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| Drawing at the V&A museum, London |
Spirituality, art
and chiropractors may seem odd bedfellows, but this week I’ve decided that they
are actually closer than I’d thought.
Maybe it's the fact that it’s my 60th year, or maybe that
this year has seen my second brush with cancer, or maybe it’s just because it’s
snowing and almost Christmas, but I’m very aware of the questions around
spirituality and life’s ‘bigger’ picture.
This week we had a
wonderful days art lesson at the V&A museum in London. Armed with our
drawing pads and creative muscles on the alert we headed to Kensington.
"Art Is About Seeing The World", as the Columbian artist
Cifuentes said, looking at what is. However, as soon as
you start to draw the mind immediately tries to tell you what it ‘ought’ to be
seeing, rather than what it actually is seeing.
You look at the arm of a beautiful statue and before you know it your
mind is telling you ‘this is what an arm
looks like – straight line here, kink there, back to straight line here’. Of course the arm isn’t like that at all and
every arm is unique. The reality is that the body has no straight lines, it
only has surfaces and those surfaces are uneven. The best a line can do is to
represent and point you towards something close to reality, but it isn’t
reality. What stops me seeing what is really there, right in front of me?
Firstly I’m too busy, I want to rush on, but seeing needs time; secondly it
requires silence, just being, and a heavy dollop of patience, to sit and see
what is really there; and thirdly it’s about ego – my mind thinks it knows
better than reality.
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| Rodin’s The Prodigal |
After lunch we did
an exercise where we had to draw something in one of the galleries, but with
our left (or less preferred) hand. Why draw with the other hand? Because we get
in our own way – in all of the ways I just outlined above. How do you silence
that controlling, ‘know it all’, ‘take
short cuts’ kind of thinking, to get yourself out of your own way? In order
to draw using the right side of your brain, the side that connects us with the
deeper layers of meaning in life, means that you have to take the pen out of
the hand of the left-brain. We don't
know what is in us; we don't know our potential because we insist on being in control
of our life, in the left-brain kind of way that feels safer.
As I seriously
attempted to focus on my drawing, I found myself startled by the hijacking of
three words - Meditate, Contemplate and Prayer.
As a new kid on the block to the world of meditation I am still learning
that meditation is about being still, silent, present to your self, to the
moment and to whatever. Contemplation comes from the Latin word ‘to gaze; to see’. That is the essence of art – being still,
silent and gazing, looking, seeing what is, not what you lazily presumed. It’s where, like art, we stop looking for what
we think should or shouldn't be there and experience first hand what is
there. Prayer, like putting the pencil to the paper to begin to create an
imperfect offering of a drawing, is our response to what we see - formulating
some words of awe, thankfulness, questioning or requesting.
There was one
point at the V&A where our teacher introduced the ‘draw with your left
hand’ exercise where she said
“I’m going to take away your control; to loosen you up”.
That’s what life
does to you if you let it. That's what having a cancer diagnosis does to you if
you let it. It loosens you up. It gives you the opportunity to learn to be
still (meditate); the opportunity to learn to see what’s actually around you,
rather than all the straight line, mental models we surround ourselves with. To
see the surfaces, the tones, the curves, the actual experience of gazing at
something (contemplate); to every now and then respond with a feeling or some
words (prayer) to try and shape some direction of the experience (start drawing
something).
So where does the
chiropractor fit in? I’ve been seeing a
chiropractor for the past few months. I have to be honest and say whilst I’ve
never been an atheist about chiropractors, I have certainly been some where
between a skeptic and an agnostic. But I can honestly say I feel better,
lighter, and freer than I have in years. Why? Because what I discovered is that
after years of bad posture (I have a PhD in Slouching) my spine was all tensed
up and so the energy, the potential, within, wasn't getting released to the
nervous system, in order to live a life that was possible. And it was that that
made me think about Religion. Religion as I had come to know it, (and maybe
most of us have known it and many have rejected in its modern form) is a
religion of straight lines, predictability, ‘I know’, everything having to confirm to our mental patterns
(fundamentalist theology), lifeless and not connected to peoples daily
experiences of reality.
The word Religion
actually comes from the word re-ligio
= to re-ligament; to realign. That's what chiropractic
does – it realigns. So, when we get true
religion it should realign us, not bend us out of shape. Maybe that's how we
know the difference between true and false religion - does it realign me, free
up the potential within, release compassion, empathy and the pursuit of the
meaningful life?
-TW
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| The cafe ceiling at the V&A |
