Summary 

Welcome dreamers, seekers, empaths, and healers! My name is Amanda Lux of the Elevation Hive school and community for energy medicine and dreamwork. In this podcast, I share teachings, musings, poems, songs, and interviews with other amazing humans who walk the healer's path. 

In this episode 

An art vlog and podcast documenting my journey from painting realism (surrealism) to abstracts!

Having never painted in this style before, I created an entire series of abstract paintings and hung them in a solo show! The theme of this series was "embracing the dark" and finding the beauty in the dreary parts of life (and the hideous PNW grey, rainy weather). In this episode I talk about:

• How I painted an entire series of abstract paintings having never painted in this style before (in less than a month).
• How I used Ritual Action to shift my energy and my life through painting
• How art helped me to change my relationship to the weather in PNW and my perfectionistic tendencies that used to keep me from starting and completing projects.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Watch this podcast as a vlog on youtube!!!!! (Like and subscribe please)
• Visit AmandaLux.com to view and buy art.
• Read the current astrology forecast here
• Go to Elevationhive.com to learn more about everything else
• Click here buy me a cup of coffee or show your support for this podcast. So much energy goes into the creation of this free content and I'm a one-woman show over here. I really appreciate your appreciation! 

Thank you for listening, sharing, reviewing and sending me your dreams! 

I love to read them. 

Songs used in this episode:

Alone/All One theme song written and performed by Amanda Lux

Take in all the many seasons and gradations of gray that

are you wrap soft glistening tendrils of hope around the malnourished

places that are hard to love about.

You.

Feed the darkness with curiosity instead of brightness.

Look beyond what you think you.

And invite the gloom to be itself completely.

Welcome to a Lone Traveler's Guide to the Divine, a podcast and vlog.

For empaths, healers, dreamers, and Seekers.

My name is Amanda Lex, and today's episode is the first of its kind where

I am combining both audio and video.

So if you are listening to this podcast, I just want to encourage you

to check out the show notes and look for the link so that you can actually

watch the video that accompanies this.

And if you're watching this on YouTube, I just want you to also know that

you could listen on Amazon, Apple, Spotify, wherever you hear podcasts.

And in today's episode I'm gonna be talking about a creative process that

involves some conscious ritual action that is for shifting and changing one's energy.

So in this episode I'm talking about.

A specific issue that I have had in my life and how I painted my way

through it, and that doesn't mean that I don't have the issue anymore.

, Uh, it doesn't mean that I'm, I've completely resolved it,

and now it no longer bothers me.

, what it means is that I have a new way of relating to it.

New tools, new consciousness, and my energy.

Is creating new patterns.

And so my experience around it is different and that's ever evolving,

so, and it's much more interesting than just staying in the old rut.

I'm gonna begin by just reading a poem that goes along with one of the

paintings and kind of the overarching theme of this entire series, and

it's called Embracing the Dark.

Do not deny the beauty of the dark outside your window.

For the window out is the window in do not retreat in misery.

Wishing for frolicking sunny days whenever the skies are weeping and the

gale winds are moaning through the creaky trees, bending under the misty gray.

As though you could be relieved of your own shadow, do not despise

those endless cold drop ceiling days.

That may as well be nights dare to savor the contrast instead to let

the dreary be, Rather than seeking to extinguish the darkness with light,

remember that you are the weather.

Ugly and beautiful.

Mournful and joyful.

Whole and grateful, fluctuating and change Full take.

In all the many seasons and gradations of gray that are you.

Wrap, soft glistening tendrils of hope around the malnourished

places that are hard to love about.

You.

Feed the darkness with curiosity instead of brightness.

Look beyond what you think you see.

And invite the gloom to be itself completely ponder its stories, revel in

its mysteries, allowing the dark inside, outside to unveil its strange beauty

to feel at home in the embrace of you.

So the theme of this art series that I engaged in, um, over the last

few months was about the weather and my feelings about the weather.

Here in the Pacific Northwest.

I grew up here and then I moved away and lived as soon as I could.

I moved to Sunny Arizona, Northern California, New York, la and really

tried to find my way home in the sun and.

I couldn't find my way home to the sun, only because my home was here and I

ended up coming back here about 17 years ago or so, and I just, I've lived here

ever since in the Pacific Northwest.

