Category: ALL POSTS
The dog position
Just tried yoga for the first time, by watching a ‘yoga-for-beginners’ video on YouTube and crawling around on all fours on the floor in front of the smart TV. Gosh, I am so stiff, I couldn’t even do the dog position without collapsing into myself like a pile of meat. This will be a fun challenge. I am a bit horrified when I see how I’ve let my body go and become passive and tense – but I’m not gonna judge myself, I know exactly why it’s happened and it is understandable – anyone who’s been through two decades of trauma and post traumatic stress would be this tense. But I used to be a dancer in my teens, so it’s sad to see how my body has changed and transformed into a permanent ‘self-protective’ mode, all curled up in itself. It is not too late to do anything about it. And when I’ve learned how to get into a perfect dog position, my body will be able to do anything after that.
Shaking it off
I’m not feeling well, I think I’m coming down with a cold and my body is still so tense from all the stress. I keep waking up in the middle of the night, gasping for air, like I can’t breathe. And I’ve started to grind my teeth. The meditation helps and I’m trying to shut out any negative energy. But I still have to find more ways to relax. Johnny and I have finished all seasons of Fringe and moved on to my favorite TV series of all times – Lost. I feel childishly excited.
I will go back to painting next week. I have to finish “The Idiot” that I’m currently working on.
A new time is waiting for me on the other side of the stress. I know I can only reach it by continuing the meditation and trying to shake off all the stress. I’ve been so close to being burned out again. I was so close to the edge. But I am moving away from it. I am gonna be alright.
The source of my knowledge and wisdom
After today’s meditation exercise, I found a new way to approach my past that’s been haunting me for such a long time. In my meditative state I went to a place where I’d stored away my past in a big closet. Inside the closet there was another smaller closet with a black door. I cleaned out the bad things in my closet and stored it away in the second little closet, locked the door and placed the key inside my pocket. The rest of the things inside the bigger closet was now organized according to three categories; knowledge, wisdom and experience. Today I’ve stopped talking about my past as thisdark and looming shadow that’s always stalking me, today I’ve decided to start using the good things that my past has brought to my present moment as a guiding light – as the source of my knowledge and wisdom.
Vonda Shepard – Soothe Me
My favorite gal.
The enemy
What Johnny’s heart has taught me
I’m enjoying this grey and rainy Saturday by listening to classical music and meditating. I am fighting every stress symptom by making breathing exercises and pushing away any negative thoughts. They don’t have a place in my mind. Nor do they live in my heart anymore. My poor little heart. It hasn’t had an easy life, but it is still beating, it’s still filled with all the red fire it was born to produce with every breath. So, it isn’t that damaged. I’ve never let any hate inside it. It’s never been completely drained.
My love affair with Johnny has been so good for my heart. He’s taught me so much about humility, self-compassion and love. I thought I knew everything there was to know about love. The passion. The all-consuming energy. The pain. The fear. The neglect and the rejection. But it turned out that I didn’t know much about love at all. Johnny has showed me how to build a home between two hearts, not only to keep each other company, but to create a whole new heart inside our home. Something which is breathing all by itself, something that has a heart, a mind and spirit but is invisible to the eye. Our love is not about passion or simple companionship, but a creation formed by mutual respect, caring and the way we see each other and appriciate what we see. Both each other’s many beauties and beasts. And we are completely naked in front of each other and ourselves. Vulnerability is the only place where all this is possible to experience. And I’m learning how to trust. How to let go of the fear to get hurt. To be fooled. Betrayed. And destroyed. I’m slowly learning how to move through this feeling of deep love without wanting to protect myself from it. That’s the naked part.
Johnny has showed me how important it is for me to see myself without looking for those eyes in other people. It’s been difficult for me to see myself without judging what I see. Without wondering if I’m enough. If I am lovable. Worthy of happiness. Before I let Johnny into my heart I was in many ways a masochist. Looking for punishments. Humiliation. Darkness. Because I thought I belonged there. That I deserved it. He was there, in the beginning, holding my hand through other destructive love affairs with self-proclaimed victims that I wanted to rescue or mirrored myself through. I felt helpless and drained by those toxic connections. Johnny picked me up, every time I fell. He was always there for me – not because he wanted to be a hero, but because he actually cared about me.
