Monika's weekly inner voice drawings:
Q: What is today's wisdom in the face of earthquakes, tsunamis, and other man made disasters?
A: "We must embrace pain and burn it as fuel for our journey."
- Kenji Miyazawa
"Today I choose life. Every morning when I wake up I can choose joy, happiness, negativity, pain... To feel the freedom that comes from being able to continue to make mistakes and choices - today I choose to feel life, not to deny my humanity but to embrace it."
- Kevyn Aucoin
Posts
The specter in the metaphorical shadow of the figure who is looking down into her own image is that emotional grief we fail to experience in the face of loss. When we fail to “look within” at the emotional field of our unconscious, we are left with a mere image of ourselves, distorted and reified in the concreteness of surface reality. When we fail to “look within,” the specter turns to fear and anxiety and depression-- those emotions and moods which plague us and which we experience as suffering. But, there is hope, even salvation in the form of grace, if by grace we mean the cultivation of self-conferring awareness. And the hope is freedom from all negative afflictive emotions: an awakened and enlightened mind. It is all here in the drawing, the inseparability (emptiness) of all things beautiful and all things ugly; all things terrifying and all things joyful. The drawing tells us that, because mind, its image, and the specter in its shadow are all interconnected, what is now the source of suffering—fear and reification (superficiality/materialism)—can, in the next subsequent moment, be the source of happiness. Once self-awareness begins to take root-- with intention, effort, care, consistency, and responsiveness—the image deepens and the specter dissolves into light. When the veil of fear is lifted, all is revealed.
ReplyDeleteTwisted" was the first word that came to my mind when I tried to understand the drawing, but then I also realized that WE feel twisted when looking out, but that we regain peace and clarity by looking in: as you so well put "The specter in the metaphorical shadow of the figure who is looking down into her own image". There is a balance between the outer passion (red) and the inner realization (purple). And with that balance and self-reflection we are able to stand strong in the midst of our tough samsaric times.
ReplyDelete