Turning to the West

 For this sacred work,
a map for returning will
be provided…

Dear One,

There are certain conversations that only make sense once you are immersed. This is one of those. If I was with you having a cup of tea I would want to look at each of your paintings with you. To ask you what you learned about yourself, your context, your world. To invite you to share with me what has changed since you began your journey with me and Intentional Creativity. And I would also want to know if your relationship with your Beloveds and your core content has changed from when you began. Is the image of your future teaching visioning showing you something different, now that you have moved more fully into your own archetype?

If you were to ask me about my experience with Color of Woman I would share a few paintings of course, because painting is my joy. But I would also tell you about my Beloveds and how that has changed for me.

The first training for Color of Woman in 2010 was all in person, and nothing but the 13 steps and the context of Legend was written down. It is hard to imagine what has happened since then. Best thing? We have reached women around the world. Challenging thing? I don’t get to meet each person and as the years go by, my personal engagement becomes less and less and this is often hard for me.  This is not because I do not desire the connection, or have gotten too busy or big for my britches, but because there is one of me and, with graduates, over 400 of you. From a math perspective, I am just not able to connect one on one in the way I would like. I trust that the connection via video, zoom and in person for those of you who want to make that connection, is enough. And I do believe it is enough. I am truly honored to have you on this Quest with me, and with all the women who make up the Intentional Creativity Guild that make this training possible. Without Mary, Sarah, Jena, Leslie, Annette and the other support, I likely would not have continued. They make it possible.

Who my Beloveds are has not changed. YOU are my Beloveds. Where I see myself meeting you, evolves from a technology standpoint, but for me, in the quantum world, you are ever and always in the grove of trees with me.

Today I am writing with a framework re-calibration. This is important so hold onto your hat, because this is going to be important going forward. Ready?

This training isn’t a how-to like many teacher trainings where you systematically duplicate or regurgitate the words and patterns of the founder. In fact, you don’t have to go out and do ANYTHING the way we taught you. My archetype is an initiator, but my material is offered to catalyze YOUR material. You go out and do what your soul asks of you. You make what you are called to make. This is Intentional Creativity. This is about access. Yours, not mine.

This is why you have to make up your own philosophy of Intentional Creativity instead of being handed one. This is why you make up your own archetype instead of stepping into a pattern our culture has created.  This is why during the last part of the training, I let you go… and if you want to come ‘back’ into our on-going circle, you are invited again, and you choose. The majority return to be a part of our circle. Some do not, but those who do confirm how rare they feel our community is, and the integrity we create for our ongoing connection. 

This training is designed to help you access your own content. My content is there as a bridge to your own. If you got access your own content, or are getting it, then I did my sacred work, fulfilled on my soulfire. The five primary archetypes are the WAY and the PLACE you use to arrive at your content through discovery. In essence, the paintings are the transportation device to ride into your own world. My call was to build a bridge through the painting processes that have come through me, as gifts to give you, as guests at my feast table.

I truly, profoundly, with all my soul, believe Intentional Creativity to be medicine and celebration. As I write this, tears fill my eyes and my heart begins to feel all of you. See all of you with that way the heart can in the quantum nonlinear space-time way. You are here, reading this, that means we met the call to gather up one another, to acknowledge our threads and strengthen our path together.

If you have done the painting to this point, you feel yourself changing, not into something new per say, but into a fullness of yourself. A revealing of what has always and already been there. Color of Woman is an archeology dig. I showed you where to dig and with what kind of tools.

If you were to ask me in a very cosmic sense what this work really is - REALLY is, I would say: Intentional Creativity is akin to remembering how we as humans work and starting to work in the way we are designed, which is to create. Not unlike you remembering yourself, and revealing the part of you which is ready to come to life. Intentional Creativity is a remembering and a revealing of what is already here.

