Blank Canvas

 

    I tend to have a vivid dream life. In one dream, I was painting an ocean scene. I was painting the scene over and over, trying to take in different perspectives. At one point, I sat in front of the blank canvas, keenly aware that I had the power to create any scene I wanted. The message I gleamed from the dream was that personal insight is much like taking out a paint brush and starting with a blank canvas, painting a picture of your life. Often people just live their lives, never looking closely at themselves or the scenery around them, rarely looking deeper into what they are seeing and living. When you are painting or drawing, you must observe every detail more carefully. You see colors, characteristics, shadows and contours that you rarely see when you glance quickly at something or someone. When you sharpen your perception to take in more details, you see so much more. When you stop living in a blur and look more closely at yourself, you start seeing your life in a different light. The other observation is that the more you are willing to look at yourself, the more clearly, you can see others. Several clients reminded me of this dynamic recently. As their awareness and insight had expanded, their insight into their spouses and family members had become more finely tuned. One client asked, "How is that I could have lived with someone for so many years and knew that there were some concerns, yet somehow denied how bad it really was?" That is easy to answer. It is like taking the canvas of your life and smudging the scene until you can barely make out what the scene looks like. This kind of denial resembles finger painting. Other people paint highly distorted scenes altogether of their lives, portraying a fantasy rather than painting reality. This would be a painting of a beautiful castle, meanwhile the occupants inside the castle are held captive under evil rule. This would be the families taunting pictures of their perfect life everywhere, while the husband is cheating and the mom is drinking excessively. This denial would resemble fantasy art. Of course, everyone denies reality at some time in their lives. When you are ready to break the denial, you see the scenery with more clarity and your painting becomes more detailed and honest.
     People also have their own unique perspectives, thus everyone lives in different realities. Take 20 people and sit them on a beach with a canvas and acrylic paints. Each and every painting might resemble each other, yet would be completely different. Their focus and details would vary significantly. That is absolutely true in a relationship. Two people can have absolutely opposing perspectives on the same relationship. Here is an example of opposing views in a relationship. A client said that his wife is so angry that he wants a divorce and just wants to blame him and retaliate. The angry spouse lives in his own reality. In his painting, he only sees himself. He does not see how his behavior affected the marriage and does not want to see how tense the relationship had been for years. In his painting, the details reflect his reality, no matter how many times other perspectives tried to tell him otherwise. So many people live in this type of denial. Also, if people have narcissistic wounds from childhood, they really deny how their behavior affects their relationships in any way. They often become vengeful, spreading lies about the spouse who dares to leave the relationship. They have to justify their rage....so they blame. The angry person begins recruiting anybody who will listen which only reinforces their distorted reality. They show their painting around town, telling everyone how the title wave came out of the blue and how the "other" who caused the wave is awful. This is why the more insightful you can be about your feelings and your own behavior, the more vivid and clear your paintings can become.
     The last insight I took from the dream is that we all have the amazing power to change our paintings and our lives. If indeed we are the creators of our reality, then we have the power to change our reality. How do we change it? First, we set out to discover what we have been painting since it's imperative to acknowledge the version of reality we keep recreating. Then, we set ourselves free by allowing a new scene to appear, one we are longing to create and live. By creating the new picture in your mind, you create a new reality, even if the reality has not yet been created in real time. I always hold pictures in my mind of what my life will look like in one year, two years, etc. Once I hold that image in my head, my choices and intuition head me in that direction. One year later, I look around and enjoy the fact that the scene I had imagined had become reality. I also enjoy the surprises, the things in my life that are even better than what I had imagined. I also accept that sometimes I couldn't account for lessons I still needed to learn, which explains the things that have not yet manifested from my vision. We also have to account for other people's lives to affect ours. These are the varied colors that come from blending. Embrace that others are creating their paintings as well and do not discount their reality because it does not fit with the image you held of what your life would look like. A parent that does not want to accept that his son is gay, is holding onto a fantasy painting of reality, versus embracing the beauty that comes from allowing others the freedom to live their lives authentically. We all have blind spots that are lessons yet to be learned and experiences meant to guide us. The beauty of life is that we can all start again with a blank canvas and recreate our lives and concurrently our paintings. Life is an ever changing experience and with a stroke of the brush and a keen eye for seeing things in life we never noticed before, we can paint our lives in a new direction. "A moment's insight is sometimes worth a life's experience"...(Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.).