Introduction - Zangmo Alexander

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How can we hold and transform painful feelings such as fear, anxiety, depression and loneliness which have arisen in response to difficult global situations like pandemics? The Buddha offered many ways we can learn to make friends with our pain and with practice free ourselves altogether from suffering even in extreme circumstances. Could the arts be a support for Dharma practice, helping us learn resilience, wisdom and compassion in everyday life?

 

For the past 15 years I have been investigating how my contemporary fine art practice could support the meditation and contemplation practices I was learning in the Tibetan Buddhist Kagyu-Nyingma tradition with my main teacher Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche. One project integrating meditation and creativity with a very challenging situation is Mindweathersong, a collaborative visual and written lockdown diary which evolved between May-June 2020 with my dear Dharma friend, Geraldine DeLuca.

 

In many ways we are very different: I am a professional artist, art teacher, mindful creativity coach and meditator who was a nun from 2007-2014 in the Tibetan Kagyu tradition. Although now a lay practitioner, I continue to live alone in semi-retreat in my home in Sufolk, UK. I have a grown up son. Geri is a writer, English teacher, meditator, and painter who lives in the U.S with her husband and is very much a family person. In 2018, we met at a Dharma and Art retreat at the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies in Barre, Massachusetts.  Once the retreat was over, we continued meeting both as part of a small “breakout” group organized by the retreat leaders and also met separately from the group. This has led to developing a friendship based on our commitment to exploring the relationship between the Buddhist Dharma and our art practices and also because we just came to appreciate one another deeply.

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Wanting to pursue my inquiry into the reciprocal relationship between mindfulness meditation and creativity in more depth, I received funding from the Marianne Oberg Foundation for Spiritual Art (MOFSA) to develop a project called Awakening Through Creativity, which related to aspects of meditation I was doing in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition.  The first part, Story Lines, was based in shamatha* meditation; the second part, What Remains? was informed by vipashyana* meditation, and the third part, Here Not Here was rooted in Mahamudra and Dzogchen* practices. In March 2020, I was just beginning work on Story Lines when the Covid-19 pandemic blew in. 

 

Notes from my journal

March 5th 2020, Suffolk UK:

The coronavirus pandemic.  We are in lockdown.  Shock, horror.  Is this really happening? I had a phone call today with my mum, who is 94 and in a care home. In a panic-stricken whisper she asked, “Do you think this is the end of the world?” I didn’t know what to say.  So I muttered something as calmly as I could about it not being the end of the world but that there might be some big changes.

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It hasn’t sunk in yet. As I’ve been living in semi-retreat here in this rural Suffolk village where I can be outside in my garden or go for country walks, I’m unsure of how things might be different for me in lockdown. I will call this lockdown my Coronavirus Retreat.

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As an introvert, I find the idea of lockdown a no-brainer, happy bunny.  But I wonder how extroverts and others will cope: those in difficult relationships, those stuck in flats without access to the outside, those who have mental health issues or are missing their loved ones.   I will really miss my son Jacob, as he’s not keen on Zooming or phoning.

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March 22nd, 2020, Suffolk UK

Well, it all started fine enough, but within this last week, all my undealt-with neuroses and hang ups have erupted. It’s amazing how intense these are, especially the more pervasive, subtle fears that I managed to avoid facing in pre-lockdown life when it was easier to distract myself.  I feel a fear that goes back a long way into complex childhood trauma. Fear and feelings of abandonment, rejection, vulnerability, loneliness, and a desire to control everything—these feelings are all arising. Yet meditation and Dharma have given me the tools for working with challenges like this.  I just wonder how anyone without similar tools will cope in the coming weeks?

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I remember a meditation instructor saying that retreat can be a roller coaster, and this has certainly been my experience of both group and solo retreats over the years. I have never yet had the glorious technicolour, blissed-out angels-singing retreat others speak of.  Instead, I am usually faced with a stream of transitory thoughts, emotions, negative self-talk, beliefs, opinions, resistances and storylines, fears, clinging, and aversion, all of which remind me of the ever-changing UK weather:  sometimes gentle breezes, other times turbulent storms like that retreat twenty years ago, when an internal hurricane raged through me for about 24 hours, before subsiding into comparative calm. It was relentless, apart from a few short gaps of silent, bare awareness like clouds parting to reveal a vast, blue sky.