Wall to skin. We have ALL always been using it since the earliest man and woman marked on the cave wall, made a skin for their baby to be warm, crafted a tool. When they made their own clothing, shaping it to fit their body and form so they could run, hunt, work, gather, sit, and make love in the clothing they fashioned. When our early ancestors were not in survival every second they took it further, from utility to beauty. They made a star pattern on a cave wall to tell a story that now 50-150K years later, we can read; this was their message to us. The mama or daddy sewed beads they shaped with loving hands, or cut fringe or marked a design from their family onto the skin they wrapped the baby in. When they shaped their early clothing to fit, but also to reflect the personality of the wearer. All of this IS Intentional Creativity.

This is intentional Creativity, both the most basic use, and going beyond utility into beauty, blessing, and the ‘content’ of that maker’s mind and heart. Not just for function but to enjoy and amplify and to tell a story about the maker. We didn’t invent Intentional Creativity, nor did we find it. Intentional Creativity is the context in which human beings live, make, thrive, and tell stories.

What we do is make this reality, hidden in plain sight, see-able. Knowable. Along with this cognitive awareness is the call to make transformation possible, as we know it is not the knowledge that transforms but the experience of the knowledge for oneself as it becomes wisdom.

“She creeps and crawls and sifts through the…mountains…and…dry riverbeds, looking for wolf bones, and when she has assembled an entire skeleton, when the last bone is in place and the beautiful white sculpture of the creature is laid out before her, she sits by the fire and thinks about what song she will sing…she stands over the criatura, raises her arms over it, and sings out…sings some more…sings more and the wolf creature begins to breathe…and as she sings, the wolf opens its eyes, leaps up, and runs away…suddenly transformed into a laughing woman who runs free toward the horizon…”Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes

As we cross this Alchemical Bridge in the training, moving from one part of the path to the next I am inviting you to do this very consciously. Before I go further into that, l have a few more things to remind you about what this training is not, and what it is.

What this training is not.

• Learning how to paint realistically or representationally
• Step-by-step paint by number you can duplicate every single time in the same way with the same results
• A memorization of our philosophy that you must now teach others
• A how to grow your existing business so you can sell your art and workshops and market your message
• A template of identity where you become more like the ones doing the training

What this training is

• Joy of discovering intuitive painting where you access the images from within that are yours.
• Access to your own content, with the support of structures like the 13 Steps and Red Thread Sessions.
• An invitation to become at cause for your own content, and get it articulated
• An additional feature to add to your business or philanthropy if you choose to translate it into income or offering.
• An invitation to becoming more and more you

Ours is a culture of freedom. Yet becoming free is a journey that often happens in togetherness. Revolution takes place when enough of us are ready to change.

Color of Woman is an immersion into the felt and lived philosophy of Intentional Creativity. Intentional Creativity is creating with presence and curating your own consciousness. You can use any medium, and any intention and apply the teachings you have received in the training. YOU ARE BECOMING A TEACHER OF THIS PHILOSOPHY. However you choose to use it is up to you.

You become an Intentional Creativity Teacher not because you can do what I do. You become an Intentional Creativity teacher because you can do what you can do. You may not have been able to before because you didn’t know the way inside, but now you do. And no one can EVER take that away from you.

The Rogue Way

About the 13 Steps, it is ONE of many ways of working with Intentional Creativity, and yes an important one. It arose out of reverse engineering the way I created a painting, not having classic skills and struggling with classic techniques no matter how hard I tried. It was created from struggle. Yet my results were great. By the time I discovered how to reverse engineer the process I used, taught largely to me by Sue to ‘construct a way of working’ (not to be confused with ‘real painting’ lol), I had already created over a million dollars in art sales. It was clear, people were called to the images. But I didn’t just want the one person collecting the painting to have it, but many many people. I went beyond my own work and gave up my painting career to do this. Yes there is some sacrifice, the good kind, not unlike a mother would give of her life to her child. She would not trade it for the world, and the reality is she could not focus on all she wanted to along the way and might have even lost some of herself.

Don’t confuse the 13 steps or the painting processes for Intentional Creativity. They USE it to get created. But they are simply transportation devices across the alchemical bridge which you are now crossing or have crossed.

Stepping into your own archetype

Let’s review the archetypes we take you through to initiate you as a keeper of the sacred wisdom and energy of Intentional Creativity.

With your Legendary self, you chose to enter your imagination and author your own story. Now you can speak from that space.

