Stewart Cubley Transcript

Stewart Cubley Interview

Summary:

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer, and my guest today is Stewart Cubley. Stuart is founder of the Institute for Art of Living, not to be confused with Sri Sri Ravishankar’s organization, it’s doing business as the Painting Experience. He’s an artist whose work has carried him throughout the world to work with groups in a process of inner exploration using the tool of expressive painting to assess the potential within the human heart and imagination. For more than three decades he has taught his unique approach to literally thousands of people at growth centers such as Esalen and Omega Institutes, multinational corporations, programs in prisons and countless other public forums. Stuart lives in Fairfax, California and is co-author of Life, Paint and Passion; Reclaiming the Magic of Spontaneous Expression. So, thanks Stewart, welcome.

Stewart: Thank you Rick.

Rick: You and I were going to do this back in September or something and I had to reschedule and you ended up going up to Alaska. You have a cabin in the woods, completely out of touch with the world?

Stewart: I do, yeah. I lived in Alaska as a young man, I lived outside of Fairbanks, and during that period of time, I homesteaded some property, some very remote property on the north boundary of Denali National Park. So, I go back there every year and we take a helicopter in, it’s 20 miles from the nearest road.

Rick: Wow.

Stewart: We’re off the grid so there’s no internet and no cell phone contact and we just hibernate for about six weeks. Usually at the end we take a couple of weeks or at least three weeks sometimes to be alone there. So, it’s kind of my annual retreat.

Rick: That’s fantastic. It must really have a profound effect.

Stewart: It’s a very powerful place. Alaska is one of the few remaining true wilderness areas on the earth because when I look out my cabin door for example, it’s looking west towards the Bering Sea. There are…

Rick: You can almost see Russia from your front porch, right?

Stewart: Yeah, yeah. A little bit of- a little Sarah Palin action. It’s 900 miles to the Bering Sea and there’s no road. It’s that wild.

Rick: Wow. What would happen if you injured yourself or something?

Stewart: I have a satellite cell phone so I can get emergency call out if I have to.

Rick: Okay, great. Now you have a… you’re not merely, I shouldn’t say merely, you’re not just an artist. You have been a spiritual aspirant I guess most of your life. I understand you spent a fair amount of time with Nisargadatta back in, what, the 80s,

Stewart: ’79, ’80. I think he died in ’81.

Rick: Okay.

Stewart: Yeah, so I was there over the, during the winter of ’79, ’80.

Rick: Most people listening to this show will know who Nisargadatta is. He wrote that book, what was it, I Am That?

Stewart: Yeah, yeah, incredible book.

Rick: And he was that really powerful guru or teacher who lived in Bombay, wasn’t it? And made and sold cigarettes for a living and had a profound influence on a lot of people. Was that your first foray into spirituality or had you been doing various things before that?

Stewart: Well, that was not my first foray. I think, well first of all, just to say, in the ’80s, late ’70s, his book, I Am That, was not published yet in this country. And so, you couldn’t really get it. So, it was being passed from friend to friend as a Xerox copy. And I remember when you got that book, the Xerox copy of I Am That -it was like, oh my God, this has never been said before. This is just incredible. And so, it had a huge impact and was kind of an underground movement for a while, before it was actually published. But no, pretty early on I was attracted to the spiritual path. I would say probably having to do with wilderness first. I grew up in northern New York State and my family had a cabin in the Adirondacks. So, I found myself gravitating towards being alone in the wilderness quite early on. It was very soothing for me. There was something I found, spending time in the high country of the Adirondacks that was very important for me. And then later, the West, Colorado and so on. And then I got drafted during the Vietnam War. And I had just finished a master’s degree actually at Brown University, in engineering of all things. And I got drafted and I refused induction. The first person I think to refuse induction in Providence, Rhode Island, they had no idea what to do with me. So, they finally just sent me home and said, “Well, you’ll hear from us.” And I never did.

Rick: Oh, that’s great.

Stewart: I kind of fell through the cracks. But I got a lot of mileage out of that. I felt like a kind of a rather a fugitive for a while. And it was kind of an exotic image to have. So, I went to Colorado and skied for a while. And then I took a summer trip to Alaska with some friends. And there was something about the quality of the wilderness in Alaska that was incredible. I just found myself very attracted there. And I ended up– my friends left at the end of the summer, and I stayed and got the only job that I could really get, which was, again, as a graduate student in a program, geophysics actually, at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks. And it was at that time that I got a little piece of property outside of town, built myself a cabin, without really knowing how to do it. I just sort of did it and spent four years there and very quickly, realized I didn’t want to be a graduate student anymore. And made a rather strong decision to leave school and to leave my training, what I was trained to do, and went on to just– went into the wilderness and spent four years, basically by myself in that cabin. A lot of alone time.

Rick: The cabin you still go back to today?

Stewart: No, actually it’s a different cabin. But anyway, when you talk about the roots of my spiritual interest, I would say something– I felt very drawn to the sort of the solitude and the sanctity of untouched wilderness. And so that was a very big turning point for me. I spent a lot of time alone there and just– I kind of felt like I would become– that was going to be the rest of my life. I was going to spend the rest of my life as kind of a weird Alaskan hermit, living alone in the wilderness and getting very eccentric. And I was pretty settled with that. But things happened there for me.

Rick: Were you getting eccentric? I mean, not having a lot of human interaction, were you getting kind of a little caught up in obsessiveness or other idiosyncrasies?

Stewart: Well, I talked to myself a lot since I was the only person around. And I had discovered yoga. And I had found out– the only book at that time was Light on Yoga by Iain Gunn. And so, a friend of mine and I sort of dove into that, another cabin dweller, not too far away. And I got– if I got obsessed, I probably got obsessed about yoga. I was doing like six hours a day of hatha yoga and meditation and pranayama. And it was obsessive because in a sense, I felt like I couldn’t really live without it.

Rick: Were you finding that all that solitude and yoga enabled your mind to really settle down and become very quiet?

Stewart: Well, it was a powerful time, Rick, because I essentially needed to get off the merry ground. I felt like as a young man, your life is about, “Okay, who are you going to be? What is your career going to be? Are you going to get married? Are you going to have children? What’s expected of you? What do your parents want? What do your teachers expect of you?” And I had been– I just feel like I had been on that treadmill. And I had been on that train, so to speak. And so, to step off it and to say, “Okay, I’m not going to do any of that. I don’t know who I’m going to be. I don’t know who I am, but I’m not going to do that.” And to go sit in a cabin in the far north of Alaska, where the winters get very dark, and very cold, and nobody– of course, my parents and a lot of my friends– couldn’t really understand what I was doing and thought I’d gone off the deep end, which David White says exactly where he should be is off the deep end. But it was very transformative for me, and I realized that when I walked out of there four years later, I was a different person.

Rick: Yeah, I can imagine.

Stewart: And I realized I had established my priorities, and I knew basically what was important to me, although I had no idea what I would do.

Rick: It’s like you did the monastery trip without actually going into a monastery.

Stewart: I suppose, yeah. I suppose. I … Sometimes I say that the force that drew me into the cabin, which is a very powerful force, something called to me to go into that degree of solitude and to cut off from the world, that four years later, that same force pushed me out. And I felt, “It was too small.” This vision of my life, living in that little cabin, which I had lived with, I thought that’s what I would do, became way too small for me. And it was very frightening, because I didn’t know what was beyond the walls there. When I left my property finally, with my pack on my back and walking down the trail, it was like this momentous event. Like, “Who am I? Where am I going? I have no idea.” And I thought at the time it was probably just a trip. I would just come back and continue to live there. But it was the beginning of something quite different.

Rick: The theme of force, some force guiding us to do something and then to do something else, that’s very fascinating, isn’t it?

Stewart: It is fascinating.

Rick: Some people ignore that, but some people, the force is so compelling that you can’t ignore it. And there does seem to be some intelligences that would like to orchestrate our life for a higher purpose if we’re cooperative.

Stewart: Yes, that’s a good way of putting it. And I like you saying that, because that’s really the core of the work that I do with the painting, which we’ll get to. But I would like to say, just before I left the cabin, I had a vision, and I think maybe I was meditating, I can’t remember exactly, but I had a very strong waking vision of myself in a room with many people, and many colors. And there was this incredible energy, there was this quality of creativity and laughter, and relaxation, and I had no frame of reference of what to do with that. I just said, “What is that?”

Rick: And at that point you really didn’t have any art experience?

Stewart: I had no art experience whatsoever.

Rick: Interesting.

Stewart: And in fact, I was a little prejudiced against artists, because I’d been an engineer, right? And so, I remember going to the student union building at the university and seeing these kind of lazy, good-for-nothings hanging around, drinking coffee and acting rather self-important, and that was my view of the artist, right? So…

Rick: Brown is primarily an art school, isn’t it? Liberal arts, anyway.

