One of my visual diaries after retreat, watercolor on paper

I sat with myself in silence for an hour, and this is what I saw

This is Part II of the series about the collection of images that started appearing in my meditations in 2021. I call them The Paintings from the Deep Unknown. After painting dozens of them, I decided to recreate the timeline of events that led to those magical experiences. You can read Part I here.

May 2021

Meditation Retreat came and did as promised - changed my life. Even more - it threw it upside down, stretching the limits of my consciousness to the point of no return. I came to this retreat with a roaring curiosity, an open heart, and zero expectations, and I received one of the biggest gifts I could ever ask for.

Like a gentle tornado, it danced through the most hidden parts of my soul, making me question everything I knew about myself. It started stripping layer by layer of beliefs that seemed mine but turned out to be foreign and imposed. This process reminded me of re-painting walls in our prewar apartment - those walls have so many layers of paint with vintage wallpapers sandwiched somewhere in between that it’s impossible to know what the actual wall looks like. And when you start scraping the patina of time, each layer reveals another one underneath, as if there is no beginning and no end.

The same was happening to me… I became like one of those walls over time and craved to discover my core.

With every meditation, I was discovering a true me that had always been there but went into deep hiding, pressed down by the unbearable weight of conditioning, life experiences, and beliefs that the world (and myself) made me believe were mine to start with. Words feel incredibly small to describe this experience. Neither my native language nor English feels sufficient enough for something like this. Maybe that’s why the paintings came?

From my diary entry after my first retreat meditation on May 3rd, 2021:

Today feels special and ordinary at the same time. There is a growing sence of calm somewhere deep inside of me, somewhere in between my ribs, at the very place where my heart is. I feel complete. Loved. Embraced.

I want to share something that fascinates me to this day - I sat and meditated for an hour twice a day that week. Yes, you heard it right. Two times a day, I would get on my meditation blanket to sit quietly for one hour. I, who have ADHD and can hardly sit quietly for a few minutes, couldn't get enough of diving deeper and deeper… Some days, an hour felt like fifteen minutes; other times - it was like swimming in eternity.

The only meditation experiences I’ve ever had before were failed attempts to establish my practice with the Headspace app, guided meditations during yoga classes, and meditation-like states during yoga nidra. All of the mentioned practices are effort-based, requiring either listening to guidance, focusing on not following thoughts, repeating mantras, etc. They felt beautiful, but now I understand that effort was taking me away from experiencing the real flow of my inner Self. I won't go further into more details because it will turn this blog post into a novel (as if it isn't already).

Maybe I’ll do another post about my meditation practice some other time. Now, I want to focus on the images I started receiving during meditations and later in daily life. I’m typing this, and my ADHD wants to tell you all the stories all at once, and it makes me smile.

In my very first meditations during the retreat, paintings began to appear. Their colors felt otherworldly, glowing, and moving, and I wondered if it was even possible to replicate them in real life. They looked so bright, pure, and uninterrupted. They existed there, floating in the fabric of my consciousness like weightless beings. It felt as if they belonged to me. Deep in my heart, I knew they did. They were the most significant gifts a curious soul could ask for.

I remember sitting by my easel, slowly attempting to give one of them life on paper, not questioning the process but allowing it to flow where it was taking me, just like when I meditate. The image consisted of a tree growing out of a spiral shell with clouds instead of foliage and a galaxy full of myriads of stars inside the blurb spilling out of that shell. One cloud was gentle pink…

What I find interesting is that the oils intuitively felt as a medium of choice for this project. Just half a year before that, I was swimming in a constant love-hate relationship with oil paints. So, this sudden pull to start working exclusively in the medium that frustrated the life out of me felt strange but deeply satisfying.

Even more fascinating was the painting process - every color I chose, every brush stroke I made, and every decision I took regarding absolutely anything felt perfect. A pure bliss an artist can ask for - there was absolutely no place for self-criticism, no overthinking or second-guessing myself whatsoever - just pure love of creation. I was bathing in its waters like a kid who saw the ocean for the first time.

The paintings kept coming into my meditations, and I kept loving them into being…

Effervescence and The Ocean Star, oil on cotton, 2021. This is a photograph I took early in the morning before leaving for a nomadic year in Europe. I had a strong pull to photograph all the meditation pieces I had made to date before taking that flight. So, I did. I quickly snapped those pictures in the cold morning light while my husband waited impatiently with the suitcases in a hallway.

I couldn't paint them as fast as they appeared, so I started sketching and writing down how they felt out of fear of forgetting. I hoped those notes would act like portals to help me immerse in those feelings more easily. I'm writing this and smiling - this fear was so funny; I find it cute to feel this way, to experience a FOMO with the surreal paintings that are making their way into my life from the place so peaceful and beautiful that I could hardly believe I could reach it while quietly sitting on a piece of wool. And there's me frantically sketching them out, afraid to lose something. Silly human. The funniest and the most beautiful part was (and still is) that they never go away; I never forget them, and nothing slipped out of my memory as if they were waiting for the perfect time to be born into a physical form as if I had all the time in the world to do that.

There are so many things I want to share with you, but for now, I will leave you with this quote I love:

There's such a healing power in honoring all the parts of you, and the only person who knows what is part of you is you. What others said about you five minutes after you were born is not you. Sending you the courage to peel all that second skin that was never yours to wear. - Dallas Hartwig

To be continued…

P.S. You can find a selection of The Paintings from The Deep Unknown here.

P.S.S. If you’d like to know what happens next, subscribe to From the Shell of My Heart publication I started on Substack.

It can be delivered to your inbox as a newsletter or read in the Substack app.

I want From the Shell of My Heart to be a safe space for my inner child to express herself in her not-yet-perfect English, for the thoughts that want to live through words and paintings, a place for everything happening all at once with no plan kind of plan, except being unapologetically me.

I’ll be sharing behind the scenes of my studio practice, my day-to-day life, and things my heart finds interesting to shed light on. The intention behind this big/little personal project is to gift me with a gift of expression through writing that I lost somewhere along the way while adulting.

I’d love this to become a safe space for you, too, and inspire you to dive deeper into figuring out what makes your inner child thrilled.

Love, Eve

Paintings from the Deep Unknown. Part II

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