Day 4: Using Art to Let Go and Acknowledge How Far I have Come
VISUALIZE workshops are 3 hour virtual retreat workshops where I teach people to use visualization exercises, stream of consciousness writing and drawing to get clarity, buildthe life that they want and step into it.
To share how visualization has helped me become the person that I am today, I did a 6 day countdown to my VISUALIZE workshop, where each day I shared a story of how and what I visualized and how it came to fruition. This is the fourth story about how I use art to let go and to also reflect on how far I have come. Miss the first one? Click here to check out Day 1.
For most of my adult life I have been solely focused on where I want to go instead of where I have been. So, sharing these stories with you has been a great exercise in seeing how far I have actually come. 2 days ago I was rearranging my space for a new studio table and tucked away in a Tupperware container, I came across a side art project that I’d been working on in college. I had tried to create clear paper out of a specific type of glue. And on this weird glue paper, I was recording my emotions every single day and sticking all of the pieces together. I had glued the paper so that I would never be able to see what I was feeling. Except for my career, I knew that it was a dark and unhappy time in my life but I needed to see what I wrote and what I felt, so one by one I started peeling the pieces apart. I was astonished! I ripped one back and it said ‘Lonely’. I ripped the next one back…’Feeling rejected’. The next one, ‘Rejected’…‘Like no-one understands’. I kept peeling. The feelings were a compilation of loneliness, rejection, inspiration and excitement about my artistic practice and where my creative flow was taking me. I realized that art had been the thing that sustained me through many hard times. I had nightmares for a really long time and art pulled me out of that. Art got me out of tough relationships too. When I was feeling like I was not in love with myself and thought no-one understood, art was the thing that kept me going.
When I was in that inspired state I was envisioning a life where I was with a partner who loved and respected me. I was envisioning that I was enough, that I was love and that I was worthy of what I could dream and hope for, whether my envisioning was career related or not. Back then I knew what my career was and I knew what I wanted to do with my life, but I didn’t really know that I had to deal with all this personal stuff – relationships and other crap. But the ‘other crap’ is unavoidable when you want to better your life. I imagined a future where I let go of all the loneliness and rejection in my personal life and started a new project where I was totally okay with looking at those, along with celebrating the fact that I brought self-confidence, happiness and worthiness into my life and harvested my ability to be alone with myself. For this new project, I put all the pieces of glue paper in a jar of salt water to disintegrate – a symbolic gesture to allow the negative emotions to officially dissolve. The salt water eating away at the glue paper is representative of me saying that I envision a life where I am okay with being alone and when someone doesn’t like me, it’s not rejection anymore.
For a long time I was always seeking love from outside of me and if I had it I was happy and if I didn’t, I was unhappy and disconnected. So to translate this into a new project, 2 days before recording the above video I placed 3 necklaces that I received from previous relationships into salt water. It had only been 2 days and they had already started rusting. This process was symbolic of me being okay with and loving myself and being okay with being alone. The thing about loneliness is that you believe that you are completely and utterly alone and, well, that is just not true. My friends are around and my family is looking out for me. Loneliness is this idea that you don’t love yourself...it's a disconnection with your soul and self. It switches your perception of who you are and what you are and makes you see things or not see things that are not actually there. Instead of seeing all of these amazing people that are surrounding you, you see all of the horrible reasons that they should not be around you. The 3 necklaces in the jar represent relationships that I entered where I was not seeking love in the right way. Through this artistic gesture, I commit to letting go of not getting love from outside of me and letting go of old stories of rejection.
My art and my visualization process is symbolic of how I got out of the bad relationships, how I started my own business, how I lost 30 pounds, how I decided that I am a powerful woman and that I am not afraid to be so. It’s how I became who I am. If it weren’t for visualizing and letting go of my past, I wouldn’t be the person that I am today.
I hope you enjoyed my story. Keep your eye on my blog page for upcoming stories or start reading from Day 1: Finding & Encouraging Self-Love.
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