prana project

Photo Credit : Indrajohnson.com

I have many lives. In one of them, I am a yoga teacher. In another a writer, during the day a mommy and on Friday afternoons I am MFA faculty; that is just to name a few. As I was putting together my class outline for Friday, I pulled out a wonderful favorite article by Twyla Tharp in “ The Creative Habit.” I am opening class with an exercise challenging my students to think about their creative DNA. Where there creative impulses come from and how they best express them. The article takes them through 33 questions to answer in rapid fire and gives them something tangible to hold on to. It is kind of like a window into that place between sleep and awake. Where you can hear your subconscious or true self-speaking. Telling you to get off your duff and mediate, or that you need to continue to heal, whatever yours tells you, that’s what mine says. I try to listen, but I, of course, am only human and so sometimes I roll over and go back to sleep. Only to question what it was saying to me when I woke up. Ugh, another wasted message!

Much to my delight as I was scrolling through Facebook, I happened upon a pic of my nephew on a beach in Chicago with a Buddha head’s eyes, peeking up over the sand. The head was submerged about 6 inches, the chin and mouth covered. Just his eyes peering over the landscape, giving the impression of something buried from your past ready to emerge if you only focus on it for a moment. Just like those between state messages to love yourself more, stop drinking wine, or work harder on yoga poses that you just don’t like. Turns out, artist and cultural worker, Indra Freitas Johnson, is asking herself some of those same questions and her current project Ten Thousand Ripples is the source of that head and many others throughout Chicago.

In her bio, found on her website she says “The process of spiritual growth has been an ongoing preoccupation for me, especially as it relates to working in the community. I have found that in the search for a personal truth one discovers universal truths that bind us to each other to the past and to future generations.” Which flipped my brain back to my MFA students and their artwork. Not a strange leap for me, in my multiple identities, I change my course of thought 100’s of times a day, sometimes hundreds of times a minute.

Between you and me, it is one of the many reasons I started a yoga practice.

When putting together my class outline and thinking about the trajectory of learning, it brought me back to that greater search. We are all trying to find those universal truths, figuring the best and most effective way to express ourselves. Delving into those late night messages and sometimes hitting the mark, but often missing.  

Those eyes peering over the sand are enough to remind me that we all have the same things hidden and we are all experimenting, trying to determine our DNA and where we are linked.

Tags: art, chiago, contemplation, self study, yoga