The colour Red

The colour Red

69 x 69cm

This is from the script of one of Ines' self-hypnosis audios. Specifically one that deals with spirituality. Near the end, there's a post-hypnotic suggestion that whenever you see the colour red, you will internalise the words (below). It embeds even better when you write it out and put it up...!

BP and spirituality

I googled the subject and found some good articles.

The best, is this one: 4 spiritual traps of bipolar disorder. 
In fact it's brilliant. It talks of the 4 traps and the antidote for each.

1. Grandiosity.  Antidote: Humility. 

2. Isolation.  Antidote: Community.

3. Urgency. Antidote: Trust.

4. Perfectionism.  Antidote: Compassion. 

And here are 2 more articles

Intuitive Empathy

The martial art of managing BP

And just so there's a picture in the post as well, here's the start of something I haven't yet thought through, just embroidered the words for: 

In a nutshell...

I had a transformative experience. Something has shifted within me. You know how you are the same person as the day before, yet have become much more? Nothing has changed but everything is different?

I am not sure I will be able to explain this to anyone. I suspect I will lose most, if not all, people along the way, as I start to speak about things outside people's paradigms. Or maybe I just think so because they were outside my own, and if I had heard someone say this before it happened to me, I would have thought they'd lost their mind.

I've been mining YouTube for hypnosis videos and audios. Doing self-hypnosis every day. Then I found this hypnotist, see............. 

She has developed a new technique for hypnotherapy, working in much deeper states of trance than is usual and I watched several of her videos. I cannot even describe what a powerful reaction I had. My mind blew wide open. I KNEW, with a wisdom far beyond my own, that this was IT.  Her name is Ines Simpson, her technique, Simpson Protocol.

I scoured her websites and saw she was on a teaching tour in Europe. I wrote to her asking if she would see me as a client. I don't know how I found the courage to do that (!), but I was driven by something beyond my puny little conscious mind. I cannot even describe how driven I felt; I was being led by something. Long story short (and it is long, but I'll expand later, just want to get this down) she said I could meet her in Portsmouth the following Monday morning 9.30. I booked flights and 2 days later I set off on the journey to England. In her hotel room, just before she left there, we had a session. It was long, over 2 hours, and I was dazed and exhausted afterwards.

What happened? I remember very little. For a good week after I was in a daze, feeling things shifting and processing in my head, beyond my understanding, but letting it happen. It felt very benign and I trusted it was right. I was prepared to be led. Day by day, my mind blew more and more.

Another long story short: she did soul retrieval. I had heard the term long ago and dismissed it as far too "out-there", but I did not need to do anything in the session but let it happen. And over the days after, I realized a piece of my soul had come back. A piece I lost some... 25 years? ago. The piece of me that held my spiritual connection.

For a long time, I've been yearning for that connection; for the ability to believe in something greater than myself. I had it once but I've not been able to let myself believe. I've found myself envying those with faith. Even if I suspected they were deluded, I envied the serenity and the meaning they had.

It was not what I went to Portsmouth to find, not at all. I was depressed, overwhelmed by negativity and looking for help for my spectacular lack of self-esteem. But what I thought I needed, was not what my higher mind knew I needed. I went to find some mental and emotional help, and what I got was my spirituality back. This was not anything led by Ines at all, she merely facilitates what the Higher Mind wants to work on. Though I didn't know it consciously, this foundation was what I needed.

So here I am now. It's a tender little seed, just planted, just starting to grow roots. I am gently and quietly nurturing it. My spirit is soaring. Art is pouring out of me, much faster than I can get all the ideas into physical form.

YES, it looks like a hypomania. And yes, it feels much the same as hypomania feels, in some respects. Spiritual revelations, insights, expansiveness, overflowing love, connection and gratitude. But just because it may bear resemblance to hypomania, does not mean it has to be hypomania. It's a spiritual re-awakening, which feels the same. The difference is in how grounded I feel. How the feelings are arising from a deeply restful place within me. My spirit soars, but it is bound to the earth by a golden thread, so it will not fly off to the sun and then crash and burn.