I am softer now, to myself and to other people. Johnny’s gentle heart has inspired mine to be less rough and raw and to embrace empathy and tolerance. I was pretty brutal with my heart before. I wasted its blood, the beats and I let anyone stay in its rooms even though they didn’t deserve to be there at all. I am starting to protect my heart without shutting out love and the warmth from people who truly deserves to be inside it. I am very grateful for having this wonderful man in my life and in my heart. We both give and take from the knowledge which our hearts have collected throughout our lives. We share everything because it all feels important somehow. Even the smallest details. The nonsense. The everyday stuff that will be forgotten by tomorrow. But at least we got to share them with each other. It cures the loneliness of the heart. It creates a home where life is welcoming the insignificant moments as well as the significant ones Where everything has a meaning and is not wasted or taken for granted.
Charcoal drawings from 2006
Law of attraction
Things are starting to come together, bit by bit. It is strange how the concept of ‘law of attraction’ works – and it really does work, just like karma but in a more substantial and profound way. It’s basically ‘what you think, you’ll become’ or ‘you attract what your mind is focused on’. I know this works because I’ve used the power of focused, positive thoughts many times to achieve past goals. The difficult thing is to hold on to the positive energy and not letting any poisonous and negative energy take over. The law of attraction doesn’t only work in your favor, it is just as powerful and active when it comes to absorbing, collecting and sending out dark energy. If you think in a negative way, you’ll attract more negative energy.
I don’t care for new age and I don’t believe in new thought philosophy, I don’t belong to any spiritualistic movement, but I do believe in law of attraction because I’ve seen how it works for me. Both when it comes to receiving success and happiness, but also getting stuck in very bad and destructive places. I was responsible for attracting both the dark and the light in my past. If I felt self-destructive and negative and I got stuck in a destructive and negative place. If I wanted success and happiness, I found it by working really hard to get there and by letting go of the darkness. This has been like a cycle, attracting the good and the bad, depending how I’ve felt about myself at different times in my life – when I’ve been in control of my own destiny or when I’ve let other people control me and my life.
The difference between the concept of karma and law of attraction is that karma is based on what you deserve and what you’ve done to deserve the good or the bad, while law of attraction is all about what you allow to happen, how you deal with things and what you attract and focus on. Karma is saying what happens to you is simply a punishment or a reward from fate, like it’s all out of your hands, almost like the energy of karma is God. When it comes to law of attraction – you are your own God or Goddess, creating your own fate by attracting what you want and need to be happy and positively stimulated. If you attract bad energy, it’s not a punishment by a higher power but perhaps you are punishing yourself. Believing in the law of attraction means taking full responsibility for everything you attract. Light, dark matter, shit-storms and success.
And it all starts by changing the way you think. It all starts with a slight shift inside your mind – and a will to change whatever that has to be changed. Otherwise, you won’t attract anything new.
I’m coming out
Yes! Yes! Yes! Now I’ve finally found out what my sexuality is called! Today I’m coming out as demisexual! It all makes so much sense now.
‘Nerdish’ work in progress
Work in progress – “FLEURS DE FRINGE” – yes I’m such a nerd, I’m collecting flowers of significance from TV-series and movies and turning them into still lifes. This will be a fun new hobby to explore. I will make the pink carnations with the cruel post it note from Sex and the City and the Carlotta flower bouquet from Hitchcock´s “Vertigo”..
This is all the important flowers from FRINGE (one of my favorite TV series)..
