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Soulfulness Art

©Soulfulness

Carmen’s Art

Homecoming

This piece is an expression of the return of soul to the body and ego to the Self. It is an expression of the journey of returning to the authentic self. This process of individuation happens when we begin to question external authority, our conditioning and habits and separate out from the collective. Sometimes this is difficult, because the false self that we created in response to all the painful and traumatic experiences in our lives has kept us safe and protected us from harm and we don’t want to let it go. The process of becoming our true and real self requires us to challenge the status quo and face our unintegrated aspects like the shadow in us. The shadow contains light as well as dark aspects of our nature, which, for whatever reason, went underground early on in our development and which, when integrated, release more of our potential and allow us to express more of who we are. The gold in the painting represents the fruits of this alchemical process of individuation. The journey of recovering and expressing the whole and true and real self is like an excavation project of digging for gold. The gold is in us and the digging for gold is the journey of self-discovery and recovery which returns the fragmented, lost or buried parts of ourselves to ourselves and allows us to express more of who we are and more of our creative potential. This feels like a homecoming because we are returning ourselves to ourselves and to wholeness so we can flow once again with life.

Sideways into the Light

This piece is an expression of the moment you finally decide to stop what you have been doing and to stop what you have becoming while you do it and turn sideways into the light. This means that you decide to choose a different path from the one that was chosen for you. It is a path you make by making and a path you choose by choosing. It involves radical acceptance and embracing what is, and listening deeply to what life is wanting from you rather than what you are wanting from life. It is a turning towards the unknown and trusting the flow of life to bring you what you need. It is a place of deep rest and acknowledgement of something other than you that supports and nourishes you. It is a deep knowing, connected to the generative and evolutionary impulse of life. It could be described as the Deep Self, the undivided wholeness that is the essence of all life. It is a place of surrender to something greater than the ego could produce. It is a joyful return to being who you are and a recognition of the value of this being. In this space you learn to value your time and presence and every moment as precious and you learn the art of living joyfully in the moment. You learn when to say yes and when to say no and you learn when to move towards something and when to gracefully and quietly walk away. It is a space of awakening to what is true and real and it gives you the opportunity to create and birth something new, something that is a creative expression of what is within you.

Infinity hourglass

This piece is an expression of life as a journey of continuous transformation, informed by an invisible and indivisible intelligence that is constantly evolving life. Sometimes we are spiraling in to recover lost aspects, other times we are spiraling out to grow and evolve and express what is in us, and sometimes we are stuck on repeat and it is difficult to move forward. The title reminds me of a William Blake poem, in which Blake suggests that it is possible to experience the world in a grain of sand, heaven in a wild flower and eternity in an hour. Life is a continuous unfolding of moments, moment by moment, and if we slow down enough to fully experience the moment, the present, or the NOW, as it has been referred to in spiritual teachings, we encounter with a sense of awe the magnificence and wonder present in the unfolding moment. In the moment, we encounter the true nature of reality as undivided wholeness and this puts us in touch with the creative force that informs all life. This also allows us to experience the world in a grain of sand or eternity in an hour, represented by the shape of the hourglass. This movement and awareness takes us out of the linear and material perspective of reality and into the awareness of time as a sphere and reality as waves of continuously moving energy. Most of us believe that we and world are made up of physical matter or atoms and material objects we can see- and that’s partly true because on a physical level you are made up of cells.

The Womb

The Womb is not a place to store fear or pain. The womb is to create and give birth to life.
The womb is not a place to store fear and pain; the womb is to create and give birth to life.
Let’s heal our womb; let’s heal our mother’s, sister’s, and daughter’s wombs. And in this way bring healing to our Mother Earth.
I release my fear so I may embrace freedom
I release my pain so I may embrace joy
I release my anger so I may embrace compassion
I release my sadness so I may embrace peace.

The rite of the womb is the 13^th rite of the Munay-Ki, brought into being by Marcela Lobos, a medicine woman initiated in the healing and spiritual traditions of the Amazon and the Andes. The Munay-Ki are a series of rituals brought to the West by Marcela’s husband, Alberto Villoldo, distilled from his work as a medical anthropologist with the high shamans of South America. Together we are the lineage that remembers that we did not come to suffer in this life, but to be creators of our deepest longings and destinies.

