transcending Fear

As a working artist I've had to develop a somewhat healthy relationship with the fear, doubt and anxiety that are inextricably woven into a career synonymous with uncertainty and laden with peaks and valleys of the emotional and financial kind.

I've been in the trenches of debt incurred by portfolio building and I've seen paydays from big jobs that have set me up for months. I've seen everything in between as well.

I've learned to accept the flux of this life I've chosen and although at times I do admire the financial security of my lawyer/banker friends, I have been told on a number of occasions that they in turn envy my jet setting to exotic locations to be paid handsomely for what I love to do anyway.

So everything is relative.

Speaking of relativity, a little physics to help illustrated how I work with fear and anxiety:

In classic Newtonian physics there is a subject (me) who is observing an object (a ball). I kick the ball and though the ball flies through the air there is an equal and opposite reaction against my foot. Subject and object and their interaction was the basis of physical understanding up until the introduction of the more complex science of quantum mechanics.

What quantum physicists discovered in the 20th century is that there is a third element involved in measuring an interaction between particles and that is the process of observation itself. On a subatomic level, the process of observation effects the outcome of quantum interactions. (See the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.)

The nature of consciousness is still a big huge massive mystery to almost everyone on the planet. What is consciousness? From where does it arise? Yogis and sages of the east believe that the physical body arises from consciousness whereas many thinkers from the west believe the opposite.

Regardless, I adhere to the truths discovered by the great thinkers of the last century (and the Yogis before them):

Observation changes everything.

Observation and mindful awareness is the root of all yoga, meditation and self healing processes. It is the single most effective tool in easing the patterns of fear and suffering we have accrued throughout our lifetime.

You can't 'get over' your fears. You can't push them away. They will come back, manifested as something else. Perhaps as disease.

What you can do is observe them.

When a wave of fear or anxiety washes over me,  I try and simply observe. I observe the fear as it manifests as a sensation in my body, a tightness in my chest or throat. I observe with detached mindfulness, avoiding the tendency to get sucked in to the emotional play of the ego-mind.

When we observe our emotions with a detached non reactive awareness we create space. Space gives us room to look at our fears and anxieties rationally. When we link this awareness to our breath we have a very powerful tool to ease the debilitating paralysis that the worries of life can impose on us.

In Yoga we hold uncomfortable postures not to get into better physical shape but rather to observe the mind as it struggles with unease. When we are able to say to ourselves 'holy shit, I hate this, I'm uncomfortable but I'm just going to observe this feeling for a bit," we are actually ripping apart a lifetimes worth of patterning.

As we get better at this we can start to observe the mind and its fluctuations on a regular basis, in our interactions with ourselves and others around us. In traffic, at work, in our relationships.

That's how you work with fear, with doubt, with anger, with anxiety. You observe it, you feel it, you watch it ebb and flow and eventually dissipate. You detach from it and observe it as a scientist observes. You become the process of observation.

Because...observation changes everything ;-)

The trouble with being creative

Often I am asked what its like to live and work in a creative field. The challenges, the payoffs etc... For people that hold steady jobs at stable companies, what I do for a living must evoke an equal amount of head scratching and envy. One of the big questions is 'how do you stay creative?' or 'how do you access that area of your mind more effectively?'

I recently completed my Yoga teacher training up in Rishikesh and I can only admit there was an inner shift of monumental proportions. An understanding about how the mind actually works and how we can move beyond the suffering that the mind creates is at the fundamental core of Yoga philosophy.

Learning to be creative has more to do with un-learning and de-habituating than anything else. To access our true creative potential we need to learn to still the mind. When we still the mind we start to unglue the narrative that plays through our consciousness like some mesmerising film, or train wreck, depending on where we're at. This ongoing narrative, constructed from layers upon layers of often unquestioned social, financial, religious beliefs keeps us trapped and stuck like a needle in the grooves of a record, playing the same song over and over again.

