Part 5: My Intuitive Guided Art: Trusting Your Intuition Experience

Part 5:

A new color came through for this fifth layer, and I am amazed at what it did to my painting.

In preparation for teaching Intuitive Guided Art: Trusting Your Intuition, co-creator Dan and I took ourselves through the workshop process. The workshop is an eight part series during which students will practice using their intuition as they paint their way through different emotions. Here is my account of the experience, shared in eight parts that will each highlight a different session or layer/emotion that I worked on. To begin the story with Part 1 click here.

When crimson red and hearts were chosen to represent contempt for this fifth layer, I had no idea it would become the new focal point of my painting. The day I completed this layer was filled with mixed emotions, competing priorities, and confusion. I was working through trying to see things for what they actually are and not what I want them to be. Contempt means “the feeling that a person or a thing is beneath consideration, worthless, or deserving scorn”. Bullseye. I had spent most of the day trying to determine what relationships and commitments were worth my time and which ones were worthless. Recently I had been feeling like my time was not my own and that I was allowing myself to get caught up in situations in which I didn’t want to be a part of. Contempt was the result of me giving away too much of my time to things that were not for my highest good.

As I sat down to paint that night, I found myself arguing with myself. “You shouldn’t cover your canvas with contempt.” “But that’s what I’m feeling right now and that’s what my intuition is telling me to do.” “But people will think you aren’t nice if you show that much contempt.” “But that’s how I FEEL.”

After a couple different versions of this conversation with myself I finally painted the giant heart and began to color in the left half with the crimson red. Once that half was filled in it was time to make a decision: do I fill it in completely by trusting my intuition and true feelings or do I only do half so that it ‘looks like’ I don’t have so much contempt? When I really thought about it, the decision to honor my feelings won hands down even though I still felt hesitant to fill that right side in.

So what did I do? I got a bigger paintbrush and filled it all in. No more hiding I decided, not even the heavy stuff. I took ownership of these feelings of contempt and felt the energy of the emotion begin to move through my body and aura. It felt like since I “wasn’t supposed to feel contempt”, that I had not expressed it fully EVER. As I allowed myself to feel my feelings, I felt the heat of contempt and scorn and something that bordered on rage release. I sent all that energy out of my fingertips and right onto my canvas. The result: a thing of beauty. When I released all of the contempt I had stored up over my lifetimes, I made room for NEW emotions and guess what I felt first? Joy. Joy at giving myself permission to feel ALL my feelings, not just the ones I’ve deemed positive.

Check back soon for Part 6. More details and a full workshop description can be found here.  Find my Part 2 recap here.   Part 3 can be found here.   For Part 4 click here. Here’s a picture of my progress so far: