How Does Sketching and Writing Poetry Help You?
You could live a life you love. You could learn to fall in love with your life. Fall in love with everything.
Ultimately, you could fall in love with everything.
How does sketching and writing poetry help you?
Sketching or painting life as it unfolds in front of you, in this present moment, has the power to connect you to your right brain, your Buddha brain. In your right brain, your chattering, judgmental mind quiets. Shoulds and oughts disappear.
Distractions disappear.
As you draw, you connect to the Sacred Present Moment. Your consciousness shifts. You can think of this quiet-mind, this “peace which transcends all understanding” mind, as enlightenment. This peace is how you enter the Kingdom of Heaven.
In your right brain, all is right with the world. All the time.
When you add poems to the sketching, you connect you right brain, non-verbal holistic awareness to your left brain linear language. You deepen your experience and you ground it in daily life.
When you sketch and write poems, you’ll feel more at home with your life. You connect to the Sacred. You make your life more holy, and you enjoy a more pleasurable life.
Can you see how this creativity boost will show up everywhere in your life? You will feel more alive and this will enhance all areas of your life.
The practice trains you to be in the present moment more often and ever more easily.
•You savor your precious time and your life. You will simply enjoy your life more.
•Your performance and pleasure at work will improve. (Caution: you may decide to change your vocation or get a new job.)
•Your appreciation of your loved ones will expand and your relationships will bloom. You will be amazed at how transformative this can be. Very cool.
•Your awareness of your body will become more clear, which will lead to improved health. This is worth the price of admission alone.
•Certainly, any religious or spiritual practices you have, will become more meaningful.
Finally, you may have some lovely artwork that you would love to display, to act as a reminder to you to attend to the Sacred Present Moment. It doesn’t matter if anyone else likes it. It’s powerful, even when, or especially when, you hang them on the refrigerator.
OK. Let’s get started with some profound facts.
Your Life Is a String of Moments
Your life is a string of moments. Have you noticed that when you look back at your life you see moments? You don’t see a continuous stream of events like a movie. When people say life is short, they may mean you just have a few moments that you recall.
Our lives seem like a string of precious pearls. So precious.
These lines by Paul Bowles from The Sheltering Sky haunt me –
How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even that.
How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.
You can enjoy a life of pearlescent moments. Some may be imperfect, but that’s the nature of pearls – imperfect perfection. How many more pearls will you add to your string?
If all this sounds like fun, you’ll want to get the book.
Go for it. Fall in love with your life.