With Muse you gained access to the inner world and voice, and began to integrate the voice of the critic and the muse into your one true voice. And hopefully engage with more play with your Muse (although mine can be rather serious even if I am joyful making them!)

With Talisman, you went inside to access your own archetype, heal whatever was ready, and gain access to the endless well of your own content, born out of your life experience in the past.

With Soulfire, we headed on into the future to discover what lights you up, we set you free from the 13 steps and in a way, from me, and invite you into your own spaciousness, line, and curve.

Now onto Visionary – where you are completing your quest and turning towards the world again to bring your gifts with you, your own curriculum as shaped by your PRACTICE of Intentional Creativity.

Intentional Creativity isn’t a process I have given you to teach. Intentional Creativity is YOUR access, your process. Your authorship. Remember that mine is here just to catalyze you into your own work. If you came into the teacher training, not having enough experience with already leading others it will be a stretch to actually teach but we hope you will. We didn’t invite novices to work, but women who said they have served and created and wanted to bring creativity into their offering, to access your soul work with living color, shape, texture and context. If you have already been a teacher or healer the leap will be a little easier for you, but will still take time to fully hear your own voice coming through. In all cases, it is practicing it, doing it again and again that will empower you.

My story of loss and transformation

I created Color of Woman at the same time I started trying to have a child. The child in this lifetime did not come to be, and this is part of my broken open heart, to feel the real grief of loss in my own life. The loss of my child, my first husband who grew this work with me for 16 long and incredible years, and then the loss of my teacher and co-mother Sue.

I am telling you this because the LOVE I would have given to my child, I gave to Intentional Creativity. The truth is that the same day I created seeds of Color of Woman was the same day I chose to have a baby. And while it makes no sense to a woman who is childless who has given her life to service to say – but look how many children you created! You would not have been able to do that if you had kids, etc. What I will say is that Intentional Creativity , and at the heart of the work, Color of Woman, has been infused with the love of a mothering heart. And what I would have spent on my child, I spent here, my creative life force is present in this work. I did something powerful with my energy.

I both serve what I have created, Color of Woman, and rise forth with new work, like Motherboard, to keep the balance for myself as a prolific creative. My intention has been for more ease, but that has not been the case. When I pray, and tune into my soul space, the message from the Creators is clear: We are making you stronger for the work ahead. Every hardship strengthens you.

So my theme changed to: ‘We are strengthening you’. And I knew that was right on. I could feel that. And it wasn’t, ‘I am strengthening myself.’ Or I am strong. But WE ARE STRENGTHENING YOU. And with that I know that it is not just me that strengthens me, the Creators, and my circle of peers, and all of you, strengthening me. We too, are strengthening you for the journey.

Now  I am deeply joyful to say, my body of work has been brought forth. I feel content, and in my own way, complete as well. I fulfilled on my sacred assignment personally and collectively. I am sure there is more to come, as I can feel the fire in my bones and in my heart. Yet, for now, for today, I know I created what was mine to cause and create. Thank you for being a part of this story. You are a thread of glorious color weaving this fabric of community and causation. I could not do it without your contribution. We have work to do together dear ones. The littles out in the world, and the bigs, need our medicine. You are carrying a potent mixture of consciousness and creativity that is so needed for our times.

The context is shifting and this isn’t a sacred cow

Do you remember what your ‘context’ for your life was when you had one? Even if you were a genius and a shaman, maybe you still hadn’t really LIVED into a new context. A new context is not just a concept, an idea, it is a LIVED experience. You weave your context as you are going along. You have woven your future by using painting with an Intentional Creativity approach. Each painting represents a doorway of soul you have walked through in order to create fire for the alchemy which takes place in soul fire. You can’t get enough friction to light the fire without doing the work, really doing the work.

