While not exactly a mandala...Christy asked me to repost this to our closed Facebook group:
As I read Judy Chicago's July 2001 article on Anais Nin...
I am struck by several images of my own: of Alise, my exotic dancing cohort from '96-'98, extracting her bloody tampon and chasing my manager Rich around the club with it as they both laughed. Of Rich' immense compassion for all of us, even as he was a sort of stern father. I remember too, during those same years, being in the front row of my Psychology & Sexuality professor's class (his name interestingly not worthy of memory retention), and hearing his pompous, ridiculous and unknowledgable assertion that women were incapable of wet dreams, being as their private parts were not large enough to create friction against the bedsheets. I begged to differ. Not only that, but I explained in great detail, to his horror and my immense delight, how I personally found that not only possible, but frequent, and frequently delightful.
But most of all, what I love about this essay by Judy Chicago is the way she asserts the grace with which Anais handled Judy's panic over the imagery of cancer appearing in her drawings...Anais, gracefully without ever mentioning her own harrowing affair with cancer, advised Judy that this was due to her recoiling from her own power, of turning her rage inward upon herself. Having myself both turned rage upon myself and also projected it outwards, I cannot recommend either course. It seems that many women only flirt with releasing their anger; that many of us are not even sure, still, after all the hullabaloo, what exactly we are angry about. But are we angry? Or just hurting? And if we cleaned up the Garden of Eden, what beautiful flowers would bloom there?
I have no awareness of what it is like to be a woman from the perspective of marriage and childbirth, but I am one, nonetheless. I have conveniently, or not so, avoided those options. We all have our various reasons for reflection, and I suspect mine are due to being 4 months into what for all appearances is menopause...something I wished for early so that I would never have to use birth control again if I decided to change my 5 year status of celibacy in protest toward all the men I've known. I must confess though, that I have not stopped teasing many of them mercilessly. I am not all sweet. Sometimes I am a little cruel.
My sincerest wish is not to offend, but to share. If you were to reply with shared thoughts I would likely become ecstatic. If not, I would most certainly understand. :)
No boorish comments please, though...
And aren't these images from the 30s, some of them of Anais and Henry, Anais as a child, like mandalas in their own way?
I want so badly to share more detailed information about what the women in this group have said, but it is a closed Facebook group for a reason. I respect that. Nothing personal will I share here unless it is mine.
Also, it just amazes what misinformation there is medically about how women's bodies function, and equally how we can heal so much by pouring creativity onto paper.
I think also that Yogi Bhajan, if he were alive, would be asking me to publish and write about painting yantras and mandalas, about writing as a form of yantra practice, of painting myself into the core of my being...of women painting ourselves out of the corner of the bhupur and into the center of the bindi, the heart drop...
I said to them all in a post: Thank you for welcoming me! I am finally just getting back to reading your words...a crazy week of releasing stuff. It is so strange to look back at our erroneous perceptions of ourselves in other time frames. Working on mandalas seems to be a practice of 'reframing' ourselves in the center of our own hearts, like the bindi drop. We are in the view-finder. We are in the frame, not cut off like some old Victorian photograph!
I cannot wait to see you all on the 18th. I'm getting past my nervousness of new faces, and so grateful to be welcomed by you all. I'm going today to Barnes & Noble to look for mandala coloring books!
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