The Six Word Autobiography

I was reminded today of the six word autobiography by one of my favorite astrologers, Donna Cunningham. Here's what she posted last week on the AARP "REALLY short stories" website:

My whole life: steep learning curve

You can read more about Donna's recovery from the dysfunction of her childhood in the "My Memoirs" section on her blog SkyWriter, which is devoted to astrology, healing, and writing.

Summarizing your life in six words is a great creative exercise. Our attention is drawn to what really matters. Who are you? What have you learned? What might you inscribe on your urn or your tombstone for your great-grandchildren to read?

I can't find the autobiography I wrote when I first heard of this technique on National Public Radio. (It's likely buried somewhere in my journals.) So I wrote a new one today that feels like Truth:

Once past the fear, unending discovery!

Assignment: Take a moment today to capture your life journey in six words. Ask your friends and family to write theirs too. Notice the feelings that arise. And heal.

How to Talk to A Tree

One of my favorite astrologers, Lynn Hayes, posted this great link last week. It has instructions printed on Beliefnet several years ago about how to communicate with a tree. What a wonderful little ritual!

How to Talk to a Tree

I laugh thinking what my Sensing-Thinking extended family would say about this. (Note to self: Blog about Jung's typology soon!) But it speaks deeply to me.

In fact, I'm headed out right now, to add a moment with the trees in our backyard before I walk our labyrinth.

Assignment: Make space in your life today to connect with a tree.

More experiential exercises

For those who can't find The Mountain Astrologer, or don't have an extra $ 7 to spend to get that article I recommended, I offer this handout I've used with my clients for years.

Exercises from Art Therapy

Gather your materials and put on some gentle instrumental music. Take some cleansing breaths. Relax. Meditate or pray if you wish. Try to rest your judging, verbal mind and see what the experience brings to you.

1. Draw a Bridge

Fold a piece of paper into three sections. Connect two ideas with a bridge in the middle section. (Perhaps, something you want to change, bridging into that changed life, or your past bridging into your future, etc.)

2. Road Drawing

Meditate on roads, signs, detours, crossroads. Then draw a road that reflects where you’re been and where you’re headed.

3. Landscape

Draw a landscape that reflects your life right now. Is it garden, desert, ocean—what?

4. Draw a Dream

With broken crayons (so you don’t feel you must be perfect), quickly draw a scene from your dream. Sketch dream images into your journal.

5. Collage

Cut articles and pictures that interest you from newspapers and magazines. With a glue stick or spray (that may allow easy repositioning), cover a notebook or folder. (You can use the notebook to hold your memories or journaling from this period in your life. Keep a collection of items that catch your eye if you like this exercise and want to do it again. Consider collecting rocks or sticks or things from nature too! You can assemble collections, or make garden art—you can do anything you wish.)

6. Mandala (or Circle Drawing)

Draw a large circle on your paper. Then, without thinking about it, quickly select five colors from a pile of crayons to represent these five spheres of your life (Emotional, Spiritual, Intellectual, Physical, and Social). Fill the circle in any way you like with these five colors.

This last technique is the one art therapist Beth Kean taught me. I use it regularly to "take my temperature," as the great therapist Virginia Satir used to say.

Most often, after completing the mandala, I find that the parts I drew with the color I chose for "physical" is the least developed--and I remember once again to give more time to exercise. At other times, I recognize that I am out of balance in meeting my social needs. I file the mandala in my journal, sometimes with and sometimes without comment. Looking back, as with dreams, I often see more.

Assignment: Choose a technique and see what happens for you.

Experiential Astrology:Bringing It Alive!

Run, do not walk, to your local bookstore to pick up the October/November 2009 of The Mountain Astrologer. And if it's not there--it has disappeared from the shelves of my home town--order it! These folks will get it to you immediately. For those of us who art, this month's article Experiential Astrology: Bringing It Alive! alone is worth the price.

Written by Barbara Schermer and first published in TMA in June 1994, the article begins with this wonderful quote:

When I can't find words to express what I mean, I get up and dance to it.

-- Zorba the Greek (Nikos Kazantzakis)

Barbara then provides detailed instructions for multiple ways to explore our charts, and thereby, ourselves. She describes the supplies needed and how to go about using them. The techniques she suggests include:

(1) Using an imageboard to display pictures and symbols which express the energies of each of the ten planets in our charts.

(2) Creating a personal mandala by capturing the images which arise as you meditate on your chart.

(3) Making a planetary mask by using plaster gauze from a medical supply store.

(4) Creating a healing image of aspects in the birth chart or current transits which may be presenting difficulty.

(5) Moving physically in ways which express the energies of the planets in your chart, exploring music and your personal dance.

Years ago, art therapist Beth Kean introduced me to the use of the mandala much as Barbara Schermer describes it here, and I use it regularly as an intuitive tool to keep balance in my life. I'll write more about that soon. What enchanted me about this article was its innovative connection to astrology, the inclusion of music and dance, and the clarity offered to those who may be new to these tools for self-understanding and healing. Enjoy!

Right Brain treasure with a Left Brain guard

Perhaps you've heard something about neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor, who was uniquely qualified to understand what was happening to her as she suffered a severe stroke. Jill had a dual interest in the brain, one professional, the second personal: her brother is diagnosed with schizophrenia. Jill had long been active in her advocacy for understanding those will brain disorders, and she found it ironic that she used a videotape of herself speaking for the National Association for the Mentally Ill (NAMI) in her eight-year recovery from her stroke. By watching this tape of herself over and over, Jill taught herself how to be herself again, how to speak, how to gesture, beginning with the blank slate of a newborn. She detailed the experience, and the spiritual discernment it brought to her, in her book My Stroke of Insight.