And I know the long, long hours of daylight in summer mean I sleep less than I should. I'm not doing it deliberately, my body clock is exquisitely attuned to the light outside, even if blocked by blackout curtains. So, less sleep also helps my spirit soar. But I KNOW this is not just a hypomania. Something has shifted inside me.

That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

So much to say...

So much has happened since last I wrote, I could write walls of text. How to condense it? This blog is not meant to be a journal of my every thought and feeling and every event in my life. It's about my art and how it is informed.

But when a dramatically altering event has happened and so much develops within, in a short space of time - and will inform most all of the art I am, and will be making, at least in the next while - it needs to be mentioned. I've thought and thought and written some, but there is no way to shorten all that happened. I will have to write it in "headings and subheadings" form.

And I'm sorry to do this, but I am going to publish this now. I hate cliffhangers myself, so will try hard to write more very soon. It's just that my mind is blown and I've needed, and still need, to let everything settle.

If I absolutely have to put a name to this state:

I'm either rapid-cycling or mixed, I think. It feels like what is happening now, careering around the mood spectrum. Not extremely, and not so the general public would notice. (So fear not, neurotypicals, she's not about to freak out and scare you!) It isn't important what you call it - which is only really relevant for medication - but it does help me understand what is going on, and helps me know, not to take it too much to heart. It is what it is and this is how it is, now.

What has happened is that I took my mood stabilizer dose down, a while back, because I was in such a dumbed-down brain fog, that nothing in class was penetrating my understanding. I had to do that, to continue my course. But logically, it isn't stabilising quite so well now. It's the dose I used to be on and which worked great before, but now there is stress added on top, and it isn't quite enough. Yet, I can't see what else I can do. Since Wellbutrin isn't used for depression here, my doc doesn't know how to dose it for depression. His locum put it up to the higher dose, and it suits me this way. Since I am in another part of the country, I can't expect my poor doc to treat me over the phone. So I just took the lamotrigine down myself.

So am I caught between a rock and a hard place? Actually, I don't think so. I quite like it here. I'm on the sad side, and highly emotional - all over the place - but this is when I am at my most creative. I feel my emotions so much more deeply. As hard as it can be, how wonderful is this? I've been in this position before, and if I can walk this little tightrope and not fall off, I'll just stick with it. My head is brimming with ideas! Being on the down side, the ideas are a lot of the things I wanted to express while depressed, but was too depressed to make at the time. I have compiled a playlist of sad, evocative songs on YouTube, which I play often, which heightens the emotions, heightening the creativity. Add the daily hypnotic trances to this mix, and yup, I'm on my own "druggy trip" on my very own brain chemicals, while still taking the ones I take to balance those chemicals! Summer holiday is 3 days away; woohoo... you can see where I am going to go with this (possibly a little recklessly, but not toooo much).

Now I have that problem of my medium being too slow for when my mind is moving fast, as far as ideas are concerned. I MUST at some stage, find a faster medium, that I can toss ideas at, and capture as they arise. I could then translate them into slower-to-make textile works once I slow down again.

Meanwhile I can start embroidering the text for the next, after the next, in between the one after that, (a text from an old song by a Danish singer called Christian) on this lovely, mottley, yellowy-beige, Bali fabric background.

... to the backdrop of this beautiful sight and sound:

Deeper and Deeper 2 in progress

... is coming along nicely. I'm quilting it now, so not too much longer and it will be done. 

I found a wonderful picture for the next couple in the series, as the same old spiral is getting a bit old now. :)

Sig nærmer tiden

One of my next works, will have these very evocative words inscribed on them: 
("The time is coming when I must go away.")

I just began today, and will do a translation once it is getting along. And also a bit of an explanation of what is behind it.

Sig nærmer Tiden, da jeg må væk, 
jeg hører Vinterens Stemme; 
Thi også jeg er kun her på Træk, 
og haver andensteds hjemme. 
    
Jeg skulle sjunget lidt mer' måske -
måske vel også lidt bedre; 
Men mørke Dage jeg måtte se, 
og Storme rev mine Fjædre.  