Stewart: Well, it’s more liberal arts, yeah. So, anyway, it was a little bit of a leap for me, but it didn’t happen immediately. I actually… One of the few things that I could read during that time, because I found that books actually were a distraction, even spiritual books, during those four years that I lived there, I found that they kind of carried me out of myself when I really needed to be in touch with my own experience. And so, they seemed to be always kind of prescribing getting better in some fashion, and I wasn’t into getting better. I was into being myself, right? But there was one author, there was one teacher I could read during that time, and that was Krishnamurti. And I found myself resonating with his message, because it was essentially saying, “Think for yourself. Don’t create an authority outside of yourself that you have to follow. Go your own way.” And so, I was doing that, and that appealed to me. So, when I came out, I thought “ Krishnamurti’s getting older. I’d love to see him before he dies.” So, I had my backpack and my tent and my sleeping bag. I ended up… First came to California for a while, but then flew to Switzerland, and Krishnamurti would give these talks in Saanen Switzerland in the summertime in a little village in the mountains there. And people would come and rent chalets and stay in the area and then go three times a week to hear Krishnamurti. A very international crowd, a lot of Europeans, a lot of people from Asia, very interesting group of people. I went there and spent a few months in Saanen. It was there that I met a woman who later became my wife, a French woman, Michelle, and she was an artist. And so that was my connection. Eventually, two years later, we got together and started our life together, which was something that was unplanned. And I got a sense of what art could be there. I got a glimpse. I recognized something about it, even though it was very foreign to me. It was never part of my own direction or self-image. I saw the potential in approaching painting, especially in this way, which was undirected, not about producing results but was really for the process itself. I saw her doing it, and I knew that I wanted to support that. And I recognized that it was not yet available. We ended up moving to San Francisco area. So, this was kind of the birthplace of the Human Potential Movement. It was just late 70s, early 80s. It was just coming into existence and really blooming, so to speak. And I said, “This isn’t happening. This is not recognized yet.” So, I realized, “Okay, I want to support this, but it’s not my thing. It’s her thing.” And we had a little apartment off of Hay street and we started giving classes there. She started giving classes and I kind of organized it. It was only a two-room apartment, so when people came to class I would have to pull our mattress out of the bedroom and put it in the living room, which was a mattress on the floor, and make a little studio for people and then show up myself, as an extra body just to make the class look bigger. I did it without, I kind of backed into it. I was doing the Feldenkrais training at the time. Feldenkrais was giving his first training in the United States at Long Mountain College. It started in ’76, I think. And so, I, being very much into yoga, had written an article for the Yoga Journal on Feldenkrais and yoga, and he liked that and so allowed me to start in the second year of the training. And I was convinced that I would become a Feldenkrais practitioner and be pursuing that. But over the years, as the painting process began to create a network in San Francisco, and it was very grassroots, people would do it, they would tell their friends about it, it was a strong connection with both the spiritual communities as well as the therapeutic communities. And it gained a recognition as being a valid tool for self-exploration. And it just became much more interesting to me than doing body work. And so anyway, I started teaching children. There was an after-school program at the French American Bilingual School in San Francisco where I sort of cut my teeth on beginning to work with this process. And children were perfect, because I was rather shy. I was afraid of the children to begin with. I thought they could see right through me, and that they would run all over me, and they did. But gradually I learned how to work with kids and to gain my own confidence, and then started working with adults. So it was during that time that we actually went to hear Nisargadatta. That was when his book became available. And I must tell you, I was a little skeptical at first, because I was steeped in Krishnamurti. And Krishnamurti was kind of anti-guru. And to have this guru show up, even though his writing in the book was incredible, I wasn’t quite sure. I was a little skeptical of it. And I kind of carried that skepticism with me. I think my intention was just to observe, to kind of go into his presence in his little apartment, his little second story hovel on Kathwadi Lane in Bombay. And I thought I would kind of hide there. So, I remember the very first day we went, and Michelle and I were together. And we got into the downstairs, and then there was this ladder, and we climb up through this hole in the ceiling. And then there was this sort of Satsang happening up there. And not very big, not a lot of people, maybe 20 people or 25 at most. And very dark and very thick with incense.

Rick: And cigarette smoke.

Stewart: And cigarette smoke, right. He was a chain smoker, and he was just smoking up the whole time. And there was two translators. Ramesh was one of the translators, and then the other one, I’m trying to remember his name. But I thought, “Okay, I’m going to go and sit in the back. I’m just going to observe.” So, I pop my head up through the hole in the floor. He takes one look at me, and he says, “You, here.” And he directed everybody. He was so in control of that room. He would tell people where to sit. He would tell people when to leave. Like, “Okay, you’ve heard enough. You go.”

Rick: Yeah, I got that sense from David Godman that he really liked to orchestrate the show, and that new people, he really liked to give them his full attention when they showed up, and see where they were at.

Stewart: Well, that was it. So, he said, “Okay, you, here, right in front of me.” And so that was the last thing I wanted, right? I was ready to hide. And he puts me on the hot seat, and the first thing he said, “Do you know who you are?” And I had read him, and I felt I had an intellectual understanding of it. And so, I think my answer at the time was, “Well, I understand you intellectually, but I don’t understand you experientially.” And then that was translated through the translator. And I remember he said he was adamant, and he said, “No, not two. Only one.” Like it was impossible. If you understood it intellectually, you understood it. It was not two.

Rick: And if you don’t understand it experientially, then you really don’t understand it intellectually. It works both ways.

Stewart: That’s what he was saying. So that was very powerful. And we went back for, gosh, there was a good period of six weeks or so there that we were going every day. We took a break and went to Goa for a while, and Madras, but just day after day, sitting in that environment. And I think in retrospect, the thing that was the most impactful was sitting in the presence of someone who had absolute certainty, of his identity with the absolute. That that’s who he was, and that’s how he saw us, that we were too. And how he could see through every illusion. WHen he would hold forth the people who understood his mother tongue, which is what, Marathi, I guess, were always in stitches. They were just laughing up a storm. He was so funny. He had a way of creating puns with words on the most serious topics. That was just captivating people. And so, once it was translated, it was still very powerful, but it didn’t have as much humor because it just couldn’t carry the humor. But to be in the presence of somebody over and over again, to see this absolute certainty, and to see someone who was living it in that full fashion, it was quite amazing.

Rick: What was the practical implication of that? Was it contagious? Did you become more and more certain, the more you sat there?

Stewart: So this gets into another topic, Rick. Let me see how I might approach this. I want to back up a little bit and say, I want to come back to this if I could, that question. Is that all right with you?

Rick: Sure.

Stewart: I want to say a little bit about the work that I do, because the painting process is a way to explore a lot of the questions that we hold in common here, I think. There’s a way to explore the very nature of the dual mind. I’m going to come back to this question because I need to preface it here a little bit. The painting process is a way to explore, for me, the deepest questions that have to do with non-duality and with the nature of self and true being. It’s not recognized. Art is generally thought of as a certain, on some level, subtle or not so subtle, it’s about the product. It’s about what you’re getting out of it. So, when you really take it out of that realm, and you really make it about the experience of creating art, you are engaging what you referenced earlier about this force, for example. This creative force that drew me into the wilderness and then pushed me out at a certain point. There’s an intelligence in this creative force that is not about your own plans, and not about your schemes, and not about your preferences, and not about even your narrative of what’s going on. It’s something quite vital and quite alive and much bigger than that, than any of those things. So, this is really what is possible to contact through painting, because it bypasses words and it bypasses the verbal. It’s working with color, it’s working with form, it’s working with image, and so it goes very deep into the human psyche and it tends to penetrate quite quickly because it’s not activating the verbal ego, so to speak.

Rick: And the way you approach it, you’re not living for the fruits of action, to paraphrase the Gita.

Stewart: Yes.

Rick: It is that verse, “You have control over action alone, never over its fruits. Live not for the fruits of action, nor attach yourself to inaction.” So, it’s just a process which you engage in. And obviously you’re trying to produce a painting, but you’re not kind of attached to the outcome.

Stewart: Well, yes, and it’s easy to say and it’s hard to do, right? Now, in a way I do say that we’re not producing a painting. Paintings are there, they show up.

Rick: The result from the process.

Stewart: There’s a result, but your intention is not to produce a particular kind of painting. But the reason I’m bringing this in now, is it’s really important to create, for me in this work, to create the right environment in which to explore. If there is any hint of preference on the part of the facilitators, if there’s any hint of a goal to reach, if there’s any hint of me or any authority that’s involved with the presentation of them being somehow advanced, or anybody else in the group- For example, people show up who have absolutely no art experience. They haven’t touched a brush since kindergarten. And then we have people who are professional artists that show up and have real training.

Rick: And they’re in the same group sometimes.

Stewart: Well, they’re absolutely in the same group. And it’s really important to have them in the same group because, of course, the people who have no training, have to be willing to face the fear of not having skill, not having talent. And the people who have the training and the experience, have to be willing to let go of the safety of what they know.

Rick: Yeah. And I guess you can get away with this in visual art better than you could with music, for instance. If you had Yehudi Menuhin and myself, both in a room with violins, I can tell you who you’d want to listen to.

Stewart: Well, actually there are people who work in this way with music. David Darling, for example. And he does a very wonderful job with it. But I think art does lend itself to this because, there’s no authority in art. Because you can say certain music is pleasing to the ear and certain isn’t. But with art, it’s so subjective.

Rick: Yeah.

Stewart: Right? Look what you can sell for a half a million dollars.

Rick: Yes. It’s a lot of stuff. It’s stuff that I wouldn’t pay ten dollars for sometimes.

Stewart: Exactly. It’s totally subjective.

Rick: On the other hand, if I had a choice between possessing, regardless of its monetary value, if I had a choice between possessing a Monet and possessing something, that I could do, I think I would prefer having the Monet on the wall. Just to sort of throw out the typical doubt that people must have.

Stewart: Yeah. That’s one of the doubts. That’s one of the typical doubts. The fact is, Rick, that you could connect with the painting process in such a way that you would feel deeply resonant with some painting that you painted, and would maybe prefer to have that on the wall than a Monet, if you weren’t looking at monetary value.

Rick: Sure.

