The wild heart intuitive painting approach to art is at core a liberation process which means that there are NO rules. Just practices. And, in fact, one thing we encourage our students to do on a regular basis is to BREAK any rules they might have picked up along the way regarding how they paint, because rules are often unconscious forms of oppression and a way that we limit our freedom of expression.

And there are quite a few of them.

For example:

Don’t even TRY to paint an image without some kind of a reference point, i.e. looking outside of yourself to make sure that the image is a correct representation of “reality.”

Everything has to be balanced, in proportion or symmetrical in your painting.

Don’t ever use pure black as a color when you paint. (This is one rule that I have NEVER understood, but apparently it’s a thing.)

Whatever you paint has to be pleasing to the eye. And not just to your eye as the artist. It has to be pleasing to anyone else who sees it.

You have to LIKE your painting and if you don’t it means you’ve done something wrong.

Your paintings always have to be meaningful and purposeful in order to have any kind of validity.

Now, I could write an article about each one of these rules, and I either already have or will sometime in the future. But the one I want to explore today has to do with what I call the Meaning Making Mandate.

This struggle is something I see a LOT in my painting classes. And it looks like this.

Someone will be painting away and then all of a sudden they stop themselves in their tracks and lose energy and interest for what they are painting because the painting “makes no sense” or they don’t have a clear idea as to what they are painting or why they are painting what they’re painting.

Now just to be clear, often a few moments before they come to this screeching halt they were happily painting, blissfully engaged in their creative process without having ANY ideas at all about what was pouring out of their brush and their hearts.

But then the judging mind pipes up and begins questioning the legitimacy of what they are painting which causes them to doubt themselves. And once that self doubt kicks in and they are no longer having any fun they will just stop painting.

Now, that self doubt can take many forms. It can look like doubting their proficiency as an artist or feeling frustrated with their skill level.

But the Meaning Making Mandate I mentioned earlier demands that every brush stroke or color or image that shows up in your painting is something that you HAVE to be able to articulate as having an explicit purpose for being in your painting. And if you CAN’T articulate that purpose it means the painting is not worth doing. Which engenders the self doubt.

When you believe that your painting only has value if it has meaning you are constantly thinking about your painting. You are never not in your head. You are always in assessment mode (otherwise known as judging), analyzing and evaluating whether or not the meaning is clear and making sure there is an obvious reason for whatever is showing up on the paper or canvas you are working on.

Now, besides being totally exhausting, this continual process of meaning making from the mind actually limits not only your access to your intuition but your creative flow. Because painting is essentially a non-verbal process and meaning making is always about language we lose touch with that place of timelessness and deep wordlessness that is the hallmark of being in connection with the ancient guidance of our wisdom self.

I also want to be clear that what I’m talking about here is the constant pressure people put on themselves to make meaning from their heads. It’s meaning that they can talk about and put into words and understand from a cognitive level.

But since painting is essentially a NON-VERBAL process there are levels of meaning that we can experience through our bodies and our hearts and our connection to spirit that can only be felt. Not spoken. Not even always understood. And it’s these levels of meaning that we are taught to ignore and to devalue.

For example, when someone gets stuck in the Meaning Making Mandate loop and they lose interest in their painting because they can’t understand the meaning, I will always bring them back to their bodies. I will ask them how they felt as they were painting. And almost every time they will tell me that they were actually quite engaged with the process. Maybe even having fun. But certainly feeling something.

But then their judging mind came in and criticized them for not being able to say why they were painting what they were painting. And totally rained on their painting parade because it felt threatened by being invited into the realms of embodied feeling, non-linear intuition and the unnameable unknown without a clear cognitive understanding of what was being expressed.

 

The beauty and the power of this wild heart intuitive painting process is that it teaches us how to let go of our attachment to labeling, commentary, stories, explanations and critical inner voices and open our hearts to listening to the painting speaking to us on it’s own terms.

 

Releasing our attachment to the Meaning Making Mandate allows us to go on a pilgrimage into the landscape of spiritual mystery and sacred uncertainty which always defies description.

This practice gives you useful tools for how to reliably connect to the primal intelligence of your natural vitality and your energy body as well as gaining a deeper sense of trust in the spirit guides of your otherworldly imagination, wild genius, native intuition, original impulses and spontaneous instincts, especially when they appear in a non-verbal form.

And opens doors into places inside of your being that can be so deeply nourishing to you if only you can get your mind out of the way and learn to value and cherish the mysterious wisdom of your wild and wondrous heart.