Tit ligevel til en Smule Trøst
jeg ud af Fængselet titter,
Og sender stundom min Vemodsrøst
med længsel gennem mit Gitter. 

  
Mig bæres for, som ret snart i kvæld 
at Gitterværket vil briste; 
Thi kvidre vil jeg et ømt Farvel; 
måske det bliver det sidste.

(- St.St. Blicher 1837)

Way back...

I used to cry to this song, when I was 15 or 16 and feeling lost, alone and afraid, and it seemed that no-one understood. Somehow it helped.

So tired of this rollercoaster

" ...and I, tread a troubled track
My odds are stacked
I go back to black."   -- Amy Winehouse

Sunday morning

I wake up, though I could have wished for more sleep, I have coffee and then sink into listening to the self-hypnosis recordings I have downloaded from the magical internet.

Rejuvenated,  I open my curtains to this, with a wonderfully cool breeze and birdsong. Life is harsh and unrelenting, but oh! - it is also wondrous and beautiful.

I have homework to be done, but I have neglected my blog, too, so let me update.

I finished the beading on 'Deeper and deeper 2'. I wrote a far-too-long hypnotic script and calculated I'd need to write 3 letters per cm, to fit it all into the 334cm I have. I took many deep breaths, picked up and put down the pen about 4 times, gathered all my courage and began to write. Why all this stress? Because ALL the beading was done, and I could not make a single mistake with the paint on the fabric. Very tensely, I wrote the whole outer ring.The irony of being so tense while writing about relaxation, did not escape me!

Then looked at it and it was ALL wrong. I had to cramp the letters so close together to fit in all the text, that it gave the feel of words-running-into-each-other-spokenfast-and-pressured - ANYTHING but the relaxed feeling it needed to have! Then came that familiar, stomach-dropping feeling of "I put all this work in and now it's ruined"... Bundled the stupid thing up and stuck it on a shelf for a few days!

Now what? The text couldn't be erased. Or so, I thought! I discovered that I could paint over it in black - you can faintly see it was there, but that will be disguised when the new text comes on. Saved! O, happy day.

Then, I cut the text in half. There were 2 parts to it anyway, so that was ok, and it gave me some space to flesh out the first part. Then followed some maths - first simple and then complex, with the aid of my daughter, because my brain is putty.

I wonder if anyone who looks at it, will appreciate the amount of calculating involved, counting words, letters, punctuation, spaces and cms available! As in: 334cm in which to write, 610 characters, 109 words, 119 spaces... AND I wanted the spaces to be bigger than the letters. My daughter created a clever spreadsheet with variables, so I can do this calculation easier next time. For this time, I have 0.5cm per letter/punctuation mark and 0.7cm per inter-word space. This provides a guideline, which I can then adjust while I am writing.

All the calculation is necessary, not only to fit the text into the spiral so that it fills all the way to the middle, not over or under. It's also to know how to space the words out, so that when you read it, it reads with the meter of the person saying the words. This means greater spaces between some words, taking a little longer for your eye to run across, to create the pauses you would otherwise hear. To translate the feeling of the auditory into the visual. This is why the previous, squashed text totally failed.

Last night I finished blacking out the text I had written. Hopefully I'll get time today, to begin writing the new text on.

You can't see the blacked-out text at the bottom, can you? No. Say no! 😁

Onwards, deeper down.

Now working on the second 'Deeper and Deeper'. I've not written the text yet, and there is not space for very much, so what can I write on it? I have just about 300cm of running line space. The first one was an abbreviated induction, with what text I could fit into 336cm. I'd originally conceived the series to be spanning over a whole hypnotherapy session, with each successive work containing the next part, in a continuation. But each work should also be a whole in itself, So now I am not sure what to do, but I have plenty of time to mull it over while I do the wonderfully meditative hand beading.

(I wrote the above about 2 weeks ago. Can't think why I didn't publish it back then?? But I will do so now, as it shows where I was in the process at that time.)