Stewart: I mean, for sure. But my point here is, in bringing this up at this point, at this time is, there cannot be any hint of authority for this to work. Nobody can be … If it’s about product in any fashion, then it creates the striving for achievement. It creates a kind of measuring in which you either measure up or you don’t measure up. It creates a kind of inward becoming so that you feel it’s about trying to improve, trying to get better. Then, of course, it’s about the inner critic, which shows up big time in this work. It has to be a really clean environment. It has to be so clean that the person who enters it feels, “Okay, I can afford to really let my hair down here. I can afford to explore. I can afford to do things that I might think are ugly, that might look like they make a mess, that would be embarrassing for other people, for me to be identified with,” or perhaps they’re dark. Perhaps they have to go into some dark places. There has to be a clarity to the environment in which a person feels safe to do that. Actually, one of the things that we ask people during our workshop is for no one to make a comment on anyone else’s work the whole time we’re together. That goes a long way to creating the safety, because if you realize that no one’s going to say anything about what you do, and you are not going to be required to come up with something polite to say to anybody else in the room about what they’re doing, and yet you’re in the visual field of everyone. You’re being stimulated by all this incredible imagery and color and form arising from the mystery because we don’t give an assignment. There’s no direction whatsoever. There’s no guided imagery. It’s really asking people to tune into the spontaneous moment and let the painting emerge from there, which we can talk more about. The fact that there’s no authority is really important. This carries over for me to that question you asked, which is- I don’t bill myself as having realized any kind of attainment. It’s not helpful. It’s not right action for me in my work. It creates an environment in which the person becomes special, and the other people have something to attain.

Rick: I sense that you’re saying that both with regard to art, and with regard to your spiritual path.

Stewart: Well, yeah.

Rick: If the two can even be distinguished, but you’re not the type of person who would say, “I have awakened,” or “I have attained such and such,” or something. You wouldn’t feel comfortable doing that.

Stewart: Well, look what happens when I do that, Rick. I think it’s interesting to make a little experiment. If I were to say to you, “Look, I went and sat for six weeks with Nisargadatta, and it was kind of a fun experience, but I came out of it not really knowing what happened, and not much seemed to happen. It didn’t really take hold. He’s a cool guy.” Take that in. Just notice how that feels to you. Notice that that creates a kind of relationship, actually. If you look a little deeper, it creates a relationship between you and me, that you’re yourself in a relationship to me. Knowing that, if I say that about myself, that creates something in the listener. Maybe it’s disappointment. Maybe it’s … I don’t know what it is, but it creates something. Now, if I were to say the other side, if I take the other extreme and say, “Look, it didn’t happen immediately, but there was a time in my life when I was challenged very deeply, and had to let go emotionally of something that I was very, very identified with. At that time, in a moment of real intensity, Nisargadatta’s message became absolutely clear to me. I saw the nature of the one presence. I saw the incredible sanctity and beauty and freedom and joy of the fact that there was one presence and I was that.” I could say that to you as another hypothetical. That creates a very different relationship to me. I find that that relationship is not helpful.

Rick: That’s funny because I kind of prefer the second statement in a way.

Stewart: I’m sure you do. I’m sure you do.

Rick: But I consider both legitimate and whichever one you were to say to me, I would think, “Okay, that’s fine.” I talk to people all the time who’ve had some sort of spiritual awakening, so it doesn’t seem that extraordinary or special to me, although I think it’s great. But I myself can say, “Well, I spent a fair amount of time with this teacher or that teacher, and it really rubbed off.” There was definitely some profound influence that I carry with me constantly and that doesn’t make me special, but it also kind of gives credence to the value of spending time with such a person. In your first statement it almost sounded like, “Well, I could have done that or I could have just hung out on the beach in Goa for six weeks. It wouldn’t have made much difference one way or the other.” But I hold that, and all the traditional teachings hold, that association with such persons definitely has an influence and it’s to be done if the opportunity arises.

Stewart: Well, that’s why I’m bringing it up, Rick, because in my experience it creates something that is not of service. I understand what you’re saying. I’m not saying this is true globally or for everyone, but I know in my own work, and my own experience, that to highlight a particular experience and make it important, is very much like highlighting a particular painting and making it important. And in doing so, it binds the freedom. It creates a model. It creates a relationship, it creates a narrative and an image around that narrative that then becomes something that someone quests after. And the fact is, for me, and my experience with painting, and also in spiritual work, that those moments happen. And I’m not in any way saying those aren’t real. For me, the potential that exists for recognition of self is totally beyond words. It’s not just another narrative. It’s something beyond imagining. But the opportunity for those sorts of openings to happen, come through being willing to inhabit your experience as you are. It’s not through having an image, either of someone who’s attained or some level of attainment, or some abstract, but it’s actually going your own way fully, completely, inhabiting your own experience. And so those spiritual practices that move in that direction feel, how should I say, more effective to me. In other words, mindfulness practice, by the way. That’s one that’s about inhabiting your own experience. And it’s not an easy practice, because we have a lot of preferences about the way we would like to be and the way we’d like to be seen and the way we’d like to show up, and actually have to get out of that, get out of your own way, and to allow what’s actually there to manifest, and then in painting, to express it, to find a form for it. This is the power for me in process arts and in process painting in particular, is that you can bypass the ego by accessing the imagination and the heart. So, I would say there’s two, let me just describe a class to you a little bit. So, people walk in, I do a lot of weekends, I do five days, I do longer, but say we do a weekend workshop, people come on Friday evening. The studio’s all built, so people walk into a pretty, kind of an interesting environment. And there’s all these painting spaces set up, everyone has their own light, there are central painting tables, and it’s an exciting environment to walk into. And we sit down, and I do a little introduction in the beginning, and I say some of these things that I mentioned to you earlier. I create a safe environment. There’s going to be no comparison, no critiquing of what you do, there’s no measuring in any way, we’re not going to have a show and tell, you’re not going to make comments in anybody else’s work, and there’s no comparison or competitiveness at all. So that sinks in, starts to sink in a little bit. But then we get started, and there’s no direction given. And so, you have to begin painting without knowing what you’re doing. And this is one of the most powerful, you might say, kind of foundational pieces of the work, is not knowing, being willing to not know. And to act and you’re not knowing. That’s one thing to not know, it’s another thing to keep acting when you don’t know. So here, you don’t know, you’ve got this blank piece of paper in front of you, you have to take a brush and get a color and go over it, and something has to happen. And it happens. And I encourage people not to wait for something to happen, actually dare to act. And so immediately it brings up, am I authentic? Is this something I’m just doing because I don’t know what to do? Is it really work level? Is it coming from, is it my thinking or is it my intuition? All these questions arise. And a person is swimming in this kind of confusion, you might say, or not knowing. And I find that incredibly valuable in the beginning, to kind of create that sense of being lost. And everybody’s equal in that, whether you’re an artist, a therapist, a meditator, it doesn’t matter. You’re having to develop a relationship with your own loss, your own being willing to be lost. And then slowly as the workshop unfolds, you realize that there are certain things that get in the way. So, for example, if you try to make a pretty painting, and you realize, I want to impress people around here. I really want to; I have a lot of skill and I’m going to impress people. You’ll notice that very quickly the feedback from the process speaks to you, and you find yourself getting really bound up and really stuck and really tired often, and de-energized and maybe kind of paralyzed, kind of frozen. Or another example of that is if you find yourself creating too narrow a narrative around your painting. And you start telling a story around, “oh, I see, I’m working with the Shakti energy, and therefore, because it’s the Shakti energy, I’m going to put this over here, because that will open up the energy here. And here are my different energy centers.” And you start knowing too much about what you’re doing. And as soon as you do that, you start to shut down the energy again. And so, there’s a kind of feedback that comes from this activity of painting where your own presence is your guide. In other words, when you start to come from ego, and you start to come from divided mind, in other words, me here trying to achieve that, you get really tired. You get bummed out and you get cut off. You find yourself getting isolated. And then your imagination stops talking to you. The very impetus to paint disappears. And so, these are the moments that the facilitator, myself or some people I work with, will engage a person and through questions, certainly not telling anybody what to do, but through Questions, bring them back to the source, letting go of their attempts to grasp and control and to manipulate the experience. And so, there’s this built-in feedback mechanism from the work. And once a person starts tapping into that, there’s something else that takes over. And I recognized this very early on. And it’s taken me many years actually, to kind of see it more clearly and to be able to place it in the right context. But I think I saw very early on that there was something sacred happening here, that by sort of giving over to this creative force, that a person was coming home to themselves, that they were coming back, you might say, to natural mind. There was no division. There was no painter doing a painting. There was just a painting being created. And I see that now in this broader context, of course, of non-duality and of presence, and really the implications of the learning potential in this work. When the personality shows up, for example, and the inner critic is part of that, and starts disliking a particular part of the painting, or wanting to create a product, as soon as that happens, it creates the duality. Like Krishnamurti used to say, “The action creates the actor.” The motivation, the motivated action, the action with the motivation creates the actor. The product creates the producer. The judgment creates the judge. There’s a mechanism that happens, they happen together. The person who, the little person, the little self who wants to control the painting and manipulate it and have it come out his or her way, shows up as part of that duality that happens when there’s a projection about where to go or where not to go.

Rick: So essentially you’re saying you want people to learn to get out of their own way.

Stewart: Well, and what does it mean to do that experientially? Because we know that.

Rick: Right.

Stewart: We can say, “Okay, it’s great to get out of your own way.” But I think a tool for doing that, is you have to taste strongly what it’s like to get to be in your own way and then stand in it. So, for example, I don’t know if you listened to that tape I made.

Rick: I did.

Stewart: Yeah, so for example, somebody gets really into judging their painting big time, right? Well, I’ll often say to people, “Look, this judgment that you’re experiencing, does it just happen in front of your painting, or is it something you know in your life too?” It’s kind of a loaded question. But of course, people know it in their life. It’s not just an isolated incidence in the painting. So, someone really, really is not liking their painting. There may be a particular part of their painting. In my experience, there is the key. And our tendency is to want to fix it. Our tendency is to want to get rid of it. And of course, there’s the analogy in our life how we do this in so many ways. But in the painting, the person would like to take a brush and X it out, or cover it up and redo it, or really fix it so it looks better. And I’ll say, “No. No. Do you dare to make it worse?” And it’s quite amazing, Rick, if this was done skillfully in the right moment, usually the right moment being when a person has kind of reached the end of the rope and they realize they can’t make it better. You say, “Could you go with it?” Instead of going against it, look what you’re doing. You’re going against your feeling. Your feeling is rather aggressive at this moment. Your feeling is you don’t like it. Your feeling is just kind of ugly. What would it mean to go with it rather than against it?