Hopeful
I am starting to feel very hopeful, like my hope is more resilient now – balanced between a new acceptance and a forceful will to get [the hell] out of this place where I’ve been stuck for some time. But even though it’s been frustrating, I’ve learned a lot about myself and how my body and mind reacts to feeling stuck, stressed and powerless. I know when and how I get into a vulnerable position where I lose my self-esteem and faith in myself – where I lose my faith when it comes to life in general. Therefore, I will be able to save myself from ever becoming this vulnerable again. It is a comforting thought. Dealing with economical, mental, physical and emotional vulnerabilities at the same has been the heaviest task I’ve ever had to take on. But at least I am doing it. I am working my way through it all. I am grateful to myself, for being strong enough to do all this without giving up or giving into the fear or the helplessness I’ve felt at times. I can’t believe I was so close to giving up, only a week ago. I didn’t know that finding closure in the most painful place was so important. Now, I regret that I didn’t do it sooner, but perhaps I wasn’t ready to do it then. Everything happens for a reason, every decision leads to a new place – and the lack of making one is one of the most dangerous traps in life. It makes you stuck. Miserable. It makes you stay when you should go. It makes you tolerate things you shouldn’t. It makes you scared of the light instead of the dark. It weakens your inner voice. It kills your hope.
I am out of all that now. I’m finally feeling hopeful. Now, it’s up to me to do something about this new hope. Otherwise it’s a waste of strength and positive energy.
Something broken but promising
Through the broken pieces of my old life, I can see how I was originally supposed to live it, before all the darkness invaded it.. And I lost my ability to distinguish the natural from the unnatural frequency of life. I couldn’t feel the stillness. Only when it was snowing. I couldn’t taste the peace. Only by using distractions. In a blog post from a month or so ago, I said that I want to rediscover the pulse of life. Now I am hungry for it. Both the low and the high. I want to know how real stillness feels like. I want to know the rush of a busy day again. But without the stress. I’ve been in this vacuum for way too long.
2014
It is sad when something breaks but through the shattered reality there is a promising freshness. It’s still too soon to know what it will bring to my life or how it will change me, but I don’t need to know right now. I just have to keep moving forward. It is all I can do.
The Best Of Inger Marie Gundersen
The good world
After my tumultuous weekend of painful inner processes and difficult confrontations, I feel deeply grateful for waking up to an email like this. To know that my art has touched the heart or mind of a young student somewhere in the world, makes me fight even harder to find my way back to my career and my creativity. My art really means something to many people. Even my writing makes a little difference in the world. I am on a lifelong mission to express what I have inside and sharing it with the world.
After weeks of unbearable pain and almost slipping into a depression, I’ve now found a stable place where I’m able to exhale and rest. For real this time. The dark days are over. I’ve made sure of that. My health is improving rapidly, because I’ve faced the hardest times of stress and anxiety with courage and strength, and now I’m putting it all behind me. I’m finally ready to accept and to let go of something that’s always been haunting me. Now, I don’t have anything negative in my life. I only have my own fear and issues to face, but everybody is fighting their fear. It is normal. Part of life. I’m now in a position where I am free of external darkness so I can focus on the light I create in the world, the light that defines my core.
Not only is my health improving, I’ve also found a great job coach who will take care of me and my health. We will start by reducing my inner stress and work on getting my self-esteem back. The rest will follow naturally as I’m gaining more and more strength and confidence. I feel so happy about this. The world is a good place if you look where the good things are. I need to hold on to this positive energy and leave all the pain behind. It’s like the law of attraction – if you create positive energy in the world, that energy will find its way back to you. I so believe in that.
The first breath of closure
This has been one of the heaviest times of my life and I have been forced to get totally naked in front of myself, other people and in front of life itself. It has been hard. In fact, at one point, I thought I wouldn’t make it. What I’ve needed is closure and this weekend I’ve found the first real breath of closure. But I almost destroyed myself in the process. I guess this is why writers always save the biggest battle until the end of the story. Closure and overcoming something difficult means facing the biggest fear – the biggest pain. To face your own mortality and purpose in life. Are you destined to be controlled by something or someone else or are you destined to be in control of your own life? Would you survive standing up for yourself in one last battle of taking back what’s yours? Would you be able to live with the consequences of making a difficult decision? You might go a whole lifetime avoiding to ask yourself these questions, avoiding the final battle, the difficult confrontation and making the painful decision, but then you would never really find true happiness within yourself. There would be a shadow hanging over you, a lump in your throat, a heavy rock on your shoulders. And it would slowly poison your heart and soul – or worse; it would numb them.