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For a long time, I imagined that either I was doing something wrong in meditation, or I had supremely heavy karma, or both.  Then I spoke about depression with a nun who was an experienced three-year retreat leader. Her advice was to go into it. She said that I needed to do a solo, six-month retreat, with my nose rubbed in my depression,   (I—Geri—hate this image.  Not very Buddhist.)  in order to go through it and come out the other side. She was right. Retreat, I find, is hard work, yet incredibly worthwhile. Something always shifts. I‘m not depressed now.

 

So, here I am, nearly a week into the Coronavirus Lockdown.  It has not changed my life very much, as I am still going out for walks, and talking with people on Zoom and the phone.  But I am self-isolating and depend on others who kindly deliver food to me. My mindful creativity coaching and art teaching practices have changed; people cannot come to my studio.  Slowly, the changes will begin to sink in.    

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The media doesn’t help, as it feeds on fear. But people are fearful.  Schools and workplaces are closing.  People are losing their jobs.  All around the world, the hospitals are crowded with patients who are gravely ill or dying as doctors and nurses struggle to understand how to treat this powerful new illness.  The only wisdom is the advice that we should all wear masks and maintain six feet of distance from one another.

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As I work on this Awakening Through Creativity art project, I wonder how I can make sense of it in relation to this huge change in the world.

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During the following weeks I discovered that this intense experience of lockdown was not an obstacle for the Story Lines project after all. Instead it was the perfect opportunity not only for meditation, contemplation and trying to help others, but also for rethinking Story Lines to make it more socially relevant. With my agitated mind beginning to settle—a process hugely supported by weekly online teachings by my teacher, Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, and connection with friends—I realised that rather than seeing lockdown as an obstacle, I could view it as a bumper time for everyone’s story lines and a unique opportunity to weave a widely meaningful social context into the fabric of the Story Lines project.

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At the beginning of the Covid-19 lockdown, I had been experimenting with drawing images fast then writing whatever came quickly to mind as a way of working with the feelings stirred up by this isolation and uncertainty.   The morning of May 5, I was using Indian ink on rice paper to make one-breath paintings, to which I then added spontaneous text.  Geri and I were talking frequently at that time, and it occurred to me that perhaps we could do tandem visual and written Covid “diaries” which we would e-mail to each other. She said yes immediately. We agreed that our aim would be to express and document the evolving process of integrating Dharma and art practice with our experience of the lockdown, perhaps bringing some clarity, understanding and healing to each other and to others as well. 

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The collaborative diary grew naturally out of our individual ways of working on our art and also out of the studies that we undertook at the Barre Retreat. Both of us had been aspiring to a process of art making that examined and circumvented our normal ways of perceiving art in general and our own art in particular.  We were committed to engaging more deeply with the “don’t-know-mind” that we had learned to respect in Buddhism. 

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We continued to exchange diary entries for 40 days, because 40 days seemed a traditionally propitious period of time—a time for rituals to endure, a time for learning—and because, at that point we were beginning to wonder if we might do something useful with all the images we had accumulated.  Perhaps a book?  And so we began to work with what we had, to create narratives and reflections.  Although we started keeping the diary again on November 5th, when the UK went into its second lockdown, I had a deadline for my grant-funded project, so we let this second diary go. 

 

The guidelines for the diary are simple: we agreed to meditate for a period of time which felt right for each of us, and then to draw and write something during the next five minutes.  Then we would email our entries to each other, with no comments. The idea was for each of us to see what came up, without worrying about how “good,” i.e., skillful or artful it was, and then to send it off to the other.   

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Often, we found ourselves responding to one another’s posts—not as “art” but as expressions of our struggles or triumphs.  On a given day, what were we struggling with?  What gave us joy?   We were both looking inward and attending kindly, compassionately to our own and each other’s daily lives.  And then as time went by, we found ourselves adding another level of comment: writing poems or short paragraphs both about our own posts and about each other’s. 

