As our boat crosses the lake from Villa Sumaya to Panajachel carrying our teacher training group to the Art Meditation at Casa La Rosa, I realize, I’m in the middle of something very familiar.
In Janie’s art meditation series just months before I closed the Yoga studio, our group gathers in her apartment for the heart chakra class. We are surrounded by acrylic paint, a spectrum of brushes, books of art to stimulate the process along with our additional stimulation of red wine and dark chocolate. She leads us through a meditation into our heart center. The previous weeks, we traveled into our lower chakras, making our way into the center gradually, like explorers embarking on a new adventure into unchartered territory.
My heart chooses a palate of color and before me sits a blank canvas, a screen waiting for the image to show itself to me. I fumble for a moment, not comfortable with working with such a medium-bold, thick paint and a hearty blank slate. I stick with it and become absorbed in the process and become swept into a space beyond the veil of what my mind knows as its current reality.
By the end of the session, a vision of my heart’s inner landscape stares back at me from the colors and brush strokes that have come together forming an image of mountains parting. The embrace of the earth forms the basin for deep calm, but powerful water that moves within the hands of the land.
We are almost to the shore in Panajachel when it hits me.
I am in the landscape of that image.
It feels like a full circle, or perhaps, an upward spiral revisiting my heart through a journey of paint on canvas with a group who safely supports one another through the process.
What it took to get here was the action of surrender…letting go of everything I thought was safe and comfortable. That “safe and comfortable” life didn’t fit any longer, but I tried and tried to mend it in one way or another, to the point where I could no longer hold on and had to let go fully. In my many attempts to respin it, I couldn’t even acknowledge how uncomfortable it had become.
In the months and years since that meditation, my actions have been flavored by deep trust, faith and surrender to a bigger push. Miraculously, in the past week, I am noticing the tightly wound knot of pain that had been trapped within my left shoulder for years is dissolving, as if unravelling from within.
I imagine the small canvas that once sat on my altar in front of my bed, now occupying space with all of my belongings in a dark storage unit in a town where I once called home.
A question arises constantly in my travels, “Where do you live?”
I answer, “here,” and point to my heart. Right now, I live at the edge of a lake and surrounded by the mesmerizing volcanoes that the Mayans call the solar plexus of their land. In the morning, I am greeted by the soft light silhouetted by the feminine earth. At night, the calm waves lull me to sleep under a blanket of stars.
I live here, in the landscape of my heart. A picture that was in me all along.













