When I turned 50 ( almost 22 years ago) I had just started holding my week long painting retreats at the Ghost ranch Conference Center in Abiquiu New Mexico a couple of years prior.

During that retreat I had a number of my long time students in attendance. These were people who had been in my world for a long years and we had a deep relationship of love and trust. In celebration of me entering this new decade my beloved students proposed a birthday ritual that included painting my body with the tempera paints we used in the workshop. What they wanted was for me to strip totally naked but I said I would go halfway and do the Full Monty if I was still facilitating retreats when i turned 100!

It was one of those invitations I just couldn’t refuse. After all, as their wild heart painting facilitator I was constantly nudging, prodding, goading and challenging them to take creative risks in their painting process. And in many ways, encouraging them to strip naked on a soul level.

So I couldn’t very well refuse their loving invitation to walk my talk and say yes to this opportunity to become more fully alive.

It was scary because what they were asking of me was to be vulnerable… to be willing to be seen and honored and to also be open to receiving. Which was one of the hardest things ever.

As a woman I had learned incredibly well how to be the consummate giver. But to be given TO and to be on the receiving end of so much love and attention totally focused on ME was definitely a stretch.

So of course I willingly consented and allowed myself to be ministered to as a Priestess Of Paint and their beloved teacher.

Once I settled into the process I must say it was absolutely DELICIOUS. And such a healing for that part of me that didn’t often allow herself to be the center of so much generous attentiveness.

Tim was also at that retreat but was in our cabin during the ritual. After the ritual was complete they brought him to the studio where I was standing in a circle with the women, half naked and utterly covered in paint. He laughed in delight and then the first thing out of his mouth was “ I see they gave you a taste of your own medicine!”

Medicine indeed.

This work IS medicine. Of the highest order. And is always an invitation into risking going to your edges and seeing what can happen if you open yourself to expressing yourself in ways that you could never even BEGIN to imagine.

I don’t call this process Wild Heart Painting for nothing!

Our wildness is a precious resource and it gets tamed out of us at an early age. We get the message over and over again that our value lies in how malleable and compliant and well-behaved we can be. We are taught not to be a bother to anyone and to certainly not have any needs.

My training was to always be the giver and to never allow my needs for love and attention and care to be expressed. And I was breaking a TON of old rules by allowing myself to be in the center of that circle.

But it’s important to remember that the domesticated part of you will only take you down well trodden paths that lead to places that you’ve already been a hundred times before.

It’s the wild, unexplored, unfamiliar places inside of you where things begin to get interesting.

So the question becomes, if you let go of control and let anything happen, what will be revealed? What passion, hunger, and wildness might begin to show through?

What long suppressed aspect of yourself that has been kept in the chains in the dungeon of your psyche can you allow to break through into the light of day?

Can you risk it? Are you willing to give it a try?

If you’re ready for your wild artists soul to be unleashed come and join me for a week of wild heart expressive arts intuitive painting in the desert in Southern California in October!!!