On those days I struggle to creative freely, fearlessly--indeed, on those days I struggle to create at all--I remember Jill Bolte Taylor and what she taught me. I long for some pathway directly into the right side of my brain.

But the left side of my brain stands guard.

I like to imagine that I hear in my own head the conversation between Left Brain and Right Brain, as Jill described it so eloquently. Because Right Brain speaks in images and symbol, and has no language, no grammar or words, I stretch the truth and give her a voice that is barely a breath.

Left Brain says: You don't have time to be creative today. There's work to be done. Things need doing. We've gotta go.

Right Brain, a wisp of fairy dust, a Tinkerbell firefly barely perceived, whispers: Oh, please, come, open ...come with me . . . There are secrets waiting to be revealed, there are parts of you ...

And Left Brain interrupts, with studied authority: Responsibility calls. There's no time today to go into that fog. Important tasks need attention here. We've gotta go.

This dialogue is Saturn squelching Neptune's call. The truth is, they are both right, we need them both. It's tempting to say they are like the little angel and devil in those old cartoons, perched atop my shoulders, whispering in my ears. But they're not. They both serve.

Jung valued both the conscious and the unconscious as necessary to the functioning of the psyche. Again, we have the tension of the opposites, the need to find some balance, some path we can follow which honors both. And, as Jill Bolte Taylor shows us, we must value the very structure of our physical brain and what it offers us. One side holds the memories, the images, the ability to merge with All, and the other is watchful, protective, always planning, always alert and analyzing the data brought in by our sensing organs.

I have discovered that in my case, the Left Brain works overtime insisting on proper Time Management, and this is as deadly to my arting as the Critic we all recognize so well.

Bless her heart, she's only trying to do her job.

Assignment: Spend 18 minutes with Jill Bolte Taylor as she shares her experience. You'll never think of the two sides of your brain in the same way again. You can find it here.

Embracing the Paradox

We are pathologizing what is most human within us. If I hear another friend at a party tell me he or she is bipolar, I think I shall scream and run out of the room, tearing my clothes in two.

(Please note that I am not writing here of the very serious mood disorder we once called Manic Depression, which does affect many people profoundly. I will set aside discussing the history of the psychiatric Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, which grows thicker and broader in each new addition. I will not write of Big Pharmaceutical and its manipulation of our culture. That is food for another day.)

Today we explore a central concept in Jungian thought: the tension of the opposites. Carl Jung saw that the Self--the archetype of the Whole, our most true and integrated Self--is a union of the Conscious and the Unconscious. In those rare mystical experiences that may come only once in a lifetime, we may glimpse this union briefly. The ego stands as the center of our conscious life, but our unconscious remains exactly what it is: unconscious, unknown to us.

We can describe this as the Rational opposed to the Irrational. There is a tension here which cannot be resolved, a tension we all have experienced in the push and pull of our inner worlds. Jung described the psyche as having many parts--archetypes and complexes, memories and images--some which we accept and celebrate, and some which we deny. The disowned, primitive part of us he called the Shadow, which some describe as "that which I do not wish to be."

When the Shadow is denied, we are at risk of acting out. Recognizing and working with the Shadow is the heart of Twelve Step practice, which Jung assisted in birthing.

We live in a culture which celebrates control and power and the rational. Our national ego admits no wrongdoing. On this planet fundamentalist religions are expanding. Mystics are mistrusted: direct contact with God must be mediated by a cleric or a book, must meet certain rules, must conform.

Jung wrote that this is exactly what happened in Germany in the Thirties. Nationalism--egotism on a grand scale--led to the eruption of an entire people's Shadow, and millions died.

He believed that a swing too far into one side of the polarity will result in a compensating shift into the other. So too may we erupt unskillfully in our personal lives.

We humans have within us many energies. In our dreams, in our art, we can explore the tensions of the polarities within us. In expression and acceptance, we allow a flow between them. We embrace the paradox.

Sharing Ourselves

Early this summer, my husband and I were invited to dinner with friends from our church to get better acquainted.

I took gifts: a bottle of wine for the hostess, and a tile magnet for the others, a business professor and his accountant wife by vocation, chefs by avocation. They art by leading us in "Feasting with the Saints" several times a year. We become their kitchen staff, as they create sumptuous gourmet meals which celebrate the traditions of a particular saint, according to the season. The little tile spoke of wit and warmth, birthed by a good meal in community.

I was surprised to find a fifth guest. But I had brought along a poem to amuse my husband on the drive. It was the first poem I had written in at least two years. Laughing, I presented it.

And this lady pleased me much as she gathered her things at the end of the evening, making certain we located her gift so she could be sure to take it home.

Here's the poem I gave her that night. Synchronicity! Our intention was to get better acquainted, and only hours before, I had remembered:

It’s hot, and they say red alert don’t breathe the air today—

But the katydids sing like they always did

in the trees at Eagle Mountain Lake

When I was a child who thought myself grown—

An old pickup truck, with a bed chock full of long teen legs and arms and hair—

bouncing down an ill paved country road toward Dido’s marina,

where motor boats buzzed like moths around the fishy pier—

And you smelled the water and the sweat

That sweet sweat smell and katydid song

And the glistening lake called us to wet our sandy suits again—

Summer in North Texas—

Sublime.

When we share our art, we share ourselves deeply.

Assignment: Share yourself--write a poem before you sleep tonight, and again when you rise. Share yourself with you.