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This was and is such a fundamental exchange.  It helped us during the lockdown, but its function goes far beyond that.  Life challenges us continually, placing us in situations that involve waiting, endurance, happiness, sadness.  How do we hold these painful or joyous periods in our hearts?  Perhaps this simple exchange could be of use to others—friends, long-distance “pen-pals” like us, teachers, therapists, anyone working with groups of people in creative ways.  And it could also work for each of us alone. 

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As we worked on this book, our periods on Zoom together grew longer and more frequent.  We had to negotiate who would do what?  And then who would re-do? Reshape?  We passed our work back and forth.  We addressed our frustrations.  We worked to our strengths: I did a lot of work on an experimental website as Geri was relatively clueless in that category, but she liked to edit.  Our friendship deepened as we looked at it with whatever wisdom we had learned from our common study of Buddhism. Our long term goal, as meditators, educators and creatives, became how to do the diary and the book and what we could communicate to our readers: how to hold the physical and spiritual “mindweather.”  Here we were together, letting our practices of meditation, contemplation and creativity breathe fresh air and space into our feeling state and our relationship with the world and our relationship to one another. We discovered that this process kept us from shutting down emotionally. We showed up for each other. We took care of each other.

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We started with our guidelines:  

Guidelines for doing Mindweathersong

 

Meditate.

Then do something visual and written about storylines and feelings

In response to this Covid-19 lockdown and pandemic

For 5 minutes each day.

No rules except the time limit

of 5 minutes of making something each day

And no masterpieces allowed, no intellectualisations, no judgements,

Just feelings from the gut, be yourself.

It’s great to do this with someone else,

wherever they live

Just share your day’s entries with each other,

Maybe posting as a blog daily and reflecting on your process every ten days

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​Story Lines becomes Mindweathersong

Originally I had imagined that the lockdown diary would be entitled Story Lines, the first part of the Awakening Through Creativity projects. But as Geri and I began making diary entries over days and weeks, the term Story Lines came to feel static, one-dimensional, lacking vitality and fluidity.  It didn’t express the dynamic inter-relating, interdependent process that I was experiencing both with Geri and also in a wider social context. I also noticed how the mind weather analogy repeatedly arose while I was contemplating, meditating, painting, drawing and writing daily diary entries. During one session, the word “Mindweathersong” dropped into my awareness—and into my painting.  This way of understanding felt much more poetic, fluid, vibrant and congruent with the turbulent pandemic lockdown rollercoaster. It was also congruent with Dharma practice, as there are many Buddhist analogies in which thoughts, feelings, perceptions are seen as weather arising, passing and dissolving in the vast openness of space. Creatively expressing or inquiring into this is like a song manifesting from our source.

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Zangmo’s Journal, 30th May 2020, Suffolk UK

OK, five minutes to do today’s diary entry. Not got a clue what I’m going to do.

Go into the studio.  Ahhh, my yummy paints and watercolour pencils.

 

Blank watercolour paper beckoning, yet what? No idea. Have to trust, let go, let it happen spontaneously.  Been a lot of swirly thoughts and emotions going on today.   Plus I’m tired.

 

Something scary under the tiredness, but really don’t have the motivation or energy to investigate what is going on down there.

 

So, I know there’s a lot going on in my mind, I know I’m tired, fed up, dissociated.

Now what? I want to lie down, curl up, sleep until it’s all over. Now what? Yellow.

Splosh yellow on paper, don’t know why. Add a horizontal strip of red. Don’t know what or why. It just happens from somewhere not conceptual, not knowing. Let go, let be.

           

Watercolour crayon on the red paint, drawing something lying down, prone, not much detail.

When I add a simple eye shape, it suddenly comes alive, watching, aware, a focal point.

It relates to the picture I painted yesterday of water, sky, a reclining figure with a painful hand, suffering, sort of.

 

A lot of weather going on.

 

​I sit back, just be while it dries, feeling swirly thoughts arising and passing through awareness. I want to make marks of them. I begin to scribble from their energy with coloured watercolour pencils.  Just free scribble all over like turbulent weather moving through space. Mind weather.

           

I look at what’s happened. It feels like a narrative, a poem, something taking shape without words.

 

On the bottom left of the paper I write the word ‘Mindweathersong.’

 

That’s how it is. Done.