Do you ever hear this question echoing in your head?

It’s a great question to play with consciously. Play with your inflection as you ask yourself:

WHO do you think you are?

Who do you THINK you are?

Or, Who the H*** do you think you are?

WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?

Do you feel the difference?

These questions came to mind after my photo shoot with Jeremy DeWeese at the SurfJack Hotel in Waikiki.

A photo shoot can have many uses and meanings. It can be a folly or an incredible experience. It depends upon the lens through which you and your photographer view the world.

Jeremy sees the world through the lens of love. By doing so, he gives his subject the opportunity to see self through the eyes of love.

The gift of being seen for who we truly are, from the inside out, brings tears to my eyes.

Seeing the world through eyes of love is something we can all learn. It’s a practice to consciously choose.

It’s rare for us to focus our lens of love upon ourselves.

To look through the lens of love is to see deeper than the surface, and to experience the heart of all matter.

We can reduce everything down to love —
even though love is a power
larger than anything imaginable.

Why do we so easily, often without thought, hide our love away from even ourselves?

Do we not know how strong and powerful our love is?

Or do we know how strong and powerful it is and fear its power?

Is our powerful mind at war with our powerful heart?

If so, it’s a waiting game, for the heart always wins. Even if it has to wait until the very end of life, the heart always wins.

The attitude, thoughts, and feelings that we exercise the most, become the strongest.

Make a choice in every moment to exercise the parts of you that you want to grow.

Learn to see the world & yourself through eyes of love.

To see ourselves through eyes of love might be the most important exercise we undertake in life.

Train your eyes to look for love within and, with practice, you will see love grow in our world.

“WHO do you KNOW yourself to BE?”

Be that YOU.

I paint because I feel better when I paint.

Painting is my form of meditation.

Mediation clears the mind so we can hear our heart.

We live in a world seemingly growing and shrinking at the same time. It’s the “Big Bang” ad infinitum as our knowledge base grows and our time space continuum seems to shrink.

We feel disconnected by distance as our families grow and move (migrate) from one job or state to another.

We feel marginally connected when we see family, friends, and acquaintances on Facebook, Instagram, Snap Chat, and “flavor-of-the-month” social media platform.

Painting, the simple act of putting brush marks on paper brings our world back into focus. Even just 15 minutes a day helps!

Time spent feeling truly, deeply connected to our selves (e.g. painting, meditation, yoga), is calming and healing. It moves us out of our heads and into our hearts.

We’ve had a long love affair with our head (brain). I’m not sure when it began, perhaps at the dawn of the industrial age?

I don’t know about you, but when I listen exclusively to my head,
I get in trouble.

Don’t get me wrong, our brains are great, they just don't tell the whole story. Our brains (and our computers) operate on logic.

Logic is only one leg upon which we stand. We do best when using our head, our heart, and our “gut” (intuition).

I go to yoga class once a week to remind myself of how good it feels to take care of my body in this way — and to be flexible.

Once upon a time I did yoga daily — on my own!

I don’t do that any more. Maybe my world (my head) is too full of other things that “must be done” first.

I go to a yoga class because I feel better when I go, I feel better when I’m there, and I feel better for days afterwards.

Sometimes life feels hard. Anything that can ease our angst and doesn’t cause harm to others is valuable.

Painting, like yoga and meditation, quiets the mind, opens the heart, and provides us with the opportunity to hear our intuition.

The head, the heart, and our intuition are the three legs upon which to stand and from which to choose how we live our lives.

We must be able to “hear” from each of these legs if we want a stable base upon which to stand.

One leg alone or two legs won’t do.
It takes three to provide stability.

Paint to come alive, to relax, to clear your mind, to open your eyes, to see more of the world around you, to unwind, to enjoy more of life, to refresh your spirit, to give you a stable footing in the world, to round out your life, to have FUN.

Simply Paint.

AARGH! I did it again! I turned my joyful expression, my passion, painting, into WORK!

This happened to me once before, about ten years ago, and it was devastating! This time I caught myself and am taking steps to get back to PLAY. Phew!

Changing habits and practicing new ones requires taking baby-steps. My first baby step was to take a walk (DAH!). This is the first thing that captured my attention on my walk.

Look at ALL of the texture. What do you think this is? Do you see the upside down heart?

The very first thing that caught my eye was the trunk of a palm tree. I'd never given them much thought until I REALLY LOOKED AT THIS ONE on my walk.

My world changed within the first five minutes of that walk! Wow! Just look at all of that texture and movement and LIFE FORCE in that tree trunk!

Okay, I got a bit excited.

I know that to make changes we need massive amounts of self-love and tenderness, with bits and pieces of tough love sprinkled in for balance.

I’m not fond of regimentation. Even though I know that following a schedule can increase productivity, I prefer going with my flow and following my impulses.

I also have to remember that I make my living from my art and that means I have to paint and sell art REGULARLY (as in a lot).

The trouble comes when I can't think of what to paint (yes that happens).

To me there's a real difference between painting for the sake of painting and painting something that I REALLY REALLY REALLY WANT TO PAINT!

There are two paintings here, side-by-side. It's the beginning, not the end.

All of my coaches tell me to schedule my “FREE-” or “DOWN-“ or “PLAY-time” first, before I schedule in other commitments.

Scheduling PLAY first does NOT come naturally to me.

“Downtime” is time to just sit and listen — or to “get bored”. You can lie down, but you don’t have to. You can close your eyes, but you don’t have to.

The only thing to “be done” is to release control
and surrender.

Oh, THAT’S ALL!

Surrendering feels scary, so I’ll start small. I’ll start with five minutes a day and work up to more. The important thing is to start.

I will breathe more deeply and consciously unwind, releasing my clenched fists as I breathe.

Go ahead try it.

It really does feel good — at least in short spurts.

Still a work in progress. It's a triptych, meaning in three pieces, still needs some love.

Teaching others to paint is part of my mission and service to the world.

There are as many ways to paint as there are people — and as many reasons to paint too! Not everyone wants to, or feels the need to make art.

Feeling tense or distracted or unhappy or just plain blah? You can find comfort, joy, and focus when painting.

One of the lessons of the Hide-N-Seek method of painting that I teach is how to use our awareness to look for what we want to see in life.

By looking past appearances and asking better questions, we find a fresh version of the world in which we live.

Gaze at this image of "Creation" to see what you can find within it.

Clues surround us all of the time. Looking for them becomes a game we play first on paper and later in our everyday lives.

The game involves a lowering of our expectations to see specific things and a heightened expectation to see more than what initially captures out attention.

When looking at our paintings, we soften our vision and look with eyes of curiosity — wondering what we might see.

The game, when extended to the world around us, requires a lowering of our "drama reflex mechanism", AKA fight or flight.

This is replaced by a deepening of our ability to see, sense, and wonder what gifts and opportunities our circumstances have to offer.

There is more.
There’s always more than initially meets the eye.

Take an internal step back into self. Take a breath, and take a moment, all before responding to the world around us.

Reaction time is not to be noted. Response time is different altogether.

Reactions take no time. They come from the limbic brain, the "reptilian brain".

We’re being called to respond from our neocortex, our “new” brain. It’s time to exercise that part of our brain on a more conscious and regular basis.

I sketched the images below all by sporadically gazing at a canvas giclée of my "Creation" painting hanging in my living room over the course of ten months.

The sketches on the left were seen after Creation was turned 90 degrees clockwise. The sketches on the right were all seen in the format shown above.

Play the game with me. Take another look at the painting above. Can you find any of the images? Better yet, do you see any new ones? Please let me know what you find!