I attended two SARK retreats in June, one in Portland and another in Carmel. I felt joy and excitement before and during both of these retreats.

During the past nine months, I attended all of the online classes and in-person retreats. I filled two journals with notes and began shifting the ways in which I create my world.

I felt great, focused and excited about the process everyday … until I didn’t.

Anxiety rose up to meet me a week before the final retreat in Portland. I was shocked this was totally unexpected!

I turned to my watercolor paper and painted my anxiety while teaching my Hide-N-Seek painting method at a “Playshop” for the Hawai`i Watercolor Society on September 30th.

The painting began horizontally.

As my left arm circled the brush round and round, my right arm made the infinity symbol with the brush moving from left to right and back again. All the while I verbally and visually explained my inner feelings.

My left hand described my frustration with going over the same learning cycle, again and again, feeling stuck, seeing the same issues rising up over and over in my mind. (Remember the Onion from the last post?)

At the same time, my right hand explained my desire to break free of this cycle.

Step two of this painting process is the removal of texture, revealing the underpainting. It was then that a heart appeared, and I knew this painting would be vertical.

On the second day of the final SARK retreat, I watched in awe as Dr. Scott Mills drew out the exact structure of my fresh underpainting on the flip chart for the class.

Scott explained that it’s easy to get stuck in the seductive loop of learning and that it’s essential to break free from that loop so we do the work we’ve come here to do.

We need to use all of our learning
or we’re wasting everyone’s time.

Learning and Doing are parts of the infinity loop. One side feeds the other. If we get stuck on either side, we’re out of balance.

I’m committed to learn and evolve throughout the whole of my life. Now I have more tools with which to do my internal excavation.

The deeper I dig, the more I learn. The more I learn, the more questions I have and the more potential and possibility I find. And the more I have to give and share with others.

The world appears to be “out there”. Yet the VAST majority of it lies “in here” — within and for all of us.

That’s why I’m inviting you to join me for my first ever 7-Day Creative Cruise through the Hawaiian Islands, August 4–11, 2018.

Together we will Discover Paradise Inside and Out.

The official pre-launch is in December. Find out first by sending an email to me: Patrice@artofaloha.com. Please put cruise in the subject line so I’m sure to respond quickly.

I’ll share with you the processes I know to dig down deeper within and outside our selves, to hunt for and find the clues being left for us by our Inner Wise Selves.

Together we’ll discover new vistas,
both within ourselves and throughout the world.

Last year I met a new “character” in my dreams. She’s pretty remarkable and unforgettable; she has six eyes. I never gave her a name; she's an image of me.

She populates two three-dimensional watercolor pyramids and a few small paintings, most notably, “Breaking Through the Glass Ceiling”.

Postcards of this image are available, send SASE: PO Box 61707, Honolulu, HI 96839-1707

A few months later I saw another image in a dream, this time of an onion with six eyes. Onions are a ubiquitous food in the world, so this image leads me to believe that we all have six eyes.

This is the first of many more onions in the book I'm creating.

Peeling an onion reveals more of the onion, sort of an internal archeological evolutionary “dig” into our psyche.

Shortly after the six-eyed onion appeared to me, I received an email, seemingly out of the blue, from SARK. She invited me to attend a webinar about a Succulent Wild Business Incubator Program she was starting.

My energy was on high-alert after the webinar so I signed up for the nine-month program.

The weeks leading up to the first in-person retreat filled me with anxiety. I knew I was about to begin a new important leg of my journey through life.

I was scared.

What if I couldn’t do it? What if I couldn’t live up to my potential? What if I failed?

I took all of my anxieties to watercolor paper and created “Eyes of Awareness”.

The painting calmed me down and gave me hope. My anxieties were no match for what was to come.

All of my energies would be joyfully, gleefully released when I allowed myself to move forward rather than stay stuck in fear.

At the first SARK retreat in Key West, we were introduced to SARK’s tool, “Inner Wise Self Love Letters”. Essentially we all have an Inner Wise Self and she/he is always with us.

Many of us have known about this inner wisdom and call it by different names. No matter what you call it, feeling its loving presence is a gift.

I credit my Inner Wise Self with giving me all of the imagery in this post.

I’m delighted to have a new, more direct way of dialoguing with her as a result of working with the SARK team (Susan Ariel Rainbow Kennedy, Dr. Scott Mills, and Suzanne Evans). Mahalo nui loa!

But Wait! There’s more to come.

I’ll share it with you soon. Stay tuned for “My Inner Wise Self and Me, Part 2”.

Stuart is always ready to play — ball or just about anything else. His little body is filled with love and he was a joy to paint!

When entrusted to paint a member of anyone's fur family, I start with a good pencil drawing. I want to get him or her situated on the page just right.

First I paint the eyes. Next I paint the nose and add a little more love to the eyes.

The eyes, those windows to the soul, really need to shine forth.

You'll see me smile while I paint these loving pets. I feel their love and I express my love for them back into the painting.

When I'm pleased with the realistic features of the pet, I begin to play with color for the rest of the body. This is done in stages.

Sometimes I'm asked to paint a pet in realistic colors. These are just as much fun and as much of a challenge as the colorful portraits; I love painting them just as much as the colorful pets.

When painting in "Hawaiian-style" colors, I work to capture the nature of the pet with a joyful rainbow of colors.

Any white lines between the colors show where the pencil lines were. They help me to remember the different planes of the face and the shifting of the color value I want to paint. I carefully paint around the lines so they can be erased when the painting is dry.

The background comes last and is meant to highlight the portrait of the pet.

If you can feel the love of the pet, and the love I felt for and from the pet while I was painting it, the portrait is a success.

Stuart is one tiny, compact bundle of BIG loving energy!

The pineapple is a type of Bromeliad. From Spanish Moss (also known as Pele’s Hair) to the Pineapple, bromeliads come in all shapes, sizes, and colors. Pineapples are a symbol of hospitality, often given as gifts to those new to the islands.

Pineapples make for fun paintings — I've done several!

"Growing Sunshine"

A fan recently mentioned that he’d like to see a painting of a pineapple at the beach and I thought, “What fun!”

So I took a pineapple to the beach to take photos of it up at the waters edge. I didn't know what it would look like there.

Amazingly I captured a few photos of a wave crashing over the pineapple just before the force of the water pushed it over.

That pineapple went on to become a delicious smoothie and then a painting!

This is just the beginning of the painting, it hints of what's to come.

When we mix things up, put something different into the stir-fry or wear polka dots with plaids, we take a tiny risk.

I've worked a little more on the top of the pineapple and around the splash.

We stay alive by nudging ourselves outside our comfort zone, even just a little bit.

I’m sure some people thought I was crazy taking photos of "my pineapple" at the beach. I didn’t care. I honestly didn’t know what it would look like, how much fun it would be, or how much it would make me laugh!

Laughter is Life on a good day!

Reach for those good days, it's within us all to grab that gusto we often hear about. It means reaching outside of ourselves.

Go ahead, reach just a little further outside your comfort zone, try something new, live Large!