With this deep disdain for the gray, cold, rainy, wet weather.

That is a lot of the year , and I've been learning how to reckon with that.

So I decided that I really wanted to transform the way I feel about the dark.

And the weather.

And I wanna invite you to think about this in as a metaphor because

the weather is just a metaphor for anything that we don't like, right?

Anything that we have resistance to.

And in the poem I was talking about, how the window out is the

window in, and what we see in our outer world is always a reflection.

Of what's going on in our inner world.

And so I, I found an opportunity in there, um, in that discomfort and to really

explore how can I create more acceptance?

How can I find the beauty?

How can I cultivate a nourishing relationship with the dark

and the cold and the dre?

And I have a million tools that I use to combat that, and yet it still has been

a thing that I have to work hard with.

Right.

So that's a gift.

I've, I've been gifted this opportunity and all of our challenges, um, hold

gifts for us to work through, right.

To learn and grow from.

And, and this one is for.

, I decided that I wanted to use this particular challenge as

the theme of this art series.

So everything that I painted, um, was coming from that place of how

can I find the love for the dreary?

And I gave myself a limited color palette to explore these abstract

paintings through, and I taught myself an entirely new way of painting.

And this was also, A form of ritual action that I was taking, and I'm gonna

be talking a little bit about that.

Because taking ritual action through a creative project like this is a

really profoundly cool way to shift and change your energy and your

perception of things in your life.

So that's what this, this painting series was also about for me, not just.

Transforming my relationship to the weather, but also other patterns that

I was experiencing in myself that I could find places where there was

limitation or old ruts that were not flowing as well as they could, and I

wanted to feel more expressed, more free.

Everything really fundamentally comes down to how is our energy flowing and

our energy wants to flow in patterns and we get into these ruts or these

specific patterns that are familiar.

This is part of human nature.

It's even part of nature.

Nature itself is cyclical.

It's patterned and it sometimes, you know, in a neutral.

Without charge, without judgment, we could say that's just the way it goes.

Patterns are efficient and our energy is always looking for efficiency

or the path of least resistance.

Sometimes the path of least resistance ends up not really being that efficient.

It's compensating because.

Trauma or experiences that um, or we have wounds, right?

Whether they're physical, mental, emotion.

Whatever that cause obstructions and our energy's looking for the path of least

resistance and sometimes it, it has to compensate to get around these old wounds.

And so we get into these ruts, these patterns of compensation

and maybe that works for a while.

It gets us out of danger, it gets us to the next place we need to go.

But then we are.

Find ourselves repeating things that we don't wanna be repeating,

and we do the work to become aware of what those things are to try and

heal and, and move through them.

And sometimes we're successful and sometimes we're not.

And we, we revisit those old patterns.

So energy does this, How do we shift that?

How do we create new flow, new patterns?

How do we rewire our old stuck places and heal the, from that,

that the trauma obstructions, right?

How do we do that?

And.

In polarity therapy, we do that through, um, looking at the energy body

through the chakra system, elementally, and, and we can kind of apply these

symbolic, uh, prescribed remedies of movement, nutrition, sound, body.

So there's all these different ways that we can treat our energy physically

and symbolically to heal and rewire those stuck patterns, um, that are

just, that we come with, that we.

Inherit that we're genetically responsible for or that

we pick up along the way.

And that's part of our comic journey.

It's part of our healers journey, our heroes journey, and it's what

makes us unique and it's what makes our lives so profoundly awesome, is

having these challenges, having these opportunities to grow and heal and evolve.

So we can look at them through the negative pole lens of, Oh, I

have these stuck places, or these resistances or these patterns.

I don't like them.

They're not serving me anymore.

and, and we can say, That's great.

I have this opportunity to learn and grow and heal.

So how do I wanna approach that?

And so for me, in this creative journey that I'm sharing with

you in this episode, my approach was to paint my way through it.

And this was, there's two.

Ways, or two different ways to look at how I was doing this or what it

was I was painting my way through.

One is, as I said earlier, the weather my relationship to place and

to the grief of being in the dark.

And two, the, the ways that darkness inspires, um,

challenge and grief in general.

how can I relate to those places in myself and in the weather and in the

town that I live in, in a new way?

How could I create new patterns around those, those perceptions.

And then the other thing, the other level that I was working with here was

just how I approach art in general.