In essence the rites are about stewardship. They are not ego awards or recognition of any kind of achievement, nor do they make anyone special. On the contrary, they make one uniquely unimportant. Only then, from a position of non-ego and no agendas of self advancement, can we truly be of service. In the Quecha language, “Munay” means universal love. “Ki” is from the Japanese word for energy. Together these words mean the energy of love. After you go through the rites, you begin to dream a new world into being – the world we want our children’s children to inherit.

Reunion

The Self is the ordering and unifying centre of the total psyche (conscious and unconscious) just as the ego is the centre of the conscious personality. The basic psychological process from birth to death is one of alternating states between ego and Self separation and ego and Self reunion. The task of the first half of life: ego-Self separation and second half of life: ego-Self reunion. In the service of developing ego strength and adaptation to life demands, the first half of life dynamics favour repression of emotionally overwhelming experiences. This condition reflects the ego-Self Separation state. In the mid-life passage, a developmental imperative initiates a shift in the dynamics, now in the service of remembering that which was dismembered. This corresponds to the Ego-Self Reunion.

In the service of recovering wholeness, the ego is challenged to open to the return of the repressed. This opening to the Self is experienced as death to the ego. The ego has been the centre of the field of consciousness up to this point and it is therefore where our sense of identity resides. Changing that or letting go of that old identity feels like death to the ego as the psyche moves the individual slowly forward on the gradient towards wholeness. The process of alternation between ego-Self union and ego-Self separation seems to occur repeatedly throughout the life of the individual both in childhood and maturity. Indeed this cyclic (or better, spiral) formula seems to express the basic process of psychological development from birth to death.” (Edinger, Edward, Ego and Archetype, pp. 3-5.)

The snake has often appeared in my dreams as a symbol of the undeveloped consciousness, calling me to the journey of transformation and retrieval of the unconscious contents that enable me to be renewed by the transformation. In 2019 I drew these snakes as the wholeness journey became more conscious and I deepened the process of remembering that which was dismembered. The two snakes represent the rising new consciousness and new masculine and feminine transforming the father and mother complexes in the psyche. The snakes are moving in a spiraling formation informed by the dynamic self-organising principle of the whole.

Emergence

“Death and rebirth are the mythological symbol for a psychological event: loss of conscious control, and submission to an influx of symbolic material from the unconscious. Personality growth is usually thought of as cumulative, a gradual expansion through time as ego consciousness gains experience and wisdom. But often it turns out to be only a pursuit of illusory ideals. Then there is cessation of growth, stultifying depression, or, more ominously, severe illness. At that point no halfway measures will do; a thoroughgoing transformation is necessary for the individual’s survival. Like the sun, the ego must prepare itself for a plunge into the darkness of the unconscious underworld, there to experience rejuvenation.” (Sandner, D., Navaho Symbols of Healing: A Jungian Exploration of Ritual, Image, and Medicine, 1979)

Enantiodromia is a principle introduced in the West by psychiatrist Carl Jung. In Psychological Types, Jung defines enantiodromia as “the emergence of the unconscious opposite in the course of time.”

This image represents the new self that emerges from the alchemical process of transformation as the treasure excavated from the depths is slowly integrated into waking consciousness. This becomes the new life or new personality rising like a phoenix from the ashes of the old life and the old complexes that drove the old personality. The new life is the expression of the daimon or creative spark which was not lost, but underground, waiting for the right time to be retrieved. The retrieval happens during what is experienced by the individual as a dark night of the soul, a sense of being wholly lost in the dark woods. From the deep dive into the unconscious, emerges the constellation of the True Self, whole and integrated, ready to birth new life into being.

Grace’s Art

Our Blood

Reminds us that as humans we are a collective and all share the same blood

Life Force

Shows energy of people with red being the core and how our energy radiates outward. The
silver represents how important it is to protect our own energy and not combine it with
others.

Dance

Shows the movement within us and how we are not only physical

Ice

What happens when we get stuck and lose our connection to our own energy. We freeze
and can become frozen.

To order a print of a Soulfulness original artwork, please fill in the email form below and we will get back to you. All payments can be done via PayPal.

Resources

Soulfulness Art

©Soulfulness

Carmen’s Art

Homecoming

Sideways into the Light

Infinity hourglass

The Womb

Reunion

Emergence

Grace’s Art

Our Blood

Life Force

Dance

Ice

To order a print of a Soulfulness original artwork, please fill in the email form below and we will get back to you. All payments can be done via PayPal.

Soulfulness Poems

©Soulfulness

“And so long as you haven’t experienced this: to die and so to grow,

you are only a troubled guest on the dark earth.”

– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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