Meditating with geometric forms: a fine study
In the years since I first started meditating with my paintings, sacred geometry has become a method of inquiry I’ve continued to hone. I’ve now guided countless groups through meditation and art practice with many specific geometries, such as The Flower of Life, Shri Yantra, 12-pointed star, labyrinths, and the heart spiral, usually using my own paintings as the focus point. Observing and witnessing our experiences has allowed me to study the specific vibrational and archetypal fields that various geometries engender. Over time, I’ve been able to track some general patterns. Each specific geometric form apparently can take people into a different state of consciousness. These non-ordinary states open up healing zones, or specific informational downloads, or facilitate contact with specific dimensions, depending on the geometry, and on the person. This was such a revelation to me, a whole new world, when I first started experiencing it, having grown up and been educated entirely in Western Christian culture, with no training in Eastern wisdom traditions of meditation with mantras, for example. Prior to this work, I had not done much sitting meditation, at the point I started working with these mandalas, I was just re-igniting my yoga practice.
There is a long history in art and architecture of conscious use of geometry to create specific mental or spiritual states in populations of viewers, and it’s pretty juicy to study this outside of formal institutions, playing with the forms experientially, somatically. This is the same process that occurs when people walk an earth labyrinth, or meditate with a Green Tara tanka, or pray in an ancient cathedral or temple: we are accessing the same technology, for our own purposes. When humans do this, we are consciously choosing to enter the vibrational field of an essence or belief or entity, through art that represents that powerful archetype or deity. As we slip into these magnificent morphogenic fields, which may have had millions of humans interacting with them over thousands of years, we can be illuminated within by some of that radiance, receive some of the information contained within it. The history of such human interactions, and the specific wisdom inherent in each archetype, is available to us when we engage with it, by painting it, drawing it, dancing it, chanting it, viewing it, or meditating with it.
Breathwork: through the heart
So another breathwork story…my next session, after the one that generated the purple-blue web painting. The model my mystery school teachers had developed, based on the Grof model, along with the day-long practice of fast-breathing, was amplified by a powerful music score, and facilitated by a number of hands-on guides, who also did bodywork with us during the breathing session. This practice was done blindfolded, with participants lying on futons. The altered states that most of us participants entered into, after the sustained fast breathing, resulted in a a powerful physical, emotional and aural cacophony in the room. With over 12 people panting and moaning and yelling at once, accompanied by very loud acoustic music, it’s a pretty wild sonic environment. As I myself breathed, I experienced that chaotic zone as an extended dream, and traveled through various imaginal realms and terrains, with body sensations and postures arising, seemingly on their own.
During this particular session, well into the day, my back started feeling extremely uncomfortable, painful, and I began awkwardly moving my body, trying to ease the situation. One of the hands-on healers came over and started massaging my back, pressing trigger points of the places that were in distress. The next thing I knew, the results of the hands-on work had somehow catapulted me imaginally through my body, as if my body itself it were a literal doorway and thrust me deep into the universe. It was as if I’d been birthed through my own physical form into another dimension. Inexplicably, while still being fiercely present in my body I had gotten to a place beyond my body. I don’t know how long my consciousness roamed out there, either in physical time, or in imaginal time, but it was a profound experience. That evening, once I had returned to ordinary consciousness, I sketched the general idea, and vowed to make a painting from that experience.
The painting that resulted, “through the heart” was one of my earliest healing pieces that I made centered on a human torso. Over the years, I’ve made a number of them, usually resulting from such experiences, where my body had become the doorway into another realm, or when something in my torso is needing healing. They aren’t illustrations, per se, but inspired by my physical/spiritual experiences. This particular painting featured a normal human-sized torso, with a background of universe-type dark blue star-filled sky behind it, and a gaping hole in the middle of the body that went on through to other space. The hole looked almost like it had been blasted through, where the heart should have been. As with all of this type of vision re-entry work, while painting it I had to keep returning to the state I’d been in when I experienced it: a classic case of vision re-entry. I had to drop into the state again, drop into that zone, and look around and delve into the components of the vision, inquiring into the nature of what was there. As always, I couldn’t finish the painting until it felt TRUE. This business of traveling beyond my body wasn’t entirely new to me, I’d done it as a child while in bed at night, but these breath work experiences were conscious practices of allowing myself to travel out of my body.