Painting Your Life

 By Tia Richardson

Life is your canvas. What do you want to paint on it? Maybe you already feel it is too late to create what you want. Maybe what is there doesn’t feel like a fit. Or, maybe you feel like you have no choice in what is painted there.

What if you COULD start to create something different in your life? Something more – harmonious? Did you ever think you could open up to new possibilities of what your life could be? Let’s imagine you can! After all your life is your canvas, and art can be anything you wish it to be.

Let’s take a journey painting a watercolor of harmony. Your paintbrush will be your imagination.

Imagine yourself walking down a narrow dirt path through a forest. The earth under your feet feels dry and solid. Next to the path green grass grows all around, wildflowers springing up; native plants growing in groups.

Looking up, you see the bright blue sky overhead. As your eyes look up and over to the left you see the bright golden shining sun. You can feel its rays shining warmly on your skin. The wind gently brushes against your skin, offering a soothing feeling.

You look down the path as it stretches towards the horizon. Walking towards it, you start to notice a fuzzy image appearing on the horizon. As you get nearer you notice it’s a blank canvas. It is large and wide, resting gently on the ground, waiting for you to give it some life!

Looking at its broad surface, colors appear. What do you notice? What do you see, feel, hear and touch?

Feel the sensations of the wind, the warm sun’s embrace, the colors of life around you.

As those sensations wash over you, look at the canvas and let the colors come to your mind that feel they want to. Imagine each color has its own personality or expression. Let them wash over the canvas and try to imagine them working together in harmony. See how they touch edges, overlap, merge, or want to separate. Are they getting along?

As the colors work themselves onto the canvas in your mind’s eye, notice what you feel. Whatever happens is ok – there is no right or wrong way to do this. The Key to life is finding what feels right for you!

Harmony is about finding acceptance, appreciation and respect in a situation, ourselves, or others. We can start by working with ourselves to know what it feels like first. Art is a great way to do this because it’s about free expression.

The idea is to try to help things that are different get along. We all have parts of our nature that have trouble getting along – attitudes, beliefs, perspectives. Harmony is asking, how can we balance those? In the journey we tried to help the colors get along by letting them work together on the canvas of our mind’s eye to paint a picture. If we can think of each color as a part our nature, maybe it can help us see different ways of working with ourselves, situations and others.

For example, let’s think of the color Yellow as representing creativity. Red, as our Will. And Blue, our quality of nurturing. Everybody has these whether they realize it or not. Many people don’t think of themselves as creative; and others may not think of themselves or someone they know as very nurturing (but maybe they want to be!)

If you want more or less of one thing, experimenting with them on paper with watercolor, freely painting to music and using more or less of one can help balance that quality in yourself. Try adding more or less of a color and notice how you feel.

There are many ways to get in touch with your own inner harmony. Different forms of creative expression can help, like making music, dance or poetry to name a few. We know meditation, listening to music, socializing and doing things you enjoy (like getting out in nature) can help us connect with ourselves and others.

Once we get a sense of what harmony feels like we can freely share it with others, and create more of that in our lives.

Flowers in nature give us a great example of what it’s like to freely share. They freely share their colors with us and everybody loves them. People love nature (not always letting it get on them!) despite the fact – and maybe because – it’s so diverse. We’re still discovering things about it. The beauty in Nature is also in us. Nature knows how to balance itself. We’re a part of Nature too.

Our journey starts with where we are. Where you’ll go? Only you know!

(This article was first published by Visionary Viewpoints - Igniting Ideas to Change the World)