Before I was Born

I discovered a pattern in a series of drawings that I made lately. These drawings were made during a period of three days. They are not all the drawings that I made. They are just a sampling. The pattern is of a layered history. I had this pattern in many other drawings that I did before. You can see many of them here on this blog. I even noted the layers when I wrote about the drawings. But these days, suddenly something rebelled in me. It was not a rebellion with fighting and blood. It was the feeling that this is a fixed perception, something which is inflexible in a world that I find more and more to be endlessly flexible. It does not have to be this way, I thought somewhere within the wholeness of my mind. This historical understanding of life, in which first there was this and from this came that, a perception that explains the condition now, based on what past events led to it, this perception is a thought in the present.

I have seen again and again that I can choose to change my thoughts in the present. I mean, a thought that occurred already occurred, but the next thought does not have to go in the same direction. I can choose a different thrust and I have done it many times. So do I have to continue keeping the belief in this historical stratification of my life? This is what was churning in me and it was different than just noting it as I did before. I was questioning its necessity and validity now.

Just this questioning, without any effort to come to an answer or to force a conclusion, has moved things in the mind and in the last drawing you will see that the order has turned upside down. What was the order before? From troubled beginning came, through a slow development, light, health and joy.

You can see in the drawing

that the roots are wild

And that they lead to a growth

that is more peaceful and joyful.

 

In this drawing too

you can see that 

turmoil and pain are the basis

from which

a rocky landscape emerges

with a transparent city on its top.

In the last one a healthy beginning is being attacked by trouble.

 

The blue and green and yellow

are the good beginning.

The trouble is easy to see.

I can say that I did not create this shift willingly. It is the awareness and wondering that weakened the old perception. Awareness and wondering made the shift possible. But the shift happened without the willful “I” of every day. Something deeper has done the work here. My intuition, or the infinite inner love, has come into the personality and moved my focus one step backward. Instead of looking at my history, looking back from now, and seeing how I came from a troubled beginning to a good state, the last drawing shows instead how I was before the trouble came into my life and how the trouble came.

From this I learn that the idea of layering is OK but it has to have three layers. The first is the innocent, fresh, joyful beginning. Then trouble comes and makes war with this beginning, and eventually things change again for the better and happier state.

I could see other things in the drawings and especially in the last one, just as you can. But this is what came to me.

Why is this meaningful?

Every change in my history was a choice. I chose to come into this world and get into trouble. Then I chose again to change the patterns of troubled living into joyful living.  But without seeing myself from before the troubles began, I only see myself as one who started from trouble, and because of this, there is always a sense that the troubled state is my natural state. It is where I come from. Something was wrong with me, right from the beginning. It is hard to get rid of this feeling that right from the beginning something was wrong with me. So even if I managed to change patterns of thought into more joyful ones, there is still somewhere in me the belief that something is wrong with me. Because of this, I don’t have the necessary energy to move to happiness. The joy that I want to experience requires some work that has to be done, to overcome this nagging feeling of worthlessness. But if I manage to go farther into the past than this life and see the way I was before I came here, I get to experience the joy in myself in the true, natural state, and this gives me the necessary energy to choose happiness. You have to choose your happiness.

I have seen it with others in my work. Especially I have seen it with those who were born into loveless families with mental illnesses, anger and neglect. No matter how much we tried to understand how these environments contributed to the current suffering, the understanding was not strong enough to make a change. My clients still felt worthless. But when we came together to the time before they were born, they saw that  they really were joyful in the beginning and understood that they had made the choice to suffer. This, somehow, leads quite easily and without a conscious effort to choosing again, and this time the choice is to be happy. The most important part of the transformation is the experience of the joy that we really are. And in this way, with surprising ease, people change their lives.

As for me, I find that many times I start new things with my clients. Wanting to help them find the power to change, I discover that we need to go deeper than we went before and come to the point where they can experience how joyful they were before the choice to suffer was made. Once they come back to the point of choice, they choose to change without any effort. And now I find that I am going through the same process.

Thank you, my clients. You are so good in being a mirror for me.

 

 

I used to be a graphic designer and an illustrator.  I became involved with the Chan Meditation Center and studied meditation and Buddhist knowledge with the late Master Sheng-yen from Taiwan. For twelve years I was in a process of deepening my meditation. I had many more experiences and insights and my life changed. After having illustrated more than 40 children’s books and writing two of them, I left this career too and went to New York University to study art therapy.

You can see more about Giora’s work on his blog and website