At last, it is done

Stumme skrig, tørre tårer

Silent screams, dry tears

120x96cm

Randers, 2018

Detail picture

I feel very relieved that this one is done. It's one I will show to very few people. The text on it, is poetry I wrote (in danish) and it's not something I am all that comfortable with just anyone reading. At least not until I can say it is firmly in the past. I'm not sure I like it much (ok, I don't like it much!) but it is one of the less beautiful things that also need to be heard.

It tells of how I felt, after I had some (very) teary breakdowns at school and some teachers and the Head rallied around and said they'd get me help, which essentially consisted of being put on the waiting list to see a psychologist (I will be very lucky to have that happen before I am finished the course). Not saying they weren't sweet and sympathetic; I did get to chat with one of the lecturers who taught us psychology a few times, but then after that, there was just nothing, and what I felt was an avoidance - a smile and hello in the corridor, but not asking how I was doing or anything. I think I might have freaked them out a bit! So the poetry is about feeling rather left in the lurch.

I am onto the next work, in the Deeper and Deeper series, which is being worked on while I watch either hypnosis lectures or Morse/Lewis reruns on YouTube. I'll put up a picture of it, in the next post. AND I am getting studying done as well! (with help from a great "stop-procrastinating" hypnosis track I bought online.) Things are ok for now.

Finishing line in sight

I've solved the problem of this being way too floppy to hang - added an extra backing, with stiff interfacing ironed to it. A decision I regretted instantly once I decided to add some hand quilting! It completely changes the hand of the fabric, making it stiff and horrible to quilt. Still, the quilting process is finite, and then it will hang properly!

A few evenings more and it will be done.

My college room has a beautiful picture window, with a view second to none. I'm not exaggerating, when I say it delights me every single day. Whatever my mood, nature speaks to me, and it's directly outside! 

Here are a few seasonal pictures:

January 2018

January 2018 at night

March 2018

April 2018. 
See the wild hares in the bottom right of the picture? I woke up one morning, to them doing what bunnies do best...

May 2018

So soothing and rejuvenating to the soul. Things are actually looking up. I hit a very low point of despair some 10 days back, just after I'd been to the audiologist and was given the news that I have hearing loss. A blow to the gut. I am 56 years old.

I have to go back in a year, to see "which way it is going" - (very euphemistic - it can get better??) I suppose it could stay the same.  He called it 'modest' - what is modest even, to someone who works with people who need hearing aids? He said, at this level, I'd typically be having difficulty in gatherings. And yes, it is in classes...

At the same time, the fog in my head, was causing me to fall behind. I'd have notes, I had no memory of having been through. I felt stuck, I had nowhere to turn, no-one to speak to. After a lot of crying, I decided to take matters into my own hands, and decreased the medication, to where it was before. And the fog cleared!

And I feel so much better. Maybe some depression will return, but I'll deal with that, if it comes.

New work

Here it is May already, and much longer since the last post, than I had wanted. Never mind, only looking forward.

The work I've been showing in progress, is nearing the finishing line, and it will be satisfying to complete, mostly because I'm sick of it. It's very, very soft and floppy, and I worry that it won't hang flush with the wall. I'm thinking and thinking about how to stiffen it, given that the quilting is already virtually completed. I'll work it out and then put it up here.

Meanwhile, I started AND completed the next. Something of a wonder for me! I'm planning a series, so this is number 1.

Deeper and deeper 1

59x63cm

Fabric and beads

Detail picture

And yes, I've discovered the wondrous world of hypnotherapy. I don't think I've ever been so relaxed before, while awake. 

And it is very necessary right now, as my mood downturn has deepened. I'm actually really battling. Artwork is only being made, because without it, I would fall apart. Artwork is being made, during time I probably should be studying, and at the cost of how well I will do in exams. A deliberate decision. I have some leeway, as I did well in the last exam, so I have a better idea of how much is expected.

I'm having some trouble working out if this is another mood episode, or a (hopefully temporary) response to the stress of the studies. Maybe it's both. Medication is up, which is giving horrible side-effects of a foggy head and dizziness, neither of which are conducive to learning. My concentration has become so terrible that it drifts off continuously, and I'm not catching or understanding much of what happens in class. I cry at the drop of a hat and feel clumsy and useless at the practical aspect. 