Rick: I hear you saying something here that people can be so habituated to certain ways of functioning, judgmentalism and straining and manipulating and this and that, that they are unaware that they even do it. And somehow the introspective, more silent nature of this process you put people through, brings those tendencies into sharp focus or contrast. And so, this stuff starts coming up that you’re so habituated to that you’re unaware of and then you can learn to relax into a more natural way of functioning which is non-judgmental and so on.

Stewart: Well, yes, that’s a good way of putting it. Those things that come up, Rick, are the building blocks of duality. That’s what creates duality. In other words, it’s one thing to have a concept of non-duality and how I might get there someday, but it’s another thing to see the actual way in which you’re creating duality. That’s the way through, right? That creates the potential. And so, to see, for example, that oh, here I am creating this duality, and by being willing to step towards it, it’s quite amazing. Sometimes chaos is another one. We have a prejudice against so-called chaos, like the painting, it doesn’t fit together, there’s this over here and there’s this over here and there’s too much in it, and nothing makes any sense and it’s just a jumble. It’s just fragmented. And when somebody tells me that, I read that now after many years of doing this, I read that as a call from the unconscious of that person for more chaos. And when I ask them, if the moment is right and I say, “Could you make it more chaotic?” There is something lights up. It’s amazing. It’s like, “Oh, yeah, no problem. I can make that chaotic. That would be easy to do.” Well, I say, “Try it.” And then the brush knows how to make it chaotic at that point. The body is already going there. It would love to make it more chaotic. And so, there’s something about daring to follow the energy rather than the preference. The energy was calling. It was like reveling in it, but the judgment was so strong we were trying to get away from it. So, what happens is when you go towards it and you start making it more chaotic, things change. First of all, that split internally is healed. There’s only one thing happening now, which is this movement that we called chaos. And then the next thing that happens is the word disappears. Wow, it doesn’t even feel chaotic anymore. It feels, wow, there’s a wholeness I feel here in myself doing this. Maybe the painting kind of looks the same, but I’m feeling whole now that I’ve engaged the chaos. And then something happens often, and you find out, my God, this painting, this is profound. I feel really in love with this painting. I feel so connected to this painting that I was rejecting as chaos. It’s expressing something. I can’t put words in, but I feel like it’s opened a door to a bigger dimension. And then usually that little person who was so frightened and so manipulative, and so caught up in the narrative is gone. And there’s a whole new dimension. The next painting starts in a very different way. So that’s an example for me, of inhabiting your experience as limiting as it might seem. The very willingness to stand in your own limitation allows that magic to happen.

Rick: Nice. So, a little while back I asked you whether being in the Nisargadatta’s presence, with his certitude that you talked about, his absolute confidence in knowing who he was, had rubbed off, whether there was an influence on you, or what it was about being with him for those six weeks or so that you find memorable. And you said, “Well, to explain that, let me tell you how I do the whole art thing.” So just tie that together for us, how what you’ve explained about your art process reflects back on your experience with the Nisargadatta.

Stewart: Well, you see why I can’t answer that question, Rick? You see why I can’t answer that question on that level? Because given what I just mentioned about the magic that can happen, in other words, my sense of the potential for transformation comes about through a person having the courage to fully inhabit their own individual experience, no matter how eccentric it may seem, no matter how much they might judge it, no matter how much it doesn’t compare to the spiritual teachings even. And I would say that when that environment is created, people come alive. When there’s absolutely no authority, there’s no projected attainment, there’s not some carrot held out in front of people about a place to get to. That it’s not about getting better in any sense, but it’s about being who you are. It’s about authenticity. I don’t know if you know M.C. Richards. She wrote a book in the ’60s called Centering. Remember that? She was a potter at the time, and she later became a painter and a teacher. She has this quote that “Authenticity is spiritual presence,” which I love, because I feel like authenticity is about being yourself, where you are. If you have any kind of measuring stick about what level of attainment you might be on, or somebody else is on, if the teacher holds himself up to have a certain level of attainment, what that creates in the student, in the participant in the event, is really destructive for me. It just shuts a door, because that person can’t fully be him or herself if there’s any sense of some place to get to. Whether it’s in the painting, or whether it’s an internal state, it’s the same. I just find I can’t go there. I don’t want to create that for people. It would really be a disservice in my own work.

Rick: I hear what you’re saying, and I understand how it works in your process of working with students and using art as a spiritual practice, but I’m just not convinced that it has total universal application. I’m willing to discuss the point, of course, but I do see levels of attainment in many fields, including spirituality. Obviously in music there are levels of attainment. We have great artists that we look up to as having excelled as musicians. Even in education there are levels of attainment. You go to college to sit with people who really understand physics or engineering or something, in order to learn those things. When you first go in, you don’t really know much, and then you gradually get to the point where you yourself could be a professor someday, maybe. And spirituality, there’s a tendency to … the phrase that comes to mind is “dumb it down,” where people gain an intuitive familiarity with what people like Nisargadatta or Raman Maharshi were saying, and they think, “I’ve got it, that’s it. I’m now at the same level of attainment they were.” And personally, I think they’re really selling themselves short, and deluding themselves if they jump to that conclusion, because there could be years, lifetimes of deepening and unfolding before they actually achieve that same level of attainment. You know what I mean? And feel free to completely disagree with me if you do.

Stewart: look, I just want to say I really appreciate your openness here, because I don’t want to make this as kind of a global statement, because look, you have pursued this interest of interviewing people who have had spiritual experiences, and it’s really important. I think it’s quite interesting. And so, I’m not trying to throw everything out, but I guess I feel spirituality is different than other things. There are levels of attainment, for sure. People are better at certain things than other things. But when you come down to the nature of self, there is no difference there, ultimately. There’s no difference. And so, to give people the idea that there’s something to attain on that level, or to reach, I think the people that you mentioned who are taking things in a superficial way, who have identified with, “Okay, now I’ve got it,” obviously they don’t. In fact, Krishnamurti used to say, “Anybody who says he’s enlightened obviously isn’t.” And so, I think those people who have done that, have gotten caught in creating the image of what it is to have attained, and then they’re identifying with the image. And that’s exactly what I’m saying, that creating the image of attainment sets up the duality.

Rick: The tricky thing with spirituality is that what we are “attaining” is something that we already have, and that we already are. So, it’s a little different in a way than studying physics, because you don’t necessarily already have an understanding of quantum mechanics -that’s something that you could attain after years of study. Whereas with spirituality, we’re talking about – I’m still using the word “attaining” but with quotes around it – we’re talking about attaining an experience of the Self. And how can you ever not be that or have been that? But where the practicality comes in, is that just understanding that that’s what I am, and actually, living that 24/7 with the kind of clarity and certitude that Nisargadatta had, for instance, using him as an example, can be two very different things.

Stewart: Yeah, so if it’s true, Rick, and I believe it is true, that there’s nothing to attain, that in other words it’s already present, right? We just don’t recognize that.

Rick: Well, how do you go about recognizing it then?

Stewart: How do you go about realizing it? For me, setting up a goal pulls the person away from their own experience. And I know that in spiritual traditions there is this practice, there is this idea that okay, if you set up the goal, you have to exhaust yourself going after the goal before you can be broken open. In other words, you have to realize the impossibility of achieving on your own energy. It’s not something you can do. You can’t make it happen. And I think there’s validity to that. I think there’s something about setting up that duality and increasing it, in other words, turning up the fire underneath that duality to such a degree that something has to give, something has to break open. And I think that’s a valid path. I have chosen to do it differently, which is not to set up the duality in the first place. So, it’s more gentle, I would say. And it probably appeals to a different kind of demographic as well. There’s something about the non-achievement aspect of it that I think for certain personalities really appeals and really works. And there’s a way of gently entering your own experience and learning to integrate it, learning to accept it more and more without judgment, without coercion. That we have such an attitude of coercion around what it means to be spiritual and what it should look like, and then all of the ways in which we are letting ourselves down and disappointing ourselves for not being spiritual enough. That kind of model is something I don’t support. I feel like the courage to enter your own experience without judgment and being in the environment where you’re encouraged to do that, and then having a powerful tool in which to engage it and to get a kind of feedback from a process which is much more intelligent than any teacher, actually.

Rick: Well, I totally agree with you. Despite everything I just said, which I’m not retracting, but in fact what you’re saying and the whole process of your working with art, as I understand it, is very reminiscent of the spiritual practice I’ve always done, which is when I first learned to meditate, one of the instructions was, “If you can think a thought, you can meditate.” Any kind of manipulation or judgment or effort, even to the slightest degree, was not to be part of the process, or else you would just be thrown a monkey wrench in the works. The more natural and effortless and spontaneous you went about it, the more effective it would be. And that’s quite different than some types of spiritual practice, which you might be alluding to, or even some types of approaching art perhaps, in which there’s this injection of individual effort at the outset, so that you’re trying to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps rather than surrendering to something deeper and just letting that guide the process.

