Workshop Experience

WORKSHOP EXPERIENCE

A workshop participant shares her experience:

“My first experience with Inner Voice Drawing was with a nice size group of women (there were 6-8 of us, I can’t remember) and the topic was ‘Fearlessness'. At that time in my life I was preparing myself to take a blood test to find out if I had inherited the Huntington’s gene from my father who has Huntington’s disease. There was a fifty-fifty chance I had it, and if I did, it pretty much meant that I would follow the path that the neurological degenerative disease demanded of my father, losing his ability to read, depression, constant jerking movements, the inability to control swallowing, etc. It meant I wouldn’t have children. I later took the test and do not have the disease. But at the time, I didn’t know what the results would say to me. Confronting this test required a tremendous amount of courage and so I had taken this workshop to cultivate some more of that fearlessness to accept whatever would be.

“I was surprised to discover how much fear I was holding onto, and what it was actually about: not the disease as much as the choices I had made in my own career path. These fears and the constant messages, which seemed to invite me to listen to my true heart’s desire, would continually surface in the drawings. I also discovered a tremendous sense of faith, of trust that whatever would happen I would be OK. How did the drawings cultivate that trust and faith?

“The intimate setting, the blank paper, the colored pencils… Monika first invited us to ease into the simple task of doodling on a piece of paper, just to loosen the flow a bit. Then we took a new piece of paper and were asked to write down a question, something like, ‘what does fear look like?’ With our eyes closed, we reached blindly for the colored pencils, choosing one, and began our drawings. People worked in silence, the kind that meant we were ‘going inside’. It’s very much like a deep listening, and you don’t guide the pencil, you just draw… let the pencil do whatever it wants. Choose a new pencil when you feel you are done with the first, or a third, whatever you feel.

“Monika timed us, for two minutes, and then we were asked to stop drawing, look at the page and write down what we saw on it, or what it made us feel looking at it. The written portion, on a separate piece of paper, gives you a chance to ease into the aspect of ‘interpreting’ through simply naming or describing what you see. It is not interpreting, e.g. ‘this red ball means x’, but describing what you see, e.g. ‘there’s a red tangled mass hovering over a blue lake’. Naming these shapes, or movements on the page, draws your focus to pull out images, or just describe what you see, without analyzing them.

“After several rounds of questions, drawing, and writing, with our eyes closed for the drawing portion or sometimes open, we would hang our drawings on the wall and together with the group, we would describe what we saw. Gradually, it became clear that a still-life narrative was surfacing. Everyone would notice something and share what they saw and eventually a consensus on the tone, imagery, the feelings, would form. Even with the group descriptions, however, the drawing’s voice was yours, privately, to understand and recognize. Perhaps it was a surprise to me… perhaps it was a recognition of what I was feeling, there in front of me, like looking at a dream in broad daylight.

“I dream a lot, and have (so I am told) an abnormal capacity for remembering my dreams. I love my dreams. Their presence in my waking life, I would say, has an effect on my conscious thoughts throughout the day, if only in stirring a sensation or a recall, but usually in prompting me to understand them more deeply. What is this inner speak? What am I trying to work out in my subconscious?

“Inner Voice Drawing is much like dream seeing, and dream interpretation, but what you have is the witness of not only your own waking self but, if you choose, your friends’ observations. Unlike a dream, however, with the drawing there is something I could never actually share with my friends – the image itself!

“It is different than dreaming because you consciously engage a practice of letting an inner voice come to the surface, which means your critical/interpretive mind has to step aside. This is perhaps my favorite aspect of inner voice drawing: the surprise and recognition that comes to the surface through that engagement of letting go of the urge to interpret.

“The first thing I always have to do before I do an inner voice drawing (and I do them now, on my own at home, whenever I want) is to promise myself that I will now trust the process, I will step aside and let what needs to come, come. This is the hardest part for me. Sometimes, when I ask a question, I want to ‘see’ a particular response. But that desire has to be set aside, suspended for the time that you are drawing. Oftentimes, the desire for a particular response comes from the fear of really just feeling what you’re feeling. So to set this aside is sort of like letting go, for the time being, of mental obstacles that blocks one’s ability to actually be present with one’s feelings. This act, in itself, loosens the grip of fear and develops trust. It’s not like I am asking something or someone ‘outside’ of myself to ‘come through’ me onto the page, although one can certainly see it that way if one wanted to. It’s more that, as Monika says, ‘You already know the answers, and you just have to open yourself to receive them.’ That is what IVD cultivates, a kind of relationship of trust with yourself.

