Pretty Real Behind the Veil

The process of art journaling is like a form of meditation for me.  The process of developing a visual image in this way takes me away from words, labels, definitions of things, and pushes me over to a more heavily right-brain oriented activity.  Once I transition to right-brain emphasis, I easily get into a “flow” mental state, but what I am discovering is that, just as when I am sleeping & dreaming, my left brain isn’t turned off, though on a top level of consciousness it would seem so to me.  While my right brain has my main consciousness busy with lines and colors and shapes and texture and media and tapping my memories and imagination to create an image that represents something about my thoughts and feelings, there is also this heavily integrated left-brain/right-brain activity going on very intensely while my hands are working on the details in the journal page.  But the words and the story start flowing later, and the messages that my brain is sending through the journal page, and the significance of it really unfold and present themselves to me when I stop working on the image.  It’s an incredible thing, that I liken to how can go to sleep with some unresolved problem hanging out there with no clear solution (sometimes even the problem itself is not clear to me), and I wake up with an amazing perspective, both on the problem, and options for resolution.  This process is like doing that but I’m still awake.  I’m not even aware of this process going on while I work on my journal pages, but I am seeing a clear pattern emerging that this happens, even when I think that I am doing a journal page about one thing, but by the time I finish, I realize that it represents something very different that I had imagined was going on in my head.  It’s like the process throws open all these windows and doors inside of me that I didn’t know were there, and the bits of data that are related to one another seem to find each other and have tearful reunions in my head, and then catch each other up on what’s been happening with them since they were last connected.

I have a very strong ability to sense patterns (another right-brain characteristic) and relationships between things, and seeing as much of the whole picture as possible in order to put things into the proper context is something that I gravitate towards.  I feel the similarities and differences in things, and connections between them, even when someone is attempting to conceal them.  My brain apparently does this even better in auto-pilot mode when I am doing the art journaling, and my brain is getting a rest from words, labels, criticism, etc.  In that flow state, my brain seems to be able to see everything, and accesses it all, and when I stop doing the art, it tells me what it’s discovered while kicking around in my head, and as that happens, these realizations get incorporated into the next revision of the current image, or it may inspire a future image.  Ultimately, I find that with each journal page that I have completed, and even each time I do the process, I feel less burdened than before I did it.  I’m still amazed by that, and I wonder what others experience when they do art journaling?  This is dramatically obvious to both myself and my husband, and our amazement continues to grow with each new step in the process.  Who knew?