Stewart: Yeah, yeah, that makes sense to me. So just to say a little bit about where this leads, when there is no goal to reach in a group, there is not getting better at, there is not becoming more proficient, there is not getting deeper, then there’s no comparison. And that, I would say, is one of the striking things that happens in the painting process, is that when you’re in a community in which there’s absolutely no comparison, and there’s no competitiveness, something then is allowed to happen. Something is born in that that is really quite extraordinary. And you get a feeling like everyone is rooting for everybody else. And so, when somebody has a breakthrough, which happened, in other words, usually there’s a kind of cycle to this work, there’s a kind of wave action where a person will go through a difficult time. One of the biggest things to learn in this work is how to work with difficulty. And so, what I said earlier about painting becoming ugly and not liking it and then finding a way to move towards it, or chaos, and finding a way to move towards it, and actually expressing that is a way of learning to work with difficulty. And part of the teaching, part of the learning that occurs, is to see that difficulty is actually a call from the other side. It’s not just there to bother you. It’s actually a portal. It’s something that’s come to challenge you to let go of something that you may not even know what it is. And you might even go through the process and let go without even knowing what it was. It can happen experientially and energetically without knowing what it is. But there’s this kind of wave action. And so, there’ll be a period of time in which it gets tighter and it gets a little harder. You feel like you’re moving through molasses. Things aren’t coming to you easily. Brush is not working so well. And I’ll often work with somebody at that point and say, “Okay, where do you feel it in your body? Let’s really ground it. Where do you feel it? Okay, I feel this tension in my chest. I feel like I’ kind of in a vice or something. Or I feel this pressure on my heart or I feel my intestines, whatever.” And I’ll say, “Okay, what color?” We’re not trying to portray it. We’re going to feel it. There’s a difference between portrayal and expression. And so, when you actually express it, you’re entering the feeling. So maybe you say, “Okay, I feel like, I don’t know, it’s kind of dark. Maybe it’s black and maybe it’s spiky or something.” And I’ll say, “Let’s see how the brush feels doing it.” And so, you step towards it, you enter the difficulty, and you find a way to move in the painting with the difficulty. And this is where art has its magic. You see, there’s something about giving form to feeling. There’s something about actually, it’s one thing to know it and to be working with it internally, to actually take it, and to have it show up on your paper in some form. And then you’ll feel like it’s not enough. That tension I started to paint it, but I feel it’s got to be more. And you work with it, and you keep working until there’s some thirst that’s quenched when you go to the end of a feeling. And then the door opens. That’s why I say it’s a portal. And so, there’s a way that this wave has completed itself. You’ve stood in it. You’ve not run away from it. You’ve been able to inhabit your own feeling and with patience and kind of integrity. And then the door opens, and you find yourself in this incredible space of freedom. Things are coming to you. You can’t do any wrong. Everything is beautiful. You’re loving everybody around you. Everyone’s doing great. And you find yourself in this much more loving, and kind of expansive environment internally. And then of course, that wave lasts for a while and then there’s an inward movement as well. And so, there’s this kind of breathing that occurs. And my experience of this is that every time you go through one of these contractions and stand in it and stand in your own experience and you’re not denying it, you’re not trying to make it better, you have to kind of … there’s an ego death there. There’s something has to be let go of. There’s an ego death. And in that moment, the duality that you create dissolves. And you taste, you get a taste of non-duality. And what’s really cool, Rick, is that I have people come. I don’t build the workshop as being a spiritual practice. So, I get people come who have never heard of non-duality. It’s the furthest thing from them. They have a whole completely different environment in which they live, but they experience it. And they touch it. And it doesn’t even need to be named. It wouldn’t really be helpful for me to try to put it in this context, in these words, because they wouldn’t really get it. It would be:  ”non-duality? What’s that?” But they feel it. And I think that’s what’s satisfying for me, is to realize that, hey, they’re there. And that’s having some effect on them. And a lot of people come back after doing this work, and they say, “Something happened for me, and I can’t put words on it. But I guess if I were to say what it was, it would be that I feel like I can trust myself. Like I can trust my own experience.” And that’s huge, when you think about it. That’s really willing to trust the movement, the creative force itself.

Rick: Yeah. That’s really cool. The parallels are so striking to me. And just like that whole thing you just described about how a person might get stuck, and there’s some constriction, and maybe some sensation in the solar plexus or something. And then they use painting as a way of working through that. It has a cathartic influence. And after a while it’s released, and then they feel this openness and this love and this appreciation. I’ve gone through that cycle so many times in spiritual practice, and others have too. In fact, when I started reading your articles and things like that, I began making a list of comparisons between this spiritual practice as you facilitate it with painting, and my own practice and others’ practices. And maybe we can run through some of the items on that list, in no particular order. Well, there was a thing you just mentioned which was fascinating. You said it was like breathing. And there’s definitely a cycle in my experience where contraction and expansion, contraction and expansion. And each contraction is an awareness of something that needs to be purged or worked through. And then in the process of doing that, expansion ensues. And then in the context of that expansion, it begins to stir up, or bring the attention to the next constriction, which needs to be worked through. And then that gets worked through. So, there’s this cycle that goes on and on and on. And in the process, one gradually gets stabilized in a more permanently expansive, free, non-constricted state or condition.

Stewart: Well, yeah. And let’s just bring into question, the whole idea of there being a permanent state.

Rick: Okay.

Stewart: I know that’s a big one. But look, you see, here’s an example. It’s not unusual for someone to go through this wave that you just talked about, right? There’s this contraction followed by an opening. And very often, the contraction has to do with something personal, too. It is personal, very often. In other words, it’s not unusual for a person’s parents to show up in the painting process. They’re painting along freely. They don’t want to have anything to do with their past or their parents. “But my mother’s back.” So, there may be a need then to paint her for some reason. We don’t quite know why. But there’s energy there. You’ve got to follow the energy. The energy is really the key in the work. And you’ll notice the brush goes easily with it. That’s a kind of indication that it’s energy. So, the mother shows up. And then you don’t know what’s going to show up around her or where she is. But then certain things happen. And you find yourself painting your mother’s heart. And then you find, “oh my gosh, there’s somebody behind her.” And then there’s something on the floor. And there’s an intelligence behind the creative flow. It brings things to you for a reason. And so being willing to give over to that and paint them, even though you think they don’t belong, or they wouldn’t look good or they’re going to be silly or they’re going to be childish, there’s so many judgments. So, giving birth to that, when you go to the end of it– and I would say that this is one of the foundational parts of the work, too, is completion. Because we often want to abandon things before they’re complete. In other words, you get to a certain place that’s uncomfortable, “gGve me another piece of paper. Let me start a next painting. I’m done with that.” And so, a large part of my work is saying, wait, hold on. Let’s get to a place– if you’re trying to get away from your painting, you’re not finished. If there’s any part of you that’s pulling to be done and wants out, obviously something’s not finished. Let’s stand in there. Are you willing to stand in there and say, OK? And it can have many layers. The painting can go through iterations and lifetimes that you wouldn’t expect after you think you’re finished. But then at a certain point, there’s a real completion. And this is where that opening occurs that you mentioned, where that expansion occurs. And it’s often characterized by what I call neither pushing or pulling, neither trying to get away from nor being attached to. I suppose there’s Buddhist terms for that, right? Attachment and revulsion. But it’s an inward state, really. And that’s how you read when a painting is finished, is when you are in that place inwardly. You’re not trying to get rid of it, and you’re not too attached to it to do something. And so, something happens. And what I want to point out here is that it’s not unusual when having painted something very personal like this, like your mother, or something from your life that has been troublesome and challenging to you. And you paint it, and all of a sudden, the painting goes to a completely different level, and you realize it’s not personal. There’s a much bigger space that opens up, and you see it more as archetypal. You see it as collective. You realize that this personal experience that you’re having is in a much broader field, and that you see it liberates you in a way to see it beyond your own personal experience. There’s a compassion there that grows. And my experience of this process is that this deepens. In other words, it moves beyond the personal. It becomes something that’s much more collective. It becomes something that’s much more universal. That’s why I question about this idea of permanent, because I think that certainly there’s changes in your relationship to the process where you can be living it fully and totally, and with great vitality, but there are always new depths to penetrate.

Rick: I completely agree. So, by permanent I don’t mean some kind of terminus where you have arrived and that’s it. I don’t think there is such a thing, as far as I can tell. There’s going to be never-ending deepening and clarification and refinement and subtlety and whatnot. But by permanent, I mean more, I suppose I could use Ken Wilber’s example of states and stages to clarify it, where he talks about states as nice experiences we might have in meditation or while doing art or while looking at a sunset, or something or other evokes some kind of nice state of mind or state of awareness or satori or something, and then stages as a more integrated, stabilized development, if you will, which doesn’t seem to fluctuate so much. Maybe you move from stage to stage and there’s a deeper and deeper establishment in the state in something, and then within any stage there can still be states where you’re experiencing this and that, and they come and go, but there’s a kind of a foundation that just keeps getting built more and more and more solidly.

STEWART: I do agree with that. I think that’s true. And I’m also very sensitive to how the ego can grasp that and define one according to this stage that’s now been developed supposedly. And then of course there has to be a kind of reckoning that occurs where that gets torn down, right? And so, I think there’s something really wonderful about, and I’m going to come back to this, because it’s my way of working, there’s something really wonderful about not having stages, not having levels of attainment. Levels of attainment create a certain kind of abuse, whether it’s personal abuse, or abuse from the authority.

Rick: I would say that you’re going to have them whether or not you like the concept of them, but it’s a question of how you approach it. You can definitely acquire a spiritual ego, you can definitely make a big fuss about yourself, and think, “Oh, I am so great and holy.” I’ve run into people like that, I’ve probably gone through that myself at times. But we can’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. Just the way life seems to be structured, there are degrees of refinement of realization, or of consciousness or whatever terms you want to use, and just because we acknowledge that mechanics doesn’t mean … On the one hand, there are people who get hung up with that and make a big fuss about themselves, and insist upon having rose petals thrown at their feet as they walk into the room, and then there are other people who just take it very matter-of-factly and don’t take it personally. It’s not about them.

Stewart: Yeah, you know an example of that? I heard an interview recently with Wendell Berry. What a beautiful man. Have you ever heard him?

Rick: I’ve heard his name, but I’ve probably read a quote here and there, but I don’t know much about him.

Stewart: He’s not a spiritual teacher.

Rick: He’s like a poet or a writer or something.

Stewart: He’s a writer, he’s a man deeply connected to the earth in a very spiritual way, and to place and to environment.

Rick: Is he still alive?

Stewart: Yeah, yeah. I think unless he died recently.

Rick: I think he might have an essay in the book by Llewellyn von Lee that I just read.