Beautiful, no?

“Today I gave my first inner voice drawing as a gift to my friends who are having a baby. I dedicated the drawing to their baby, Josey. There was no question, per se, only the dedication, ‘Let this be for Josey, and for her parents, whatever may be a delight for them, and any deeper messages about their strengths, let that come too.’ The drawing, which started off as a tangled, scribbled, blur, began to announce profoundly clear shapes, one by one, … an elephant dancing in the middle of the scene, a mother elephant behind with peacock feathers, a radiant father lion (these are so like the parents themselves!)… a dog, a baby, a squirrel… I teased out shapes that caught my eye and gave them a more detailed presence. This ‘teasing out’ describes another stage of the drawing in which you open your eyes and draw out what you see, give it more shape and depth… there is more active, conscious engagement at this point, but this is valuable too because you are integrating the openness and non-determinedness of the drawing with your own pleasure and shaping/creative eye. We might say that IVD fosters both, creative authority (“I choose to draw out this Squirrel and give it a tail”) and spontaneity (“I do not know what this is, but it’s there and I’ll go with it”). In fact, how could something be creative if it didn’t come from that place of openness and spontaneity?

“The delight of the making is so much in opening to the creative process; it is a relationship with your ‘inner voice’, not a pre-determined act of ‘here is my idea and now it is on the page’. The true subject, I would argue, of the greatest poetry in our western tradition is in fact this relationship between the poet and his inner voice, what sometimes has been called ‘the Muse’, what sometimes has left a poet such as Dante to describe himself as a scribe of his own heart: ‘I am one who when Love breathes in me, take note, and in that manner which is dictated within, go on to set it forth in verse.’ Inner voice drawings tap into the poetic wisdom that is not lost to us in this day and age, nor is it something that must be cultivated through cloistered academic settings, but is innate in our capacity to engage our inner knowing through our questions and our willingness to become scribes of the answers.

“On the integration of the conscious/spontaneous phase of the drawing: one thing I like to do is when I see something clearly, I go with it, I draw it out, I make it more clear visually. But many times there are things I have absolutely no idea what they are. Monika advises to continue asking the drawing about such obscure shapes and scribbles, for instance, ‘What is this round ball thing in the elephant’s hand?’ I never perseverate over a shape I don’t get. (This is part of the trust). I move on to something else, maybe I add a curve where I am feeling lines that are unsatisfying… but eventually when I come back to that enigmatic piece, with the confidence to both ‘take matters into my own hands’, which means sometimes adding something that wasn’t there, and allow the surprise to emerge when I’ll suddenly just recognize what it is. The point is that the process of integrating both creative authority and leaning into the question (spontaneity), remains there as a palpable relationship of connectedness with something in you that is working with you to be drawn out.

“Inner voice drawings as gifts, it turns out, are a huge hit. It is truly something that you are giving to someone from yourself, and yet it feels as if you were drawing from a knowing that connects you more deeply to that person, something shared and yet non-verbalized.

“So for me, inner voice drawings serve both to draw out the answers to my questions, helping me to hone in on my feelings, and on subconscious material in my psyche, as well as to foster a relationship of trust with my inner voice. They also serve to expand one’s creative voice. This is due to the engagement, as I mentioned before, with opening and allowing that voice to emerge.

“In addition to the above benefits of this practice, inner voice drawings are one way of focusing a reflective practice. Many people may use journals to do this, or meditation or therapy. IVD is in line with these practices, even more so with the later two because of the focused energy that goes into opening and receiving the images, letting them emerge.

Why does the world need to know about Inner Voice Drawing?

“Anyone who is interested in becoming more self-reflective will discover a valuable and practical set of tools in Monika’s Inner Voice Drawing technique with which to actively practice self-reflection. The drawings also have the benefit of getting us “out of our heads” long enough to listen more deeply to what we are feeling and to what is going on beneath the surface of mental chatter. It develops inner listening and trust, as well as intuition.

"Monika teaches that these are all skills that each of us has innately, which we are all here to develop if we so choose.”

- C. C., New York, NY

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