mostly revolving around two fears. One, would I hurt myself and be in pain? Two, would I look stupid/ugly? That last one is not one I care to admit, since I think ANYONE can dance, that it’s not ABOUT how it looks AT ALL, and that self connection and soul expression cannot be other than beautiful. I know. I’m just ‘fessing up to the voices that were in operation.

The class is a kind of meld between Gabrielle Roth’s Five Rhythms, and Vin Marti’s Soul Motion work. The music set the structure, since it was based on the Five Rhythms, (I think they are Flowing, Stacatto, Chaos, Lyrical and Stillness). I took it slow, which the class supported, as did the progression of rhythms. I felt my way in.

I breathed, I moved slowly so I could feel it. I followed myself. I stayed on the floor a long time. Invited by the rhythms and the music, I found my way to standing, to larger movements, to moving around the room, weaving in and out of the moving bodies. Sometimes I joined another dancer for a moment his or her movement. Mostly I moved. I played with people, with music, with my own impulses. I was in a trance. At one point, I came back to myself, aware, suddenly, that I was sweaty and moving in as free a way as I had for probably 8 years. My chest suddenly swelled and I was so overcome with feeling, with gratitude, with REMEMBERING the joy of dancing. My breath caught in my throat. I sobbed and a flood of tears added themselves to my already sweat soaked face. I kept dancing. I sobbed and moved, and felt ALIVE in an exquisitely VIVID sense.

I could give you an in-depth analysis of what the structure of the class was like, and maybe I will at some point, just so you understand the brilliance and beauty of this class. For now, know that I danced. The I remembered the joy and freedom of movement. Right here, in this exact body, as it is now. ”Limitations” and all.

Looking at the studio from the street. 3060 Adams Ave., San Diego

Me, at the studio.

Why Expressive Arts Therapy?

Someone recently asked me how I got into Expressive Arts Therapy. The truth is that it got into me. Maybe before birth. I’ve been scribbling on the bedroom walls with crayons, dancing around the living room, writing poetry, drawing, making sounds and beating on the furniture as drums, and generally expressing myself since I can remember. It never mattered too much through what medium I expressed myself. Whatever was at hand, I suppose. A pile of rocks. Some sand. Some pens. Maybe I started dancing since my body was the most readily available instrument of expression. I’m not sure. But throughout both my dance degrees, I was not only dancing but writing and sounding and drumming and painting. Most of my choreography was built on poetry I’d written, or poetry by people like Clarissa Pinkola Estes, for example. I had a composition class in grad school taught by David Capps. He was always asking us to create a dance piece in response to a painting, or an object he’d assign us (he gave me a toy fire truck). I loved that class. My graduate concert incorporated a lot of poetry, a lot of theatrical delivery, rather than dance.

Expresssive Arts Therapy is different from other creative arts therapies in that it uses ALL the arts – anything that stimulates your imagination. Anything that engages and sparks you, and gives you a means to follow an inner path. I could have trained to be an Art Therapist, or Dance Therapist, or Music Therapist, or Sand Tray Therapist, etc. In which case I would have trained to be an expert in one of those particular disciplines. What I love about being an Expressive Arts Therapist is that my expertise is in moving from one art discipline to another. I am trained in how to follow that spark, across different media. My training, and interest, is in how to use any creative means to help the soul say what it wants to say in that moment. To help amplify and make that spark more clear.

That’s what I’ve been doing, naturally, since I can remember. Frankly, I was delighted to find out there is a NAME for what I have been doing all this time! I didn’t find out about that until after finishing my MFA in dance. The interdiciplinary nature of that MFA program proved to be the perfect pre-training for my Expressive Arts career.

After I graduated, I kinda floundered. I knew that I had been studying dance for my soul, and I told myself I was getting a masters so that I could teach in a college/university. The whole reason I went through those dance degrees was because they were personally mandated spiritual practices. And becasue of that, when I graduated I found myself not particularly interested in all the things I was SUPPOSED to be interested in, were I to pursue teaching dance as a career. So I floundered, moved back to California, taught aerobics, worked at Jimbos in the human resources department, and was REALLY, REALLY depressed. Until I found out there is a thing called “Expressive Arts Therapy.” And found out there is such a thing as the “San Diego Expressive Arts Institute.” And found out that they were starting a new batch of graduate students in two months. Really. I found out there was such a thing, applied, interviewed, and less than two months after finding out the Expressive Arts Therapy exists, I was sitting in a graduate training program. Yowza. Five years later I opened “The Art of You Studio,” where I continued my private practice and started offering workshops.

That’s the short version, really.