Stewart: Yeah, he was interviewed by Bill Moyers at one point.

Rick: Oh, I must have listened to all those. I must have heard him.

Stewart: Check it out. Anyway, beautiful, beautiful man. The humility there is absolutely incredible. The sense of heart that comes through him, the deep connectedness to the earth. In terms of, I guess the feeling I have is that he’s not concerned with levels of attainment. He’s living it. It is him.

Rick: Exactly.

Stewart: There’s no duality there at all. There’s no parsing of that sort of thinking. I find a beauty in that. I guess the way that I look at spiritual experience is that- I think you probably know the analogy of the elephant in the dark room.

Rick: Tell me about it.

Stewart: I can’t remember what the source of this is.

Rick: Oh, this is the blind man feeling the elephant?

Stewart: Yes. Maybe it’s like that. The blind man feeling the elephant. Maybe there’s this elephant and it’s in a completely black room and there’s people coming in from different sides and somebody touches the tusk and say, “Oh, it’s very sharp. It’s very hard and very sharp.” Somebody touches the tail and says, “Oh, no, it’s stringy.” Like a snake and somebody touches the toe and says, “Oh, it’s so soft and so smooth.” I just feel like it’s that big. It’s so different for anyone. Everyone’s approach to it is going to have a different taste and it’s going to have a different experience. I just feel like I’m really careful not to give any kind of projection on my part of what it looks like, or to talk about my experience of it in that vein because inevitably, at least I know it in my own milieu. I know it in my own sphere of work that as soon as I do that, if I were to do that, it creates a distortion in the field.

Rick: I hear you. I would say that there’s a delicate balance here. I would say that someone like Wendell Berry, to use the terminology I’m using here, there’s a stage of development in that man, a degree of refinement of heart, a refinement of perception, a refinement of intellect, which he doesn’t go to being a punk rocker for half the day, and then switch back to that later on. There’s a stability to his development, if you will. That’s kind of what I mean by, when I say stages or levels or something. Whatever his state or stage is, it’s been cultured over a lifetime and it’s resulted in a very refined, intelligent, perceptive, sensitive man.

Stewart: Yes, and so when we view him, when I view him and see him, I am really deeply inspired because I see an individual who has become himself. He’s deeply authentic. He stands in his own experience, and he’s not afraid to say what that is, especially when it goes against the mainstream. He’s willing to do that. That for me is different than someone who announces that they have something. I think …

Rick: There’s that Zen saying, “Those who know don’t say, and those who say don’t know.” I think that’s what it means.

Stewart: Exactly. That’s the context for me. That’s why I’m hesitant and find it not in service of the people that I work with, to talk about my own experiences in a way that would then create that image in people’s minds because I just feel like it really is not helpful.

Rick: Yeah. I think we’re in agreement here. It’s just a slightly different angle we’re taking on or a different emphasis. I’m saying, sure, there are degrees of attainment and levels of spiritual maturity or something, but if you’re tooting your horn about them then you probably haven’t attained them.

Stewart: If you’re announcing them.

Rick: Yeah, if you’re not making a big fuss about them. I knew a guy one time that used to go on courses in the TM movement, and every time Maharishi talked about some new experience or state of consciousness or something, he would get up on the mic and proclaim himself as having achieved it. He loved having people cluster around him and listen with rapt attention to his every word. So, I think that’s an egregious example of the kind of thing you’re talking about, where there’s no humility and a person is just using it to aggrandize their ego. But in the same breath, I would still say that that doesn’t refute the notion, that there actually are genuine stages of spiritual maturity or development, but again, being a blabber mouth about them is probably an indication that you haven’t attained them.

Stewart: Yeah, or even having that concept of yourself.

Rick: Yeah, yeah. In fact, Adyashanti, whom I respect a great deal, one of the things he said one time is, “I always have the attitude that I’m just a beginner. I just feel like I’m just getting started on this path”, despite the fact that I consider him to be quite spiritually mature. I think that might be what they mean by beginner’s mind in the Zen tradition. So there’s some cool comparisons that I picked up on reading some of your stuff. For instance, you were alluding to the cool comparisons between your process of using art as a spiritual practice and other spiritual practices. One is giving up, which you were just talking about, and a lot of people drop off from spiritual practice. They do it for a while and then they lose interest or just hit up against a wall which stops them cold and they don’t take the time or whatever to break through that wall. You were talking about that. I suppose that can happen in the process of creating a single painting and it can also happen in the longer term, in terms of not engaging in this process anymore after a while.

Stewart: In my mind, the distinction between giving up and giving over is very big because, of course, in this process you’re going to be tempted to give up. You’re going to be tempted to bolt. I worked with a woman, actually. I just finished a workshop up in Portland and there was a woman who came, a very serious person, a very deep person. She was a writer. She was absolutely petrified. She had never done art. She just felt like it was not her place to be there and that there was tremendous fear. It’s not unusual for this work to elicit that because it’s very visual. You’re kind of out there in front of everybody. You’re not just sitting in a room and kind of going through your own things. It shows up on the paper and everyone sees it, even though we don’t make comments on it. So, she reached this abject panic and fear. It was through the support of myself and my facilitators that she felt safe enough to stay there, but more than stay there, but to stand in it, to be curious about that. So that it wasn’t some obstacle to get over, but it was like, “Wow, look at the extent of this fear. This is pretty incredible. Wow, look how much I want to run and get out of here.” Then how do you move with it then? So, there was a conversation and an encouragement for her to actually take that experience of her fear, which is very visceral, by the way. It’s very somatic. It’s not just in the head, right? It’s in the body. To take that experience and maybe with a large brush, I don’t know what size brush she took, she moved with it. She found a way to take it from here, and to have it move out onto the paper. There’s an example of standing in it and being willing to express it, which is giving over rather than giving up. In many, many different times, a person is tempted to give up because the judgment is so strong or the fear is so acute or the sense of comparison. Very often you just feel like, “Oh my God, all these other people are just doing so well, and look at my piece of crap on the wall.” You just want to give up. I think that’s a very fruitful time. Like the reason you’re finding an analogy to that in spiritual teaching, that’s a very fruitful time. That’s when the ego is the most threatened.

Rick: It can mean that something good is happening, that you’ve really come up against something that is ready to be rooted out.

Stewart: Yeah, yeah, right. It’s a time of potential, it’s a time of great potential.

Rick: Here’s another one. You sort of discussed this, but comparing oneself to others, we’ve touched upon this another time, but that happens a lot of times in spiritual groups. “Oh, so-and-so is so much higher than I am,” or “I don’t have any good experiences and everybody else seems to have good experiences,” and that kind of thing. You really get caught up in that.

Stewart: Yeah. That’s one reason we create the environment that we do, because that’s going to go on. The mind does that. If it’s not supported in the environment, in other words, if we’re not giving awards for paintings, if we’re not doing critiquing, because in so many art schools, for example, we get many people who come in wounded from their experiences in art school, because they have been subjected to heavy critiquing, often by big egos, and in an environment that’s created where you just feel devastated, you’re constantly criticized. There’s a wounding that occurs there. To create an environment in which that’s not happening, in any level, and this is why I come back again and again to say there can be no measuring stick. It’s not about breaking through, even, because breaking through in my mind … In fact, I told that woman this, this past week that we had this workshop. I said, “Your position right now, in feeling as stuck as you do and as afraid as you are, for me is equal to someone who is breaking through and is feeling joy. Both experiences have to be equal. If not, you’re going to feel guilty about where you are. You’re not going to be full. You’re going to go to the old story, which is I’m not good enough. I’m not in the right place. I have to get better.”

Rick: Would you say that there’s a place for critiquing in art school, or do you feel like it’s just a very age of ignorance approach to art, and that perhaps if art were universally taught the way you go about it; it would be better for everyone?

Stewart: You’re talking to the wrong person. I do feel like we live in an age of ignorance, and especially around some of these things that I’m talking to you about, that we do not know how to be kind to each other. We do not know how to emphasize the most important things, what’s really important. We get totally caught on things that are just cosmetic. Is there a place for critiquing? I suppose if you’re trying to learn a particular skill, to have someone compassionately show you how to learn certain things about how to execute certain things, that has its place. That’s a kind of critiquing.

Rick: Maybe if you’re in a class studying anatomy, and you’re painting nudes, or you’re doing still lives, or something like that, there must be some kind of tricks of the trade that you need to learn, and you’re going to get critiqued if you haven’t learned them, or some such thing.

Stewart: But Rick, what’s the emotional environment there? That’s the question.

Rick: Right, whether they’re ripping you down, or whether it’s loving and supportive.

Stewart: Exactly, that’s the important thing. So, I’m saying there is a place for that, but for me, I’m looking at the emotional environment, and that’s why having an environment in which there’s absolutely no comparison, and there’s no better and no worse, it’s amazing. It’s actually kind of mind-blowing, what the energy that then starts to emerge in that kind of environment, where you do feel like you’re rooting for everyone else. And I will say, what happens there is, because it’s not being supported by others around you or by the facilitators, you get to see how you do it yourself, in a very pure way.

Rick: Even though you don’t critique or evaluate or judge, are you kind of amazed sometimes by the quality of some of the stuff that people produce, especially neophytes?

Stewart: You see, I don’t know what quality means.

Rick: Yeah, I know what you mean, but you sometimes look at some of the things and think, “This is awesome!”

Stewart: I think what’s awesome is authenticity. And everyone, even if they’re trying to manipulate their painting because they’re afraid and they’re trying to paint a nice painting; they’re being authentic in that at that moment. I don’t have that bone in my body where I feel like one painting is better than another. I really don’t.

Rick: That’s great, you’re really sticking to your guns. There’s another tendency in spiritual communities, I wonder if there’s any parallel in what you’re doing, which is, “My way is the best way. We’ve got the best teacher, we’ve got the best practice, everybody else is kind of a little bit confused,” some such thing. Is there any parallel with that there?