What are you willing to endure if choosing to avoid closure? What are you willing to lose? Who would you become if you choose to avoid standing up for yourself – and who would you become if you did?
These questions are terribly difficult to answer without actually doing something about them. By taking action. By doing everything in your power to find the answers. To fight the right fight. To fight your fight. To get your life back. Your self-worth. Your self-esteem. Your future. Your peace of mind. Your power. Your freedom.
The answers would always lead you to a place where you’d finally start ruling your own world.
Michelle Obama On Donald Trump’s Comments: ‘Enough Is Enough’ (Full Speech) | NBC News
One of the most courageous and authentic people in the world. This speech is epic and very, very important.
“When they go low, we go high”
Toxic people
Work in progress: “Fleurs de Fringe” – about the dandelion in Fringe
My digital piece “Fleurs de Fringe” in progress, adding a dandelion today – why?
Here’s why (1:37):
The flower of hope. A flower that can survive the darkest of times, that can find its way through concrete and asphalt to blossom and thrive. Today, I feel like a dandelion. I am so fragile but I am still here, looking for a way through the dark and hard surface of life. I want to grow. To feel beautiful and strong. And to live and not just survive the hardest of times.
Julee Cruise & King Dude – Animal
My friend Julee Cruise recently released her music collaboration with King Dude and it sounds amazing!
Good things
I have found a new inner strength, I can feel it. I just need to hold on to it no matter what, even if I fall, even when I fail and even when the hormone levels go up and down. I have so much to be happy about, much more than I have problems. I will make sure to remind myself of this every day.
A fan framed some older commissioned pieces I once made, they look great!
In 20 minutes Johnny will call me from California during his lunch break. He’s probably the best thing that’s ever happened to me. I might feel lonely here in my apartment but I’m not lonely in my heart. And I have creative projects in the making in each category of my favorite artistic expressions; writing, digital art and painting. I’m taking care of my health. Trying to eat right. Exercise (well, sort of). Think in a positive way. I need to keep going. Because I’m finally back on the right track.
I’m winning
I woke up feeling stronger and more clear-minded today. Hopefully I am out of the anxiety for now (during my ovulation hormone storm and all – a double victory!). I will try to become more active and get out of my apartment more. Pathetic-behavior alert: yesterday I went to the mall and asked a salesperson some random questions just to have some kind of human and social interaction (!!). I wish I had more friends in this city. I miss Stockholm and my friends there. I’m turning into an isolated cave woman. I guess the cave is really a ‘shame cave’ because I’ve felt a lot of shame due to my health problems and the fact that I’m broke. I need to stop this behavior. Who cares if my body looks strange or if I don’t have any money? It’s almost expected of me as an artist anyway. It only adds to the freak status. So, I’m winning.
“Hello!” from my inner freak (gif animation by James Kerr)
I’m having a good time with my secret writing project. It will take a long time to make but I feel like writing is the creative expression where I always get into that glorious flow. I’ve been writing almost every day for more than ten years now, and even though it’s been nothing more than blog posts about my inner journey or simple diary notes, it’s given me a lot of practice. In the book Outliers, author Malcolm Gladwell claims that it takes roughly ten thousand hours of practice to achieve mastery in a field. Well, I’ve got that covered.
Mara Wilson
The face of actress Mara Wilson (“Matilda”) really inspires me. I love beauty that isn’t about perfection but about the unexpected and interesting features.
A memory
Meeting the American artist Jenn Porreca in Stockholm, 2012.
I haven’t heard from Jenn in a few years now. In fact, it seems like nobody knows where she is at the moment. I hope she’s fine. Jenn Porreca is a great painter and her strength is in the way she portrays vulnerability with confidence and style.
MIA MAKILA 