And I really wanted to, Come up with a new way to approach my art.

I had some old patterns of perfectionism that were keeping me stuck and I

was ready to move through that.

So perhaps in your life you have something that you are

experiencing, something that you are.

Carrying, maybe it's an illness or a relationship or a job that you

don't like that isn't really working for you anymore that you wish you

could change your relationship to.

And I just wanna invite you as you listen and observe this episode,

to really try that on for yourself.

Like how, how could this apply to you, This idea that on a fundamental, energetic

level, you could take some form of ritual action and you could find a new way.

It's really kind of amazing how much you can shift and change when you bring

that awareness through ritual action and through especially creativity, which

taps into your subconscious and your, your right brain intuition and you know,

there's all kinds of ways that you're.

Can then move through without your conscious, logical mind really

understanding and, and it gets to be expressed and new patterns arise

and it's like, wow, it's so, wow.

So I've always painted in a very realistic style that was surrealism, but

it was very much about capturing this dream, this vision, this idea, this.

Feeling and the story of the dream, perhaps through the visual painting.

And I was really focused on detail and, you know, getting the details

and the colors and the, the emotions to translate through the painting.

And this definitely was detail oriented, uh, small strokes, you

know, really I give, I would spend months and months on one painting.

Years and years, and it was, it was a little painstaking at times.

, the amount of detail and effort and perfectionism that would show up.

And this is not, uh, unique to my art that those same traits, those

same ways of approaching things we're showing up in my life as well.

I wanted to feel more flow in my life.

And so I decided to really do that through my art and I go on a journey with the art

to see, you know, how I could approach it differently and how could I meet my.

Creative process, uh, with this awareness of these stuck points and move through

them differently as a way to reorganize my own energy and the patterns that

my energy had gotten into these rut.

Of perfectionism and kind of spinning out before creating and

not bringing things to completion.

I decided to approach art in a completely different way and I taught myself

how to, uh, paint in an abstract way as opposed to in a realistic way.

And I had never done abstract paintings before.

I was terrified and kind of thought that painting abstract.

And easier, and it would help me get outta my head and more in my

body and it would feel, you know, freeing and I would feel this abandon.

And I, that's what I really wanted.

, not the perfectionistic thing.

I wanted to feel wild and free.

But when I tried doing it, I realized that it was really hard.

It didn't look good, the paintings weren't looking the way I was feeling,

and I wanted to learn how to translate that and how to have a cohesive.

Where the creation was really a reflection of what I was experiencing

and of the consciousness.

So I wanted to feel that freedom and I wanted to, and I decided

to focus for the series on.

The weather and my relationship to the weather, cuz that gave me a subject right?

An emotional, um, quality to paint from

And so that helped, right?

And then I also gave myself a limited color palette so that I could create

a cohesive series because that felt better than seeing all this chaos.

And I was looking for, you know, these specific creative co.

That would help create a, a solid container so that I could feel more

free and playful within it, because that's something I've learned about

myself, is that the more options and unlimited possibilities that exist, the

more paralyzed I can become, and it's, it's not good for my perfectionism.

If you ever suffer from this, I invite you to try creating limitations

because it's very powerful.

And it's, um, it's, it's a really cool thing that you might not

think of it that way, that creating limitations will create more freedom.

That old pattern of just sort of dancing around the blank canvas and having

difficulty actually getting started.

Totally blown out of the water.

With this new method of painting.

I just started pouring paint.

I wouldn't know what I was gonna do.

I would just start pouring.

I would make smaller studies so I could have an idea before I

got to the large canvas, but,

Um, but I, I was really working with paint that was out of my control,

splattering, dripping pouring, um, learning how to work with, with different

consistencies and different tools.

I got rid of my.

Tiny little brushes that I used to do all this detail work with and I started

using giant brushes and um, pallet knives and you know, any tools that I could

find lying around, some that weren't even painting tools, my fingers right.

I really.

It was just playing.

And that's what I wanted to feel.

Really.

I wanted to feel playful.

I wanted to feel free, and I also wanted the compositions to work.

I wanted, um, the end result to convey something, some kind of feeling or thought

or emotion or experience, and it didn't.

If it was the same as the one I was having while painting it, but I was

very conscious of the tuning in and really embodying the emotional quality

or the thought or essence of what I was painting before I painted and

while I was painting and getting my body involved in the painting process.

