My painting, “Eyes of Awareness” began in one of the Hide-N-Seek watercolor classes I teach.

The painting process is called “Hide-N-Seek” because I never know what the result will be. Each painting starts with an idea, sometimes a drawing, that’s hidden when texture is applied to wet paper.

This painting had no drawing.

I unravel 3-ply jute, a garden twine used to create texture. My full sheet of 300# Cold Press Arches watercolor paper is sopping wet. The texture hides a drawing or describes areas to be painted. It provides a path along which the paint moves.

As I laid the jute hap-hazardly on the paper, I explain, “this is a painting about procrastination. It’s about feeling anxious or resistant to doing something you must do, but don’t want to do.” 

My palette glistens with bright, juicy, wet colors. Lifting a 1.5” brush filled with color, I continue, “Angst doesn’t feel good. You’re all tied up in self-made knots.” 

Splat!

I swirled and threw great gobs of color, starting with yellow on much of the paper. Continuing around the color wheel, I flung oranges, reds, and pinks. The darker blues, turquoise, and purples are thrown on the bottom third of the paper — where procrastination lives — in the gut.

“Suddenly, in a burst of ‘I can’t take it anymore,’ you go ahead and do that thing that you don’t want to do.”

The cleaned brush is dipped back into the warm colors as more paint is released. Yellows, oranges, pinks even gold gouache sails through the air, arcing from the bottom melee of dark colors up toward the top of the paper in a spray of freedom. 

At this point, the paper is loaded with rich, wet colors. It looks more like a question than an answer. What will this painting look like?

“Now,” I say to the somewhat shocked class, “we wait.”

The colors fade a bit as they dry. When it’s still damp, I gently lift the jute to see if the paint moves. If it is, I leave it alone.

Once the paint no longer moves, I remove the jute. Some of the paint lifts off with the jute.

When the paper is completely dry, I begin to find the painting.

I’ll stare at it until I know what to do.

Your painting will always tell you what it needs, what to do.

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”.