I've wondered if I am trying to do something which doesn't play to my strengths, once again. If I should carry on with it. Not sure what will happen, or how to tackle it, but I have made contact with a psychologist, so here's hoping I can figure out a way through, with help.

Weekends are little oases, with the life-giving waters and nourishment of creating. While there's freedom to create, there is hope.
________

(Oh, and I did get my purse back - with everything in it. )

Here it is, with the busy background, I thought I'd try. I started sewing some of the stripey bits together last night and got about 1/6 of the way. 

Then I took this photograph and and I SERIOUSLY dislike it. I really don't like the "exploding" effect. 

This is a dreadful stage of the creative process: you start out SO excited and inspired, work feverishly to manifest what is in your head. You lose track of time and have moments of Flow. It's such a high. Then you reach a stage when it just looks dreadful and you hate it. It's nothing like the amazing picture you had in your head. The risks you took with the direction it wanted to take, have failed. You've put all that work into it, and it's a flop. You've lost something you invested so much in. 

Often I put it away at this stage and just try to forget. Start something new to get back the high of the inspired feeling. Or numb out the disappointment on Facebook. 

This time, I knew what I didn't like and luckily most was still pinned and I'd only sewn a little. I sighed over the futile effort down the drain, and unpinned 2 evenings (roughly 8 hours) work. There was still too much I didn't like, so I unpicked about an hour's worth of the already sewn part. I'm much happier with it now. I may even unpick a bit more, but will wait until I've built up the empty parts.

The process resumes and it's amazing how your disappointment then vanishes into thin air, like a cloud on a sunny day: you've managed to Save it. All those hours, going in the wrong direction, are totally forgotten.  The possibilities are open again and you're back to riding the high once more.

I now have a pile of cut-up-in small-pieces "Precious Fabric I've Been Saving For One Day And Just Can't Bear Cutting Into". Quilters will know what I'm talking about!  Ahhhh well, it's only fabric and that "One Day" is TODAY, I remind myself. There will be another work in the future, they'll be just right for.

And there's a sunny Sunday afternoon ahead. Streaming Radio 702 from South Africa on my laptop.

, 

It's acquired some blobs and some writing. :)

I don't have much of an idea where it will go to next - a pieced background? Maybe that's an idea. A busy background, with a quieter foreground.

A brief update - not much to say...

There's an old Danish song, about Winter, that starts "It is cold outside" and which goes on to describe the snowy landscape and the birds that have stayed behind. I've "corrupted" it, and written "It is cold inside" - there's more, but this is what I have finished embroidering:

I lost my purse yesterday, so I'm feeling frantic, and that doesn't help my mood. It's -6C outside, I have no car and am soon going to walk the 2km into town to search in the streets.

I've added two more layers. 

I have an upcoming exam, so I'm procrastinating and finding other **very important** things that HAVE to be done right now.... 

It's a great pity that I'm at my most creative when find myself outside the "normal range" of the mood spectrum. Maybe because, whenever I diverge to the negative end, it's so imperative that I create, to halt the downward spiral, that I can't not do it. 

I relate to people who won't take medication because it makes them "normal" - even though I'm not one of them. Being well-functioning takes priority now, even at the cost of some creativity. My mood has been stable for the past several years, which you can see by the lack of posts in that period. It's not that I don't create, it's that what I make doesn't have soul, or meaning or message. Or depth. And that is the kind of work I mean by "I art therefore I am".

I used to have much more time, but I'm studying at the moment - to become self-supporting again - so the pace of the work is much slower. There will probably not be much finished work posted here, just work-in-progress, as and when there is time to progress.

1.       

I'm finally getting around to using the fabric I rusted a long time ago.. I don't know if it's the Nordic influence now, maybe the naked winter trees, but I've moved to a phase of subdued colours - brown and grey, which I used to think were dull; practically non-colours. But now I discover that there are many, many shades of those and it's very interesting to see what you can do, when they're so muted.

"If my life were important"

Work-in-progress