So that was.

Oh my goodness.

I used to sit at the, uh, easel and just get so stiff from doing this

really detailed work, and I would completely disconnect from my body.

Hours would go by and I would have like knots in my shoulders and my

wrist would be cramped, , and then I'd have to go get a massage and work.

And so I didn't wanna do that anymore.

I wanted to approach this in an embodied way.

And so I would put on music, I would dance, I would, um,

cry, I would make sound.

And that really helped in the process of, you know, feeling

more embodied as I was painting.

And.

I would take a lot of breaks too.

I would just sit back and I would, I would do some painting, and then I would let

that layer dry and I would observe what was happening and how it was changing.

It was all an incredible adventure, and at the same time, I was doing

these practices, knowing that this was a symbolic ritual action that I

was taking to the level of my energy body and to the rest of my life.

How can I be more embodied in my life?

How can I.

Be more expressed in a free way.

How can I approach the problems, the issues, the old resistances that I

have to things like the weather and just, you know, embrace them, find

the beauty in them, play with them, or be with the, the full spectrum of

grief and joy that came through and.

The whole range of emotions and the whole range of, of experiences that would

come up and really be present with that.

So the painting process was really about consciously going there while also

applying that to my life, knowing that it would be applied anyway, because that

was the consciousness and intention I was bringing, but it was so powerful.

Continues to inspire me in new ways and I'm seeing how my energy is changing and

shifting and how I'm changing old patterns in other areas of my life because of this.

A holistic experience for sure.

And um, yeah, really, really helpful.

So I'm going to read the poem one more time in completion and invite

you to contemplate where in your life is the, the gray weather.

What, what aspect of your life would you like to create a new relationship to?

How can you.

Accept those challenging places in yourself even more, How could you find

some way to engage in ritual action to transform the things that are not flowing,

that are not working for you in your life?

In dream work, when we see the dream or incubate a.

Oftentimes we're wanting to have some inspiration or we're

seeding for information, or we're seeding for to become unstuck

around a thing in our life, right?

And often when we set those intentions, we want the dream that will reveal this.

Positive possibility.

And instead, we often get a nightmare or we'll get a dream that doesn't make

any sense, but it doesn't feel good.

And you know, our life can be like that in the way that our life is, is the dream.

Right.

Sometimes we say, Okay, I want to experience more abundance, more freedom,

more joy, and in order to get to those experiences, we have to pass through the

gauntlet of all of the things that are in the way that we have put in the way.

The dream, the nightmare might be bringing up that subconscious fear that

is blocking our ability to experience the joy and the same in our life, right?

So that said, how can we love the nightmare?

How can we relate differently to the pain, to the hurt, to the illness?

To the, the stuck places that are inhibiting our ability to love

our lives, to fall in love with ourselves and our own expression.

How can we embrace the darkness as much as the light?

That's really the contemplation here.

So embracing the dark.

Do not deny the beauty of the dark outside your window.

For the window out is the window in Do not retreat in misery.

Wishing for frolicking sunny days whenever the skies are weeping and

the gale winds are moaning through the creaky trees, bending under the

misty gray gloom as though you could be relieved of your own shadow.

Do not despise those endless cold drop ceiling days.

That may as well be nights there to savor the contrast.

I.

To let the dreary be, rather than seeking to extinguish the dark with light.

Remember that you are the weather.

Ugly and beautiful, mournful and joyful, whole and grateful,

fluctuating and change Full take.

In all the many seasons and gradations of gray that are you.

Wrap, soft glistening tendrils of hope around the malnourished places

that are hard to love about you.

Feed the darkness with curiosity instead of brightness.

Look beyond what you think you see, and invite the gloom to be itself complet.

Ponder its stories, revel in its mysteries, allowing the

dark inside, outside to unveil.

Its strange beauty to feel at home in the embrace of you.

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Lone Traveler's

Guide to the Divine, and watching if you are on YouTube watching this.

And thank you for reviewing, liking, subscribing, follow.

Sharing, commenting, all these paintings are for sale.

I would love to get rid of them so I could make room to paint new ones.

And I'm so excited to continue exploring this painting journey and keep

listening and following and watching.

And thank you so much.

It's such an honor to be in sacred community with you.