Awakening Through Creativity Project (work in progress)Zangmo Denise Alexander
Geraldine DeLuca
Beginner’s Mind
I have spent the greater part of my life teaching writing and literature at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York. I particularly enjoyed teaching writing because it felt intimate: I learned who students were and I watched them grow. Early on, I found Peter Elbow’s influential book Writing Without Teachers, which taught that writing was a process. The standard wisdom was, “Get your ideas straight in your head; then write them down.” Elbow’s way was to start with where you are and open yourself to what comes your way. One step will take you to the next.
This, of course is the way of the artist. It is also the way of the child before the child’s imagination becomes constricted by the rules and tests of conventional schools. Mark Epstein told the famous story of the Buddha as a child sitting in a field while his father was somewhere nearby. There was such peace. I remember those moments from my own childhood: being happily occupied in my imagination while my mother was in another room. I was safe and free in body and mind. I see that state now in my grandchildren as they settle into an imaginary world. They lean over it, maybe singing or saying all the voices. In every aspect of my life, this is what I sought, but it is hard to hold onto in a world dominated by outcomes assessment, particularly when the outcomes are valued purely for their ability to be measured.
So we go back to a state of “don’t know” mind. “Beginner’s mind.” Something fresh and uninhibited. I became interested in visual art in my twenties, and I took several painting courses at the Brooklyn Museum. My approach was not particularly imaginative; I painted from a nude model as faithfully as I could. But the wordlessness of the experience was peaceful, meditative. I was a graduate student immersed in words, and the pleasure of being quiet and looking toward images was startling. I was also beginning to teach at Brooklyn College. Soon I got married and had my children, Katharine and Jeffrey. They, of course, changed my life. I learned a deeper kind of love than I’d known before. And I also became very busy. I started a journal about children’s books with a colleague, and I let painting
Finding Buddhism in New Age America
At the college, I noticed people who seemed to have a spiritual life—who looked to be quietly engaged in something that nourished their soul. Maybe they did Centering Prayer. A few attended Quaker meeting. I wanted to sit next to those people, to know how it was for them. I read Matthew Fox’s liberation theology and the writings of Thomas Merton and there I found my way to a spiritual life based on kindness and love. I read the work of young writers returning from India, Burma, Thailand: Jack Kornfield’s A Path with Heart, Mark Epstein’s Thoughts Without a Thinker, John Kabat Zinn’s Full Catastrophe Living. I spent some weekends at the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, New York, and I began meditating. All of this helped to counter the often-painful competitions of academic life.
In Buddhism, I found a kinder way to be. As my children got older, I made time to go on retreats. I learned from teachers who offered a way to be comfortable with whatever experience I was having. Eventually, I understood that I needed to start with tenderness for my own presence.
Combining Dharma and Art
In 2011, I moved to Vermont and began taking art courses at the AVA Gallery and Art Center in Lebanon, New Hampshire. So my life as a painter began in earnest. I took many courses; learned many methods. Then in 2018, I applied to a year-long course in “Dharma and Art” at the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies (BCBS) in Massachusetts. The course focused on our perceptions and introduced me to the revolutionary notion that what I judged to be true—mostly about myself—was not necessarily so. Once I accepted that, a world opened up. It was there, also, that I met Zangmo and began a friendship that has become a deep part of my life.
One day during that course, I found myself painting a man standing in a purple space, his arms outstretched and vulnerable. He was me, I thought, but he was also black. That too was a new perception and the deepest lesson of the Dharma. We’re all of us—all beings—a part of one another.
That consciousness had been growing in me for years. As a writing teacher and administrator at Brooklyn College, where the student body is vibrant and diverse, I learned, as the National Council of Teacher of English put it, that students have a “right to their own language.” I also came to see that the classroom was our life, and if we were to grow together, I wanted to introduce the contemplative modes of learning that had become so much a part of my experience. The Association for Contemplative Mind in Higher Education supported a colleague and me in developing a program in contemplative modes of teaching. Out of this work came my book, Teaching Toward Freedom: Supporting Voices and Silence in the English Classroom (Routledge/Taylor & Francis, 2018.)
As I write this, I think about what comes next for me, and I envision a spiritual autobiography with pictures! The days go by, and I write, paint, practice meditation, study the Dharma and continue to educate myself about racial justice: with the condition of all beings everywhere. I aspire to help. And I am filled with gratitude for all of it.
Zangmo Alexander
For me, making art is joy, an opening into timeless essence, a voyage of discovery. Spiritual practice, everyday life and making art have evolved together, intimately informing and nurturing each other in dance of mutual feedback throughout my life. Making art now supports my awareness meditation in a process which is also a spiritual practice. This has evolved over a lifetime of exploring my mind and the whole mysterious business of being an embodied consciousness.