Really doing the work doesn’t mean you feel confident and ready to rock. Although you might. We invite you to teach the 13 steps as an initiation in your own work, it is a kind of rites of passage you go through to prepare yourself. Not everyone makes it through. We chose the 13 steps  because if the pattern is followed, MOST of the time the painting turns out pretty cool. Once you have taught it a few times you can shift it and change it how you like, this is C.O.W. and it is sacred, but it isn’t a sacred cow. The 13 steps is a guideline you learn, then you innovate, and you can use ANY THEME YOU WANT. Muse and Visionary are loose themes, but we intentionally don’t ask you to keep doing what you learned the way we taught you. YOU HAVE YOUR OWN INFORMATION.

Intentional Creativity becomes the approach, and my work and hopefully my style goes into the background. We don’t want tens of thousands of paintings that look like Shiloh paintings do we? Or we do we even care? If it helps other women access their image through using my style to surf in on. Finding your style is hard, even without Color of Woman. Maybe you already have your own style, if so, keep on going. If you don’t, then persist, your line will shine through in time as well as my voice dropping back and yours rising up. My muse has been hanging out with your muse, handing her ideas, colors, symbols and encouragement so she could get strong enough. This is happening now; you are becoming strong enough.

Completing the Soulfire Archetype, you turn towards the world with your gifts and opening your Visionary eyes. The energy will be different because for Talisman and Soulfire, the gaze is inward, with a reference towards your content and curriculum you want to share. But the gazing is inside. What happens for you as move your attention outward, to how you will share your Soul Work with the world?

The Changing Face of the Feminine
When I started this work at 23,  I wanted to change the perception of the face of the feminine in our lifetime. I had no idea how to make it happen. Sometimes I would muse that there would be giant billboards with my paintings, demonstrating that we don’t look like the fashion models, divas, pre-raphaelites and impossible feminine archetypes offered by the system as the ideal feminine.  

Now, 25+ years and thousands of paintings later, I feel we are well on our way. Changing the face of the feminine, not by my hand, but by many many hands and many voices and many faces. More women are showing up as they are in the media, women who identify as Lesbians are a smashing success, our community has worked together to bring Native voices to the United Nations. And in more homes in our community than ever before, mamas and grandmas have set up creative spaces for their precious babies so they never forget, like so many of us did, that they are creators.

Blessings, dear one, on your path to that which matters most to you.

Shiloh Sophia

Bone Gathering

Returning to one’s self

after a long voyage into the

desert is the work all beings

must do one day.

The day will come when

the absence of the missing bones 

and the pieces of your heart

that you left on the highway to die

after too many mornings waking up

alone, in body or spirit or both,

will require you to return.

For this sacred work,

a map for returning will

be provided, so you can find

the missing persons reports. 

This map is not in a language

you will understand.

Are you surprised?

With each stop on the quest

there may be a sitting-down-hard

head-in-hands-wondering-why

and even despair you thought

you had gone beyond.

Grief and wonder are the

companions you will find

because they are also the way

through the hard to see places.

Give in to them. You will be okay.

I wish I could say it

could be easier than this.

Hiding, cutting, dismembering

ourselves wasn’t so easy, was it?

We did it to survive, we thought,

and we wrapped up the bloodied

limbs and continued on,

almost soldier-like in our sacrifice

of ourselves. Never mind the blood-loss

of not being ourselves.

Never mind not even knowing what song

belongs to our mouth and

what movement our body

loves the most. 

How did we go on this way?

All that is done now.

No more, we say, 

and that is how we found ourselves here.  

This excavation requires

specialized tools, 

if it didn’t

bone gathering 

would have started long before now.

Yes I know you have already started. 

I can see that in your tender eyes.

Don’t worry, yes it is scary at first. 

The tools are intact for excavation

and user friendly, 

you will find they fit your palm just so.

The stranger within you 

knows how to use each one.

She was the one yelling at you before,

to listen listen listen inside the soul cave, 

but now that you have listened to her, 

she will be the one to help you see in the dark. 

This is the one we call the Muse.

Visionary bones are made of stardust

and glow in the darkness.

Come. 

You will find them. You have to.

I need you to.

We need you to find them.

I have gone a’ bone gathering

and I found this poem here in the wet earth

and brought it to you.

Dust off the mud and muck

and you find words dry enoughto light your spark.

(download)

Then watch this video as the wrap up - and an invitation to notice changes.