#19. i'm a vessel

laying in bed, legs up the wall, as the fan drones

discernment with my awareness, being a vessel. ode to slow arts. interconnectedness. i love you

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

I'm laying on my bed. And I was in the shower and I was thinking about how how I became this vessel. How am I a vessel? How have I treated my body as a vessel for my awareness? And I mean, of course, the minute our bodies were were created, we've always been vessels, you know. But how does one become a vessel? I think about this, like, there's this letting in and there's this letting out. And because your body has always been the vessel that it is, it is a vessel. And it's not something that we are, right? What we are is just pure consciousness. At the end of the day, when we peel all of the layers past of our i past our identity, past our things, the things that we attach ourselves to, including our body itself, then we're just the part that is simply witnessing. To understand that we are also awareness and then everything as well. I am a vessel. How did I become a vessel? Because I understood that a vessel is simply a channel, it is a conduit, it is a space. Conserving your attention. And I think this one has been particularly hard for me because my body has so many different desires, and and um I don't want to limit my body from those desires either, but I want to be very discerning about where all of my energy is going. So I'm letting in and I'm letting out. I'm letting in, I'm letting out. I'm being discerning about where exactly my attention goes and how that is that is nourishing for my body. I mean, like every day I've been waking up and I've been seeing the sun. All the little sunspots, and the way that it reflects on the water, and the way that it like sort of flirts through the trees. I love that. I love it so much. So that's what I'm focusing on. Focusing on all the light around me, all the ways the light hits the buildings, the ways the light hits the sidewalk. I mean, that's the thing that I've noticed the most here. Oh my vessel. All of my work starts from the body, you know. And it all comes back to the body. It's the most grounding when I'm traveling. I feel that it's very grounding this way. And it's very strange to admit that. I think when I was back home, I was very focused on like how much money I was gonna make, and I think that is uh very much an inevitable part of life. But having no home or anything to sustain, I don't take care of anything but myself. Um, it's been the most grounding experience. Just making sure I have enough money to eat for the next month, enough money to go through for the next month. I think there's this beautiful trust that I'm going to take that this ultimate faith that everything is gonna work out. Everything is gonna work out if I just allow and let be. Allow my my intention is to practice as much as I can. To practice as much yoga as I can, practice hand poking as much as I can. I feel that I am the ultimate student on this journey. And in a way, I um I'm also very afraid because I don't I don't know if it's all gonna work out. I have no idea. But I I know that it will. At the same time, I feel like I know that it will. Everything that it offers me. And for that I'm just falling in love with life again. I've always been like such a deep, deep lover. I mean when I love things I love it so hard, and that goes with like people, with with animals that come my way, and and right now there's this sort of I wouldn't say void, but sort of a silence. It makes me think, where do I put all of my love? Where am I going to put all my love again? And it's really, it's to me. I've been making markings on myself and just illustrating flowers here and there on my own skin and everything that I make, I don't think anybody else's opinion matters. It's it's I just want to know if I'm having fun and I think I am. The thing with hand poking is that I'm learning about how it's um learning about how to prevent blowouts, the depth of the skin to hand poke and how slow to go. I love to choose all of these mediums that challenge me because I'm such an impatient person. My my ego tends to be quite impatient wants results now, wants everything that we want now, and um all these different mediums that we've chosen, oil painting, that's oil paint just it dries very, very slow, and then hand poking, it's that is um, you know, very um measured and and slow and intentional where every dot matters. But I think I can master it. I think I can master the art of being patient. You know, I've been so patient with others, but I don't think I've been patient enough with myself. I feel that I've like placed a lot of pressure on myself to work things out like perfectly. I had arranged a an excursion for a group of yoga students, and it was absolutely terrible. Um not only the drive took longer than it should have, the destination was lackluster, and we all ended up getting food poisoning. So that was awful. And I was so hard on myself. Well, nobody else was. So I think it's about time that I just practice a level of forgiveness to myself. Because if anybody had arranged that trip, I I think I I don't think I would blame them either. It just was. And I think it reminds me of the interconnectedness of everything. How everything is each other, everything is connected. And maybe it's so comfortable and comforting for me because it's it feels more real to me. It feels more real to me is to see all of these different elements blending in together everything. Just chaotically interweaving into each other. I just cried all of my worries out. And it was such a beautiful relief. I walked to the river and I heard all of her sounds and the way that water just keeps going and going and going and going. It's so comforting to me. It's like she can just take away every single bit of grief and sorrow I have. And I truly felt renewed afterward. I did. So I feel that like my art sort of honors that too. Yeah, I think the flow has been quite present in almost everything that I make. To the point where I just like want to break apart from it, but I know that I'll come right back to it because I I believe that that's that's what I want to communicate. But as humans, we're so obsessed with our separateness, you know? We're so obsessed with like our own judgments of ourselves and others. Seeing things so black and white. Being so caught up in our own fear and what makes us different. But really, I'm sure that my worries have um been quite similar to your worries in the next person's. That we're all actually not that different from each other. And that while all these differences are so beautiful, all of our sufferings are so different. I really think that like I don't know. That we're all connected. Not the same. We're just all connected. That the way nerd nature works is is that it works like an ecosystem. It's an ecosystem, it's a system, it's a system of all these little parts just like we are. I feel excited. And I feel grounded at the same time. Yeah. I'm discerning with my awareness.