The Power of Unleashing

I started painting in my thirties. It's never something I've attempted throughout my life. I've never possessed any talent in the artistic world, outside of writing. But, during the pandemic, I needed something away from screens that was fun and interesting. While many turned to baking, I turned to painting.

When you enter something without skills and without the intent to become skilled, there's no pressure to create something worthy of affirmations or accolades. It's just the purest form of raw expression.

Something started to happen that was unexpected, I started to love my paintings and not just the process of painting. So, I started putting forth effort. "I am going to paint a carnation." And, even if those attempts turned out in a way I liked, I didn't connect to the process or the final product.

I liked it, but it felt empty.

Here's what I learned about my relationship with painting.

I can’t paint when I’m controlled. When I try, I can’t quite take the shape, the contours, the colors, the contrast of something in my mind onto paper. And, I think the control strips it of what drew me to painting in the first place.

So, I stopped trying.

Instead, I focus on a feeling, from that feeling, I slap paint in broad strokes on a canvas or cardboard or some trinket around the house. It’s movement-based mediation to me.

Painting is the expression of feelings through movement and design that words can’t quite capture.

It’s uncontrolled, it’s sourced from emotions

This realization came during the last workshop of an eight-week series led by Keisha Frazier. The series focused on connecting to our hearts.

In my meditation, I saw a golden ball of light expanding into a rose and jewel-toned rainbow. It was a cosmic sort of event in my mind, a birth, a resurgence of light and the feeling felt a lot like a child-type energy.

The only way I can explain that energy is like when you see a baby dancing as soon as a song comes on because they just can’t help but be captured in the joy of the beat. Children choose joy every time before the world conditions them to think and do otherwise.

I dolloped paint across my palette: white, yellow, pink, green, red, and purple. I grabbed my brush, focusing on the vision I encountered and the associated feeling... and I just started spinning the giant piece of cardboard canvas in circles as my paint stroked across it.

I painted and painted and painted until what I felt was reflected back to me. And, suddenly, I captured that feeling in physical form. No other way to describe it, but magic.

This experience was a reclamation and reminder of something I gave up long ago, something pure... that when you create from a place of openness and vision without the need for validation – even your own – but for the purity of expression, magic can happen. When you unleash, something beautiful and unexpected can emerge from the process.

When I look at that painting, captured on cardboard, bordered by a gold frame, and hanging above my altar, I feel happy. I smile. I see my heart.

Now, the question is, how can I unleash in life, the same way I unleash in painting? Stay tuned... 😏