Dangerous Conversations

A few years ago I began meditating regularly.  It started with a visit to the London Buddhist Centre, and then a mindfulness course, and then retreats at Gaia House and Vajrasana. And then between 2014-15 I did formal training as a mindfulness and meditation teacher.

On the 25th of June, right at the beginning of this process of exploring fear, risk and change I organised a meditation afternoon at Open School East.  I have found that meditation can help me understand the complexity of my emotions and experiences, and go much deeper than the immediate sensations, thoughts and feelings that arise constantly and can often seem overwhelming.

The idea was to come together with a group, in a free, open and accessible session, and spend some time going deeper together: seeing whatever comes up.  It is a strategy that I find incredibly useful when working with uncomfortable experiences and so I wanted to share it and explore it with others as part of this process.

The day of the session actually ended up being the day after the result of the referendum on whether the UK should remain in the EU or not.  I hadn’t timed it specifically like this- it was the only appropriate saturday when the room was free.

It did mean that there was a very significant emotional backdrop to the afternoon.  Throughout the day before I could feel a real heaviness and tension in the air.  There was so much angst and grief and anger on social media- from people who had voted to remain and couldn’t believe the actual result.  And I felt that there was a huge amount of fear: about what would happen next; and how it would change people’s lives.  I myself was feeling fear, but in a different way to perhaps I ever had before- it was like something had been wrenched away, a sense of a possible future had been torn off.

We didn’t discuss anything related to Brexit in the afternoon- the focus was returning to the body and the breath as an anchor to ground our experience.  And this somehow created some space, an opportunity to return to the present, to the group of people I was with and not to get drawn into projections about the future.  Listening to the wind, and hearing rain falling gave me a sense of the world going on as usual, and how change is completely natural and inevitable.

At the end of the day I led a ‘loving kindness’ meditation, which is about exploring compassion for others and the self.  During part of it you are invited to offer kindness, or love, or whatever positive emotion feels right, to everyone around you- not just in the room, but out in the city, the surrounding countryside, in hospitals, on buses, going to work, sleeping, kissing, arguing, holding hands.  This stage of the meditation was very moving for me, as I felt the powerful angst of the division caused by the vote, and anger towards those who had set this course (in my own opinion) needlessly.  But above it all I felt that compassion is such a powerful emotion, and one that is so invaluable at times of risk and change- it can shift a whole perspective, and help me to understand myself better and connect with others better too.

1. Pre-existing ideas of the kind of work I should or could be making
2. Ideas of the kind of artist I want to be, should be, or can be
3. An overwhelming sense of moral responsibility to make things that are somehow ethical
4. Doubt over my own judgement in what ethical things I could make
5. Fear of revealing too much about myself
6. Spending too much time looking at / reading what I’ve already done
7. Nonspecific worries and anxiety
8. Writing down ideas of what I could be doing instead of doing it
9. Unrelated emails
10. A feeling of nagging unease
11. Encountering the work of successful practitioners that I think isn’t very good or interesting or which so obviously comes from a place of privilege and worrying that I’m going to make the same mistakes
12. The idea that I am an individual making individual work that is somehow about me and reflects me
13. The idea that whatever I create has to be somehow interesting
14. Worrying about something else important or stressful that I have to do in the next few days
15. The idea that whatever I create has to be meaningful, significant, authentic, and have a value in the world
16. Not accepting or understanding that it’s simply OK just to make stuff for the sake of it, for myself

Earlier this year I was lucky to have been awarded a Professional Development Bursary from a-n and in the past few months I have been trying out a radical new approach to my practice: to go back to the beginning and see what excites and interests me.  One of the things that has kept coming up as I have tried to start making work is all the things that literally stop me, or hold me back, from making work.  There are some obvious external practical ones (money, time, resources), but then I’ve begun to notice how many are internal too.

This list is some of those internal ones (leaving aside the practical ones for now) that I can think of right now.  I feel like making work is about engaging in an ongoing psychic struggle with any number of them, but that somehow they are also necessary obstacles too.

The first few months of this year (2016) have been a time of significant change for me.  Having left my role at Cubitt, where I co-founded and led a large scale education programme for eight years, I decided to quite radically change how I use my time and energy.

My first commitment was to put as much time as I could into my own practice.  Carol Bove talks very well about how time and practice are inseparable:

“Your time is not a separate thing from you; it’s not an instrument. Time is part of what you’re made from. Emerson said, “A man is what he thinks about all day long.” Everything that you do and think about is going to be in your artwork. The computer-science idea “garbage in, garbage out” applies to artists. This is something to consider when you’re choosing your habitual activities.

One question is, how do you create a way of being in the world that allows new things (ideas, information, people, places) into your life without letting everything in? I want to point out that your tolerance for media saturation might be lower than you realize. You need to conduct an open-ended search that doesn’t overwhelm you with information and at the same time doesn’t limit the search in a way that pre-determines your findings. That is a puzzle.”

(full article here)

After a number of years working at full capacity: fitting in emailing on buses or trains, working evenings and weekends mostly on programming, development and administrative work, I had begun to realise that unless I specifically invested time into my practice then it would never develop in rich and exciting ways.

I began to think about how I could maximise the time spent on my own, making things, exploring ideas, with limited external expectations.  I decided to minimise the time spent on ‘earning money’ and maximise the time spent on my own practice- to try and work to live, rather than live to work, and ideally, to find ways of earning money that directly support the practice without compromising it.

I should at this point recognise the privileges that have enabled me to make these choices, and to embark on this process.

Firstly, nearly four years ago now, myself and two friends got together to try and buy a part-ownership flat in London.  We realised that none of us could individually ever afford to buy somewhere and we had just left a flat where the rents were going up by over 50%.  We were very lucky to find a great place in Hackney, built by a housing association and we managed to buy 35% of it between the three of us with a fixed-term mortgage.  So this has meant that my monthly outgoings are now relatively stable, and not at the mercy of the inhumane housing market.

Secondly I do have a studio.  For so many artists this is a huge luxury.  Affordable, accessible studios are incredibly rare, particularly if you’re looking for one close to home.  Through a connection I met at a conference and skills developed during my time at Cubitt I have set up my own studio residency in a mental health facility in Homerton.  I have a small self-contained studio and in exchange I run a weekly programme of workshops for the residents- most of whom have high support needs (including schizophrenia).  It is a really positive set-up: I have my own space; and I also get to engage with people who have led fascinating lives and to teach them some basic art skills (image below from one of the workshops).

Thirdly, I think my parents instilled in me a positive relationship to taking risks.  When I was growing up, we lived a very basic existence: our food came from food co-ops; we wore secondhand clothes; our dad cut our hair; and we rarely had a working TV.  But we were incredibly lucky not to experience true poverty or perceive that we were somehow unequal to others.  My brother and I went to a tiny school (with only 60 pupils) and the village we lived in was a pretty eccentric place.  Later, when we moved to another school, and the teacher was asking how much pocket money we got, I remember only being slightly bemused by the fact that quite a few of the children got £1 or even £5 a week, when I got 19p.  I don’t remember feeling jealous at all.

All of this has given me a sense that it’s possible to take risks, to just make a leap in a new direction and try things out.  And I realise that these things are all privileges, and that they shouldn’t be taken lightly.