Childhood
Growing up in Hove, UK in a non-observant, dysfunctional, Jewish family, attending a Christian school and trying to make sense of traumatic childhood experiences raised questions of self and identity, stimulating a spiritual search from the age of 11. Trauma was a wonderful, although not pleasant, teacher: when 9, nearly losing my mother to tuberculosis, parental divorce and the suicides of my brother as a child and later when I was 29 the suicide of my alcoholic husband opened my mind to impermanence, the transience of all things and that life definitely didn't seem to be how I was conditioned to believe it was. This led to questioning the meaning of life, undergoing an awful lot of psychotherapy and embarking on a spiritual quest.
Discovering the Power of Art
Wanting to learn more about the mind, as a young adult in the 1980's I worked as a nursing assistant in a psychiatric hospital where I was invited to participate in an inspiring six-month staff art therapy group. This experience was a spingboard opening me to vast possibilities of expressing my mind through art. This led to practising as a committed artist exploring the mind and inner experience as subject matter. Contemplating Mark Rothko's paintings at the Tate Modern and listening to Mahler's Resurrection Symphony conducted by Simon Rattle further opened my mind to how the arts can reach beyond purely visual and aesthetic dimensions to be powerful transforming, healing, revealing, and spiritually awakening experiences. I began to understand that for me the role of art was to include both the suffering human condition and also point to our timeless universal essence. A new journey began exploring art, psychology and spirituality.
Spiritual Search, Art and Spirituality
My husband’s suicide in 1981 was the trauma that woke me up spiritually, and catapulted me into a search for my spiritual home. I studied Christian Essene spiritual healing with the College of Spiritual Psychotherapy. Wanting to see if my Jewish roots could help, I studied Kabbalah with a rabbi’s wife. Interest in the perennial philosophy led me to look east, study Hindu and Vedic teachings and travel to India, before arriving in 1991 at Tibetan Buddhism, my spiritual home.
Wanting to follow my increasing desire to integrate art, psychology and spirituality, I embarked on a BA Hons degree in Painting (1987-1991) at the then Brighton College of Art. I began studying Hindu and Tibetan mandala painting, the work of Agnes Martin, Jackson Pollock and Richard Pousette-Dart, Paul Klee and Kandinsky and travelled to India to research Indian women artists and miniature painting. I recall asking a tutor on my degree course, ‘How do I paint pure consciousness?’ to which he replied, ‘Become pure consciousness, then paint’. I would also add, ‘By painting you can discover pure consciousness’. Discovering how to do this became my creative koan.
My art work became increasingly abstract as I searched for ways to make visible a sense of things seemed to me beyond superficial physical appearance. In 1991 I wrote a dissertation, ‘The Symbolism of the Center in Religion and Sacred Art’, which investigated the relationship between sacred art and the perennial spiritual teachings. In the midst of all this I discovered the joys and challenges of parenthood with the birth of my son Jacob in 1990, following fervent prayers for something that would help me destroy my ego.
Discovering Buddhism
In addition to exhibiting and practising as an artist, in 1995 I began a more committed, formal Buddhist study and meditation in the Tibetan Buddhist Kagyu-Nyingma traditions. I was so grateful to receive teachings from authentic, realized, spiritual masters including Ato Rinpoche and Khenpo Tsultrim Gyamtso Rinpoche. In 2005 I discovered my main teacher, Mingyur Rinpoche, a Tibetan Buddhist teacher holding lineages for Mahamudra and Dzogchen, which includes shamatha and vipashyana meditation. These lineages offer progressive training in the path to enlightenment that particularly suited my mind and turned out to be life changing.
Beginning to Integrate Dharma and Art
I also began studying traditional Tibetan thangka painting for two years with two nuns. Although a beautiful art form, I increasingly felt drawn to investigate ways of integrating meditation with contemporary fine art practices. The desire to deeply inquire into ways of integrating Dharma and art practices led me to study for a Masters Degree in Fine Art (2005-2007). For my examination exhibition in 2007 I created a short video, 'Letter to My Mum' in response to my mother asking why I wanted to ordain as a Buddhist nun.
A week after my show closed, I was ordained as a Buddhist nun in Oxford UK by His Eminence Thrangu Rinpoche. I remained a nun for seven years, living in semi-retreat in my house in Suffolk UK. In 2014 I was increasingly feeling that while being a nun had been extremely beneficial for myself and hopefully others, I needed to be more naked and integrate ongoing spiritual practice with creative practice, teaching art and everyday life as a lay person, for both my own and other people’s benefit.
Since 2007 I have been developing projects integrating art and the meditation practices given to me by Mingyur Rinpoche, along with teaching art and mindful creativity coaching. Contemplation and meditation define the subject matter of my art, informing and underpinning activity before, during and after creative activity. I am discovering that the process of integrating art, Dharma and everyday life is a contemplative, mindful and transformative practice observing deeply ingrained conditioning and also inquiring into the nature of knowing and not-knowing in everyday life and when making art.