Now I have started art school, will I be one of those people that keep throwing it into the conversation? Hahaha likely yes! BUT I want to share with you the juiciest bits of what I am learning. And I learnt a technique that I thought was such a brilliant way to overcome our conditioning.
Basically, when you are painting something in front of you (eg an egg, an orange, whatever still life is there), your eyes will continue to adjust what you VIEW, to what you PAINT. So what starts to happen is that what you paint is not what you’re viewing. You end up standing there slightly confused, blurry-eyed after hours, wondering what the hell is going on (and wrong). So our teacher explained this, and that there is a neural hijack. Essentially your brain keeps messing up the process by assimilating the two views. It’s a shortcut for the brain to make the whole thing easier, but it means it’s really hard to paint what you see. So, a solution is you hold a little mirror up to your eye, and look at the painting through the mirror. Instantly, because the picture is now in reverse, you can see exactly where all the differences are. That bit there isn’t straight, that fruit is way too big, etc etc. With the mirror, it’s instantly obvious.
What happens as we move through our days is similar. We aren’t ’seeing’ reality, but seeing instead our conditioning. Seeing through our conditioning is almost impossible. Cue meditation. It’s like a daily mirror that helps us cut through our conditioning so we can see in fact what’s going on. Sometimes annoyingly, the very thing going poorly is us. Our conditioning will blame everything outside of us. The meditation/mirror holds us accountable. And this is where life gets super juicy and interesting and actual transformation happens.
The reason we meditate twice a day is we are constantly working with a brain that is showing us our conditioning over and over adjusting the scene to fit what it knows from the past, and what’s not actually in the present. So get serious with your practice, and get in the chair, twice, daily, every day!
With love,
Jac x