You can't just 'be' creative, not at a core level. Thats the problem with it, its not something you can click on and off, not if its to be regarded as an accessible part of your holistic being. Accessing creativity begins with observational awareness. We have to sit and watch the mind spin around in its habituated patterning, we need to understand it and observe it without judgement, without getting caught up in its game.

Creativity is not about being able to take a better picture or paint an amazing portrait though those are happy outcomes. Creativity, true creativity is the ability to take a novel approach to the most mundane habitual patterns that occur everyday in our lives. When we harness our reactivity and allow for gaps in our old narratives to form, we are on the path to becoming Great Artists within our own lives. 

Beware the Collective Unconscious

You may have experienced the Collective Unconscious in statements such as these:

-Good jobs are scarce
-It's nearly impossible to make a living as an artist
-The outlook for the global economy and environment is bleak
-We have to struggle and suffer for our success
-Survival is for the fittest
-The world is a dangerous place, defined by war and the competition for limited resources

The Collective Unconscious is passed down to us through our parents, peers, teachers, churches and mass media. It defines our thinking and actions not only as a culture but as individuals, masquerading as a set of unquestioned beliefs widely accepted as truth.

If you feel that life is a struggle, the world is unsafe and that your survival depends on your ability to compete aggressively you may be suffering at the hands of the Collective Unconscious.

The deeper I dig into my own reality, the more I realize that a lot of what I hold as fact are nothing more than fuzzy half truths and lazy stereotypes rooted in ignorance and the very human need to belong.

As awareness increases there's a realization that perhaps these long held social beliefs are not entirely in line with one's personal convictions.

An effective way the combat the Collective Unconscious is to meditate on the positive aspects of your life. Focussing on what's front of you: Your health, your family, your friends and relationships, your mind and the ability to change it anytime you want, your breath and whatever else it is in your life that allows you to be happy, free and at peace.

Creating space in the mind through meditation helps us break through the dark clouds of doubt and move into clarity and awareness. With the correct intention and practice it is our innate wisdom that begins to define our world view.

Creativity lives in expanded awareness

Within the Buddhist tradition there is an amazing insight into the human mind. The Buddha believed that our thoughts were not just isolated perceptions and insights into the world but rather complex weavings of beliefs about ourselves stemming from the constant re-enforcement of past patterning and conditioning.

As they say, you have on average 80,000 thoughts a day. 79,900 are the same thoughts you had yesterday.

those 79,900 thoughts are like a strip of film running through a cinema projector, playing and repeating your story over and over again. Uncreative, non intuitive.

Another great insight these guys came up with was that all our thoughts and everything that passes through our mind can actually be be FELT in the body somewhere. The difficulty is that many of us in the fast paced chaotic madness in which we live have lost the connection between mind and body.

There are two basic states we can choose to live in: Expanded awareness and Contracted Awareness.

Contracted Awareness is a mind body state governed by fear, worry, doubt, stress. Though these states originate in the mind, we can actually feel them in the body. This state manifests itself as a possible tightness in the chest, shallow breath and in an advanced state; some serious forms of illness.

Expanded awareness is a mind body state expressed by love, creativity, intuition, faith and transcendence. In the body they manifest as deep full breaths, a sense of expansive freedom, pleasant sensations, a general looseness in the body and a smile. Not imprisoned by states of worry and stress, the mind in this state is freer to intuit and be creative. Essentially it is in this state that we can start to loosen or break the 'cinema projector' of our patterning.

Meditation is the key tool for moving from a state of contracted awareness to one of expanded awareness. No longer the realm of monks and mystics, meditation is becoming regarded as an important tool in the maintenance of mental health. It is used by people around the world to maintain a sense of calm and to tap into that infinite realm of creativity and oceanic unboundedness that is our birthright.

As an artist my intention is to live within an expanded state. The world is already far too challenging  to have to deal with specter of self doubt. Often times I'm pulled into contraction through daily worries and stresses but with the help of simply sitting in silence it becomes easier to catch myself...and change my mind.