Stewart: That parallel exists everywhere. And for me, that’s the sign of a teacher who hasn’t done his or her own work, and the need to be seen as special, the need to have your way be the way.

Rick: It’s an attempt at self-validation.

Stewart: Yeah, it’s an attempt to fill a hole that’s not been filled and it’s not been entered. I recently started an apprenticeship program, and it’s about a year old now. It’s an invitational group of people that I invited to work with me. It’s been really, really special because that energy is not there. I recognize that this is something I’ve developed over the last 30 years. I have my way of doing it, and it works. It works for me. It works for the groups that I teach. But I also know that somebody that I am teaching to facilitate this process, if they have the fundamentals, in other words, if they really get on a very deep level that it’s about process versus product, and the spiritual implications of the work, how deeply it actually goes, I’m really excited about turning them loose and letting them, their personality, take the work. I know that it’s going to be different than the way that I do it. I work hard on this because I know a lot of examples, and I could name them. It doesn’t make sense to do it, but I know a lot of examples where the work has become very diminished by the attitude that I am the only person who can do it and it has to be my way. It’s a shame, really, especially when it’s a valid work, especially when it really is a work that has the ability to help people.

Rick: You’re talking about spirituality in general now or art? People who have that attitude?

Stewart: I was talking about both.

Rick: Okay, good, yeah, I agree. How about the concept of the dark night of the soul, which I think St. John of the Cross coined it, and for him it went on for years, but people on the spiritual path can sometimes go into doldrums which can last long periods of time, and it’s kind of like a train going through a tunnel, progress is being made, but it doesn’t seem like it, and you can feel stuck for long periods of time. I guess you’ve sort of alluded to that in your thing, but it seemed more like a short-term thing where you’re just sort of working on a painting and you become artist block, and then somehow you work through it. But do you see people going into deeper spiritual crises in a way which take quite some time to work through?

Stewart: Yeah, yeah, it’s not just a short-term thing. I think, and for me this is one of the major misunderstandings of our culture, is the power, and the spiritual nature of the dark side, so to speak, of going into the dark night of the soul. And there’s such a fear of that, and there’s such a tendency to want to heal that too quickly, to kind of patch it up, put a band-aid on it, and think that you’re through it. And so, the painting process actually lends itself to the exploration of that part of the psyche in a very powerful way, because you’re working with colors and images and forms. And those energies that you’re talking about, whether this dull, it’s not just the doldrums. When somebody tells me that they’re experiencing the doldrum, I want to look for what the physicality of that is. Where is that? How do you know? This is a word, doldrums. What’s the experience itself? Well, the experience might be of real lethargy, for example, or it might be of being weighted down, like you’re just being, you can’t emerge, you can’t come up, you’re just being pulled down. It might be deep contraction. It might be a sense; it might be deep sadness there.

Rick: So, you’re actually suggesting that people kind of tune into their physiology and sense the sensation that corresponds to the mental attitude that they’re talking about?

Stewart: Well, yes, because you see, the body, by tuning into the body, the somatic aspect of the experience takes you out of your head. You get away from the label of it, and you start inhabiting the experience of it. So that’s kind of the first step. And then, as I say, sometimes sadness arises, very deep sadness in this process. And the first tendency is, “Oh, I’m going to paint a happy painting. I’m going to make myself feel better. I’m going to paint a happy painting.” Well, of course, that’s just on the surface. There’s something more deep. There’s a deeper call here to go towards that, whatever that is that’s being announced by the sadness. And so, depending upon the relationship that I can develop with a person and their willingness, I’ll encourage them to go towards it. And so that’s the first step, might be to feel it in your own body. Where do you feel it? How do we move from there into the painting? And it might then, take a form on the painting. Will it be a mass of dark color, for example? Sometimes it’s just black. One of the most powerful experiences sometimes for people is to paint a painting, black painting after black painting, after black painting, after black painting. I remember a woman last year, she, at a workshop I taught in Holland, for three days, painted black paintings. And some of them were like six feet by ten feet. With all these pieces of paper put together, the whole wall, black, black, black, black, black, black. And there’s something, there’s a certain moment for a person, there’s a certain timing, when that is so nurturing, to just give yourself to the black, to be buried into black, to know that there’s no end to black, to go, to be completely immersed and covered in black. And then at a certain point, the wave is over, and there’s another color that emerges, and something happens. There’s another, there’s a coming out, so to speak. So, there’s that, that has a certain lifetime to it. But also, on a person’s spiritual practice, in your own evolution, there are times when you really need to enter the darkness. And it may happen for months and months and months, it might go on years. What I feel about the painting process is that you don’t just stay stuck in it. The power of expressive arts is that you can move with it, you can actually feel like you’re moving. Even though you’re still in the darkness, you feel like, “Oh my God, things are shifting now, things are moving.” Because you’re engaging it, you’re feeling it, you’re expressing it, you’re feeling it, you’re expressing it. It’s very alive, and it’s very different than just being sort of stuck in the doldrums.

Rick: Yeah, that’s great. There’s a kind of a related point, which is, that sometimes things are tidily bottled up in a person, and then when they do spiritual practice, the cork comes out, or the Pandora box lid opens, and all sorts of stuff starts to come out that had been kind of kept bottled up. And this can sometimes result in sort of extreme situations of actual mental breakdown and insanity, hospitalization. In other words, the spiritual practice destabilizes them. I’m wondering if you’ve ever encountered that in the painting process.

Stewart: This is a conversation that we had just recently with my training group, because I work with a lot of therapists, there’s a lot of people in the therapeutic community, psychotherapists who come and do the work for themselves. There’s some in my training. And the interesting thing, in all my 30 plus years of doing this, I’ve had maybe one or two instances where it got edgy in that way. One was a woman who had a panic attack. I was teaching a workshop at Esalen, and all of a sudden, we’re all sitting there, we’re all in this room painting very quietly, and she starts screaming at the top of her lungs. So, I went over and I was really clear that I did not want to give her the feeling that something was wrong. I didn’t want to contribute to that. She was obviously feeling it, when you’re having a panic attack, right? But she needed to know that I was okay with that. So, I went over, and I sat with her, and maybe held her in fashion, and let it just have its way. It was a wave. I knew everything has a beginning and an ending, depending how long it’s going to be, I don’t know. But it was a wave. And I knew that my presence there with her allowed the wave to complete itself. And then the room settled down a bit. And then we went outside, and we sat on a bench and talked.

Rick: You and the woman?

Stewart: And the woman, yeah. And it was essentially, she needed to know that that was no big deal to me. And I kind of might have said that. I said, “Okay, you can do that. What’s next?” And so, then we went back in, and she found a way back into the painting. Now I don’t want to say that’s the case all the time. There are times when somebody is on the edge in a way that’s not healthy. And there’s something about the painting process that’s very self-regulating, I should say. Because nobody is telling you what to do, so you’re not being forced to do anything. It’s all coming from you. There’s a regulation. There’s an intelligence in the psyche in terms of what it brings up and what it brings you to do. And when you feel in a safe environment and that you’re not being coerced and that you’re not being brought to an edge that’s uncomfortable for you, but you really are in charge of what you do, it’s very rare for someone to reach that point of feeling kind of out of control. And it does require a certain ego health, I might say. I know people who work with other populations, where there are more challenges mentally for these people, and that’s a different ballgame.

Rick: Yeah, like if you’re going into prisons or you’re going to a mental hospital to help with the inmates or patients there, imagine…

Stewart: It’s a very different thing. But I would say in these groups, these are self-selective groups. These are people who have an ego health to the degree that they’re really interested in exploring and going deeper in themselves. So that sort of selects…

Rick: There’s a thing with spiritual practice where even a relatively healthy person can do too much meditation, or too much pranayama or something and can destabilize themselves by overindulging. Can you do that with art? Can you do too much?

Stewart: Well, it’s a little hard because what happens is if you go beyond your limit, you get exhausted.

Rick: Yeah, and you just want to take a break.

Stewart: You want to take a break. You’re just exhausted. It’s really hard to keep pushing in that way. It’s unusual. I haven’t seen it happen.

Rick: My father was a professional artist. I haven’t told you that yet. He was sort of the stereotypical suffering artist. I read in something you were writing about how there is this sort of stereotype about suffering being conducive to creativity. And I get the sense you don’t buy that, right? Or do you?

Stewart: Well I did talk about this cycle, right? There is, I think we’re in agreement about that, that in our own internal development, there are these waves and that we are being called at times to encounter suffering, to encounter difficulty. I think what I was questioning in that article, was just kind of the culture built around That, and the kind of ego stance that that can give birth to where it really gives you permission to get away with a lot, right? And it’s not really mature. There’s a way in which you can kind of identify with the suffering artist. And then it gives you license to be manipulative, not really take things seriously, and hurt a lot of other people as well.

Rick: I’m an artist so this is the way I am, dude. And so, you wouldn’t say that a relatively happy, well-adjusted person who is not about to cut his ear off or commit suicide or something is in any way hampered by his happiness and well-adjustedness. He can be a fountain of creativity and productivity and so on.

Stewart: It’s really important never to take that away from anybody. So, people will come in and some people start this process, and they are just in ecstasy. It is like, “Oh my God, I can’t believe the freedom that I have. I feel so good. I’m in love with my painting. This is so great.” And even if I have a sense that they’re holding on to that a little too tightly, because we have a lot of fear around suffering that it might mean something about us. If we were to admit our own sadness, for example, or admit our own feelings about certain things that aren’t just happy, then it challenges our own self-image and we’re afraid of that, like what it might mean about us. So, I recognize that and sometimes you’ll see people who are holding on to their happiness a little too tightly. They’re wanting to keep it right there. They’re wanting to freeze-frame it. I don’t have to do anything because the intelligence of the process itself will bring a person to a screeching halt at a certain point, and they’re not going to maintain it. They can’t maintain it and keep their feet in the room. So, then there’s an availability. At that point there’s an availability and I just might ask them, “What are you really feeling?” And if they say, “Oh, you know, I’m sad. I’m feeling sad,” then we have a way to enter it. Then there’s an opening, you see.

