ZS#2: Sacral Chakra

I began working on these paintings, which I have since named zenskins, as an attempt to get over unrequited love. It wasn’t just that most recent broken heart at the time either, but also the feeling that my whole life was just a mess. About a year earlier I had gotten divorced, and although it was something I had wanted for a very long time, it didn’t really happen the way I’d envisioned it. It was nastier than I would’ve thought, and I didn’t feel any happier. Not at all.

Yes, I was devastated that the arms I had planned to run into were folded against me after all. Even I could see how ridiculous it was for me to keep pursuing someone who was just not interested in a relationship with me, but I couldn’t stop thinking about him. I couldn’t make my mind do anything I wanted, actually, and I felt like I was about to lose it.

The only thing I knew to do was paint. That always made me feel better. This zenskin was the first one I started, and one of the last ones in the Chakra series I finished. It doesn’t even exist now except for as a digital scan, because it became the first layer in my Virgo zenskin later on. But, this one probably had the most layers (or “skins” as I would later call them), changed the most frequently, and was generally the most challenging so far.

Yet, I don’t think it should have or could have been easy. It was an entirely new way of thinking and painting for me. I learned so much about Flow consciousness, which I’ll go into more in future posts. The short story is that this type of painting DID help my mental state, very definitely. Probably even more than traditional meditation (which I also did quite a lot of at the time), painting this way, or zenskinning, got me into a state of mind where problems would find their own solutions almost magically. I learned more about the psychology later, but this first painting, “Svadhishthana,” also known as the Sacral Chakra, pulled me back from the brink and changed my life.