The Importance of knowing you suck

Catchy title, huh?

Its not to say you suck at everything but you certainly suck at something. I know I do. I suck at lots of stuff.

Lets start off with a story: Not too long ago a female friend of mine was enamored with a beautiful man. He was one of the top models in town, oozed sex appeal and seemed to vibe a heightened knowledge of the female psyche. He was charming, witty and arrogantly hard to get. He was the type of guy that when he entered the room all heads turned, male AND female. You know the guy i'm talking about right?

Anyway, when she triangulated some basic information and found out he was not gay, she made her move. Now, my friend is quite an attractive woman herself, but whats more she's self assured, graceful and intelligent. So its not such a stretch that she would be able to land the hottest guy in town.

Well...she did.

Back at her apartment things started getting steamy...thats when she noticed something was not right. He seemed fidgety, nervous, anxious. His heart rate seemed accelerated above average and he was having a hard time, or maybe, well, not hard enough.

Since this is primarily a photography blog, I'll simply cut to the chase: Their session was 'over' about 20 minutes into foreplay and this guy just picked up his stuff, red faced and left. The door shut and my friend just sat there for about 30 minutes contemplating the worst sexual experience she's ever had. This 40 year old handsome man, dripping sexual appeal from his every pore, turns out to be the worst lover she's ever been with.

It brings up an interesting question: How can someone who's convinced us they're so good, actually be so bad?

My theory is that human beings will do almost anything in their power to hide the fact they suck and arrogance, in my humble opinion, is one of the biggest indicators that someone's definitely hiding their Suck.

Bringing this post back to point. The sooner we actually acknowledge that we suck at whatever we suck at, the sooner we can transform the suck into not sucking.

There's a few main things to think about:

1: Realizing we suck at something requires us to face our Ego head on. This is painful. Our Ego is the part of ourselves that decides what it is we want the world we 'think' we are. Its the false sense of self that always seems to be at war with what's really going on inside us. When we let down our guard and realize that we're all just a bundle of twisted up, conflicting sets of patterns and conditionings that have been forming haphazardly since we first learned to speak, we can begin the process of facing our shadow selves with courage, honesty and wisdom.

Accept and Own your 'Suck'.

2: Surround yourself with people who are better than you, or at least suck less. We all have strengths and weaknesses, it doesn't help to look upon life as a competition; thats the old model of being. Sure, resources are limited and we all need to struggle to achieve, but I'm sure it can be done in a way that doesn't tear us up inside.

3: Introspect. If you're making the same mistakes over and over again and everyone sees it except you, it means you're caught in a pattern thats so comfortable in its discomfort that you might not even know that its happening. Spending some amount of time in silence will help you with this. Silence is like a wedge that drives into your conditioning and creates the space you need to make sane decisions about your life.

4: Always remember, there's always someone out there, even its just one person, who doesn't think you suck at all. Perspective is key.

Being one with your Suck means to accept your humanity and that's a beautiful thing. Focus on your strengths, know and accept your weaknesses and cut out all negative self talk.

So embrace your suck; just like the line between pain and pleasure, with a little attention that in you which sucks could very well turn out to be your greatest strength.

-M

chillin' with the Tibetans

Dharamsala is a dope place, not just cause hash is as readily available as Dal and rice but because its so damn chill. Originally an english hill station set up against the foothills of the Himalayas its now home to the Dalai Lama an the Tibetan government in exile.

I'm not doing much work except for coordinating the post work for my latest Harper's Bazaar shot between my retoucher in Israel and the editor in Delhi. Its been pretty much Yoga and meditation classes and long hikes through the foothills with my wife, son and our friends from Canada.

I've been going through some past work putting together images for an exhibition i want to do and found this outtake from a fashion shoot in Rajasthan a few months back.

We'll be back in Bombay around the 17th of June and then its a bunch of ad shoots back to back till we head back to Canada for a few weeks.

So i guess this is the calm before the storm.

Taken outside of Jaipur,  Rajasthan at sunset