Rick: So, it keeps coming back to naturalness and authenticity.

Stewart: Absolutely.

Rick: And if you become a bit unnatural or inauthentic, the process that you’re engaging people in is going to, sooner or later, help them get back on course.

Stewart: Exactly. And so, this is part of my learning, Rick, over the years of doing this because I used to exhaust myself trying to get people to move. I have a certain intuition about the potential of where they could go, and I would step in too early and I would try to make it happen. And then, of course, I’d be at loggerheads with that person, and they would feel like I’m trying to force them, and I would feel like they’re not moving. I had to learn how to get out of my own way. I had to learn how to not exhaust myself and how to wait for the moment when it was just ready to happen and then it just takes the slightest push, like with a feather. Somebody’s open and they’re ready then.

Rick: There’s a saying, I don’t know the Sanskrit, but it’s “Brahman is the charioteer.”

Stewart: Very nice.

Rick: And by Brahman, in case anyone doesn’t know, we just mean that sort of holistic intelligence that contains and permeates the universe and ultimately is the charioteer. That’s the thing that’s doing it all.

Stewart: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Rick: We just need to get out of the way. In fact, that’s what we are. That’s what our intelligence is, however, much it may get filtered or distorted through our little filter. When you get right down to it, that’s what we all are.

Stewart: Yeah.

Rick: Nice.

Stewart: Yeah.

Rick: Well, anything we haven’t covered?

Stewart: Let me talk about one more thing, if I could. There’s a quote that I like to use from Keats, the English Romantic poet. It’s become much more meaningful to me as the years have gone on. I think he said this maybe towards the end of his life, or towards the end of his career. He said, “I am certain of nothing except the holiness of the heart’s affections and the truth of the imagination.” I am certain of nothing except the holiness of the heart’s affections and the truth of the imagination. I’ve come to realize that this path, this using art as process, as a spiritual path, is formed on these two pillars. In other words, there’s the imagination and the heart. By heart, I often use the word energy, because heart doesn’t mean just love or romance. It’s connection. It’s attraction to or repulsion. It’s heart energy. It can be either that you’re going towards something or you’re trying to get away from something. There’s an energy there. I’ll often ask people; I’ll recognize that when I’m working with somebody. If they say, “I really don’t like this part of the painting. I really want to get rid of it,” I see that there’s a lot of energy right there. For Keats to say, “I am certain of nothing except the holiness of the heart’s affections, and the truth of the imagination,” he’s saying that holiness is spiritual. The connection that we feel to things is our spiritual connection. It’s holy. The truth of the imagination, in other words, that which comes to us in the intuitive realm, that which comes to us without thinking, the imagination is that which happens without thinking, is truth. In other words, that there’s an intelligence in the imagination. These are two things which I think are really not understood. They’re confused, especially in this culture. We discard imagination. We think we’re just making it up. We’re thinking it’s just fantasy. Again, there’s a man, Paul Berenson, he says, “Fantasy comes out of us. Imagination comes into us before it comes out of us.” Imagination is a receptive phenomenon. It’s not something we make up. We receive it. We have to be listening. We have to be empty enough to have it break through, to have it enter, whereas fantasy is just our own personal narrative and our own desires creating a fantasy. There’s a lot of misunderstanding about this, and this is a lot of the education that happens in the painting process, which is how do you tell the difference between thought and feeling? How do you tell the difference between an image that comes up that is just contrived or between one that’s authentic and that’s actually coming from imagination? And then where is the energy? In other words, you may receive something. Something comes up, “Oh, I could put a television set in my painting,” but when you connect with yourself, there’s no energy there. I’ll often ask the question, “Does the brush want to do it?” That’s a somatic question, you see. That’s an energy question. And it’s pretty clear, it’s an interesting way. You often know physically whether the brush wants to do something or not. And that’s a way of tuning in to what I’m calling energy here, or what I call heart connection. These are the two pillars of the work. These for me are fascinating because they’re not taught in this culture. We’re taught thinking, we’re taught comparing, we’re taught preference, and we’re taught what would look good and what’s expected of us. We’re not taught to tune in to that kind of wild place in the psyche that gives birth to imagination, which is the same as a source of dreams. And we’re not taught to listen to our own energy around something. In other words, what is the physical reverberation of that when you consider doing it?

Rick: In fact, we’re taught quite the opposite. We’re bombarded with external stimuli which compete for our outward directed attention. You see people walking down the street looking at their cell phones, there’s just this constant bombardment so it’s not really conducive to an inward turning which is going to lead you to that place of the holiness of the heart’s affection.

Stewart: Yeah, that’s right. Yeah.

Rick: Yeah. When I hear you say that, holiness of the heart’s affection, quoting Keith Keats, to me that means … Nisargadatta and Ramana Maharshi and others talked about having the mind settle into the heart, residing in the heart and so on, and that was kind of the essence of self-inquiry as I understand it, as Ramana Maharshi talked about it. And so, to me the word holiness is totally apt because it’s a holy place, that sort of deep spiritual abidance in a state of inner wisdom or consciousness or what have you. And then kind of culturing the ability to function from there, to paint or to live or to do anything from, there’s a saying in the Gita, “Established in yoga, perform action.” Having established yourself there, then perform action. So, I think that’s what you’re talking about.

Stewart: That’s interesting. I’ve heard that, and I never put it together with this, but that’s interesting, very interesting, because I think we get confused of what it means to abide in heart. In other words, you can think, “Well, what does that mean? I should be feeling love, I should be feeling compassion, I should be feeling something I’m not. What does it mean to be abiding in heart?”

Rick: I think the way Ramana uses the term, it goes beyond feeling. It has to do with becoming a jnani, just residing in the state of pure intelligence, which is fundamental to all thoughts and feelings.

Stewart: Well, what does that mean in our own experience? You see, for me, when I talk about that, what I call energy, it gets very clear. We always have a resonance or lack of resonance with something. In other words, if you had a painting in front of you, you would paint it, there would be certain areas in that painting, every area would have a different feeling for you. If you start perceiving through that lens of that, which we call heart, or I’m going to call it feeling, if you perceive through that lens and let that guide you, let that be your guide. For example, if there is an area that really disturbs you, you recognize that as a kind of energy call. It’s a call to a deeper place. There’s something unfinished there. You actually gravitate towards the disturbance, recognizing that it’s an incompleteness, something wants to happen there. When you start looking through this lens of energy, it changes the way you relate to the world, actually. I’ve had many people come up to me after the workshop and say, “You know, this is one of the most useful things that came out of the work, is that I ask myself now, over and over again, when I have to make a decision, I ask myself, ‘Where’s the energy? Where’s the energy?'” It’s kind of a radical question, because so much of our consciousness wants to go to what would look good, what do others expect of me, what am I supposed to do, what would be the right answer, rather than, “Wow, where’s the energy?” Anyway, I just feel like that’s a question.

Rick: That’s good. Another way of phrasing it might be to become self-referral, rather than object-referral. In other words, you’re not looking to others for approval or what they think, or what’s cool or what the world thinks, or whatever. There’s just this inner compass that gets cultured. March to the beat of your own drummer, so to speak. Nice. Well, anything else you want to throw in there?

Stewart: No, I’m getting talked out here, Rick.

Rick: Okay. Well, that was great. I’ve learned a lot, and I haven’t really done an interview like this, talking to someone with your passion or your orientation, using art as a spiritual practice, but I think the parallels to other spiritual practices are so striking that it’s totally a spiritual practice. It’s not just like one, it is one. And obviously it’s having a profound influence on those who engage in it with you, which I suppose you’re still doing workshops, right? Anybody can do this sort of thing if they want to?

Stewart: That’s right. We have workshops all over the country, and a number of people now that I’ve trained to do it, so you can definitely engage in it.

Rick: Yeah. So, I’ll be linking to your website and people can find out where those workshops are. You’ve written a book, “Life, Paint, and Passion, Reclaiming the Magic of Spontaneous Expressions,” so I’ll link to that also. And you mentioned you use Skype a lot. Do you do some kind of sessions with people over Skype?

Stewart: I do. I do quite a bit of online work with people over Skype, so that’s another avenue. People are engaging in the process at home. They take photos of their paintings every 15 or 20 minutes and they put them up in a web album or send me by email. And then we schedule a talk and I look at their work and they tell me where they got stuck and it’s very cool. It’s almost like being in a room together.

Rick: Yeah, that’s really neat.

Stewart: Yeah, it really works.

Rick: And you can do it with people all over the world.

Stewart: That’s right.

Rick: Yeah, great. Well, thanks, Stuart. Let me make a few concluding remarks. Those of you who have been listening or watching, this is part of an ongoing series. Stuart’s interview here is number 205 or something like that in the series. They’re all archived at bathgap.com, B-A-T-G-A-P. On the right-hand column there’s an alphabetical list of all the interviews and there’s a pull down menu where you can find a chronological list. This started out as an attempt to be a little radio show in my hometown, and it grew. There also you’ll find a discussion group that springs up around each interview. There’ll be a link to Stuart’s discussion area on his page. There is a donate button, which I appreciate people clicking if they’re willing and able. It keeps the whole thing flowing. There’s a place to sign up to be notified by email each time a new interview is posted. There is an audio podcast and a link to it on every interview page in case you’d like to subscribe in iTunes and listen to the audios. And a bunch of other things if you poke around in the menus, you’ll find them. So, thanks again Stuart and thanks to those who’ve been listening or watching and we’ll see you next week. Next one should be Joseph Goldstein who is a well-known Buddhist teacher. See you then.

Stewart: Okay, thank you very much Rick. That was great.

Rick: Yeah, you’re welcome.