Sadhana
My spiritual awakening in this lifetime began with a motorcycle accident in Brooklyn, NY in 1997. I was living in a huge garage, soon to be my studio and an art gallery, when I rode across the Williamsburg bridge one cold morning and hit a pothole. There was a moment of reckoning: would I fly over the guard rail and land 200 feet below, or go down in the road and use my karate training to break my fall? I chose to continue with this life, went down and rolled to the side, as the cars miraculously passed me by.
Recovering in Manhattan, a friend took me to a yoga class at the Self Realization Fellowship Center in Manhattan. There I saw pictures of Paramahansa Yogananda and his teachers. My mind was curious, and my heart opened up as I practiced yoga and healed from my injuries. Back in Brooklyn I began to make photographs of myself in front of my mother’s paintings from college. They were performative and confrontational, facing a persona of failure and lack of agency that had been hindering me all my life.
I moved to San Francisco in 2000, returned to NYC briefly for an art project in 2001. With horror, I witnessed the September 11th attacks from a rooftop on Lower East Side early one morning. Devastated, traumatized and questioning the existence of God, I returned to San Francisco and found solace in yoga classes, visited the Green Gulch Zen Center in Marin, had a profound Reiki session that opened up my psychic awareness, and took a meditation workshop with Pema Chodron in Berkeley. In April 2002, upon visiting the Siddha Yoga Ashram in Oakland for the first time, I received Shaktipat initiation from Gurumayi Chidvilasananda. She held my face in her hands and looked into my eyes, and I saw the universe unfold before me. I had no idea what had just happened, but an incredible awakening, purifying and remembering process began.
I had been practicing many forms of yoga and wanted to become a teacher, but my injured shoulder from the motorcycle accident flared up and made it too painful to practice. I found a more therapeutic form of yoga called Svaroopa and was able to heal my old shoulder injury. During my first week of yoga teacher training in La Jolla, I had a kundalini awakening during shavasana – I was frozen and couldn’t move while my sacrum burned like fire, tears of joy streamed down my face, and I was never the same again. In the next few years, I became a 500 hour certified yoga teacher, and began to teach in Oakland and later Los Angeles.
Simultaneously I had been taking photographs of myself naked and looking dead in nature, around the bay area. These performative images came to an end after my awakening. It was as if my ego had died and I no longer had any desire to make this kind of work. I applied to grad school at Mills College but didn’t know what to make art about any more. The world suddenly seemed so beautiful and complete, I didn’t know what I had to contribute.
That Summer I was invited to make an art project in an abandoned barn in a town called Amden in the Swiss Alps. I went and made my last performative photographs of myself, as I crossed over from making art about pain, to making art from a place of inner knowing. There was so much yogic awakening bubbling out of me, I was having kriyas (spontaneous kundalini movements often moving me into yoga poses), and chanting esoteric texts. The color red kept coming in stripes: the three gunas. I painted my body with blue and then red stripes, traversed the landscape in the alps and photographed myself in natural springs and an aqua blue lake surrounded by peacocks. I was channeling the energy rising up inside of me. I was breaking open and not sure how to participate in the art world or the world as I knew it.
After my awakening I returned to Siddha Yoga, where I learned meditation, chanted and studied the ancient Sanskrit texts of yoga and Kashmir Shaivism. I was guided and enveloped by Gurumayi, Baba Muktananda and Bhagawan Nityananda for the next 14 years. I also spent time at Gurudev Siddha Peeth Ashram in Ganeshpuri, India, and Shree Muktananda Ashram, in South Fallsburg, NY. My art became more realistic and abstract at the same time. I began making very large photographs of elements in nature, like flowering trees and water, and architecture, like churches and portals, but with my body no longer visible in the images.
In 2010, with the birth of my first child I began to paint again. I felt so much love, that the fear of being judged melted away and I was able to just start doing what I wanted to with my art. I had always been a painter, but stopped in art school due to my new interest in deconstructing everything and a popular narrative about painting being dead and self-absorbed. I was a scholar of painting, but denied myself this particular practice for 20 years for some silly fear of having an ego or not being good enough. So I found a way to paint with less ego, I began painting large abstract pieces on paper, very fast, and then cutting them up into smaller works and scanning them. This way I thought I would not be able to overthink or make something precious, that my ego would be cut out of the picture. I wanted the images to have a life of their own, freeing me from being contrived or intentional. Also scanning the images made them feel two steps removed from the original, denying the myth of the genius I was taught to question in postmodern theory. Chance became my mantra. It worked for a while, until my circumstances changed enough that there was nothing I could do except paint.
In 2018, while living and making art in Echo Park, Los Angeles, I studied yoga with some special teachers at Yogala who set my heart and mind free. I realized that I needed to integrate my two selves: artist and spiritual seeker, and that many amazing people had done it and nothing bad had happened to them. Such a simple idea, but I had always lived with split personalities. For years I never mixed my art practice with my design work and never told anyone about my spiritual life and so on. I had been struggling with a great fear of being seen.
In addition, I let go of my attachment to one path or lineage for spiritual attainment, welcoming in the awareness of many modalities and traditions that elevated my longing to make a more conscious connection between art and spiritual practices. Through a past life reading I became aware of the depth of my healing knowledge and was ultimately able to trust my own truth and inner guidance.
In the Fall of 2018 I held my beloved grandmother as she died. Throughout the process of leaving her body and crossing over into a new awareness of “glory,” as she expressed it (and this was quite a feat since she had been a staunch atheist until her death), I stayed with her, chanted and prayed for her, and experienced the profound blessing of seeing her on the other side. We had a soul contract, since my birth she had been devoted to me, and in her death I was devoted to her well being. She was carried safely to the other side by my teachers, angels and guides, her fear assuaged. I am forever grateful for her care, and even though in life, she would have been horrified at my new found psychic work, her soul is quite pleased.
Since then, I have been on a fast-track of intuitive development. I knew that it was time to move back to NYC, so I packed up my family and departed LA. I took Reiki and psychic training and became a Reiki master. I began communicating regularly with angels, guides and ascended masters. I became focused on manifesting and energy clearing, in both physical and metaphysical realms. I chose to move five more times (in a search for a place to raise kids and continue making art), learned to clear the energy in each new location, continued to clear parasites and toxic mold exposure in my body, survived Covid, kept making art with two children at home — and all the while became more intuitive and connected to my soul’s purpose.
Happy is not a word that comes to mind about 2020. It wasn’t easy to break free from preconceived notions of one’s life path, with my family of 4 in a small crowded space 24/7 for months on end, terrified of dying from each grocery delivery, guiding miserable children glued to screens, and my mental health impacted from having & living during Covid… and I’m sure the rest of the world feels about the same! Let me just take a moment to offer blessings to the many kind and generous souls who departed in this past year, specifically the 5000 souls in my zip code in Brooklyn during the month of April 2020. We hear you, we miss you and we will not forget. Many blessings.
But looking back, it does make me happy that I was able to handle all that darkness and transformation and still feel supported by the universe. Most importantly, I learned to listen to the guidance I was getting and trust that it would work out. I took many leaps of faith, over and over again, until it became normal to trust (even when I had no idea why in some cases).
Last Summer, having left Brooklyn for upstate NY, I was trying to figure out where best to raise my children, so they could have some semblance of a normal childhood during a pandemic. While meditating on where to move, I had a vision of flying above Maui and saw a beautiful and creative life for for us, even though I had never been here before. So we took the risk of getting on two airplanes and flew back across the continent to the middle of the ocean, found ourselves unconditionally welcomed by a lovely friend and her family, and my consciousness and art practice have been expanding exponentially ever since.
