Its been an interesting week of watching the same patterns in myself and in the world at large play out like perfect mirrors of the same theme. The Schumann Resonance that has been riding so high was countered, mid-week, by a cork-screwing solar flare on 20th February which sparked geomagnetic storms that I have been experiencing as some of the most intense inflammation in my body for a long while. By Wednesday,  I didn’t know what to do with myself, such was the uncomfortable back pain and migraine that was happening to me day and night. Not only was I being “burned” on the inside but by the burning impulse to be constantly busy doing things, all of the time…yes, burning the candle at both ends, pushing myself hard, relentlessly. Yet it wasn’t a satisfying urge to be “doing”; I felt equally frustrated by what I was doing and not doing whilst disillusioned with them all, like I couldn’t remember why they were important anymore. I wasn’t the only one; a friend across the ocean was describing the same thing and another friend that I was looking forward to seeing at the weekend cancelled her visit due to a sudden onset of burning back pain. Talking to her on the phone, she too was in a spin of female frustrations, money frustrations, art-career frustrations. In my house, tempers flared and moods swang all over the place. All of this felt like a reaction to a distinctly “yang” backlash after the rising “yin” of the Schumann; like the more this solar flare made itself known, the more an outspoken edge of the divine feminine was refusing to quiet herself longer.

In my work life, I had hit a similar sort of impasse where “what I do” meets its commercial  aspect. It’s not a new theme but, suddenly, the blind-alley that is the venture of trying to make a living out of right-hemisphere talents such as art really hit me in the face this week and I was no longer sure why I was bothering. It felt like more of the same theme; a deep and pervading frustration that had me chasing my tail doing more than ever whilst, at the same time, feeling like I had had enough of it all and wanted to quit.

It occurred to me, this sense of unfair “odds” being stacked against these right-sided skills of mine feels like another subtle but pervasive case of being the underdog in the same way as being a woman has been for the longest time. Just as there are feminists, there are artists and yet we have feminism but no “artism”; so perhaps that’s what we need – people prepared to be outspoken, to speak out for what is so out of balance – in order for us to work through what is still such an major obstruction to the “yin” coming in. In a spark of new “Nine Waves” clarity, I realised how art came to me out of nowhere at the exact mid-point of the Eighth Wave 11 years ago; literally, as a box of old paints dropped out of the cupboard and the strangest urge came over me to have a go at using them, having never painted before. Two years later, on the fifth day of that wave (the fifth day has a special evolutionary role in each wave), I made my unexpected entry into the commercial world of art when a gallery suddenly approached me, a career turn I could never have predicted from the perspective of my life just a handful of years earlier but which altered everything for me, overnight.

So, if I had any doubts that painting is a core instrument of “my” Eighth Wave coming in, my grasp of this is solid now…yet, if so, the Eighth – for me –  keeps stalling; I have to notice that since it is really so obvious from my lack of viable income from what I do. I just can’t seem to get it to FLOW in a way that, in practical ways, meets the needs of my life on this planet. If I thought this was just my problem then a reunion with a group of  friends, all hard-working and talented artists with Fine Art degrees, reaffirmed to me that making a living out of art hasn’t got any easier over the last 30 or even 10 years; all are barely making “pin” money out of their skills. How they are doing seems to be in proportion to how well they court attention via either the corporate world or the internet (both much the same in many respects) and how supportive their partner is but none of them could live off what they earn…not even nearly. Where other ways of making a living seem to be able to stand on their own two feet, we artists are made to feel like we still need to woo the kind of patronage or favour that became the art-model during the Sixth Wave; no wonder I find myself kicking-up against it!

The internet, that modus operandi of the Eighth Wave (which is feminine in its impulse, being all about the urge to  communicate) makes it look as though the world has opened up wide to provide opportunity for everybody, across a wide range of talents, and yet the artist continues to tells a different story. Not that deep beneath the surface of our world-wide web, there’s a whole other kind of inequality built into our dealings with one another that makes second-class citizens of those who are not technology-minded or who balk at playing the marketing game that turns beauty into “commodity” and other beings into cannon fodder on the way to making a hard-nosed “buck”. We readily step on each others heads on that route and, somehow, the very intention of art gets lost along the way while those producing it barely manage to feed themselves; this is hardly representative of a world in hemispherical balance.

Why is there still such a problem when it comes to thriving as someone with primarily right-hemispherical skills? Perhaps because those old Sixth and Seventh Wave mindsets (patronage, status, money, power…) still underpin the whole system as it is currently set-up. Without the ruthlessness, the money-angle, the marketing drive and the tech, artist types remain the soft filler to other people’s income-generating game. The “cuts” we are offered in return for being part of their money-making schemes are abhorrently low; ten per cent or even less for our contribution to products we design, in other words, well below subsistence level. So we either remain the underdog or find we have to cross train in left-brained skills (to a degree that left-brain oriented people don’t feel they need to bother reciprocating) in order to survive.  How is this meeting in the middle?

So, perhaps a solution is to work on our left-brained skill set; to become more technology-minded so that we can be the ones starting the business, doing our own marketing and manufacturing, playing the current paradigm at its own game…well yes, that’s a possibility but not ideal if these skills lie outside of our sweet-spot. I could think about this round and around (and indeed I have, for several years now) and yet there is no ready solution, at the practical level. Until the world meets us half-way and starts valuing – and paying for – our talents we remain the latest discrimination factor in the same way that women used to be (still are, in parts of the world); along with similar attitudes that tend to put us down and make us less-than for our artistic talents, like they are not really very serious or valuable (though people like to use them for their own ends).

So there I was  lying in bed the with beginnings of a very severe migraine yesterday, while gnashing my teeth over the fine print to an art-related internet business  contract that I was reading through late the night before and which had me spitting feathers at yet another set of unfair and impractical exclusivity conditions coupled with extremely low commissions (in other words, tying my best work to this venture yet receiving peanuts in return). But then, out of nowhere, a new spirit of determination surged up in me and I began to see the light at the end of the tunnel; could see ways that I could go with this new business model but play it my way and not to their exclusivity condition in that it wouldn’t be the only thing I give my time to but just one of many irons that I will keep warming in my furnace. I could play the system to gain more, not less, freedom and I could work loopholes around that exclusivity clause by working faster, smarter, using more tech to generate derivative work from my own prior (more painstaking) artworks that I can remain free to market in broader ways. I could have some fun, go back to being almost childlike in my playfulness and experimentation. I could grow from this new approach, learn new skills, become more computer savvy. If they want factory mindset then I could do that…easily, cleverly, speedily…whilst still doing my other stuff in my own time, having my cake and eating it. In other words I could “yin” and “yang” all at the same time, using these two angles to complement each other in support of the “whole” that is me!

The more I allowed this new wave of formidable, much more determined and uncompromised “yin” energy to rise up in me, the more my excruciating head pain seemed to recede, which seemed to run counter to logic since I normally have to pull back from any kind of excitable energy and become passive in order to turn down my worst migraines. Yet I could tell how this “yin” version of turbo-charge was quite different to its “yang” counterpart and that, rather than making me more inflamed, it seemed to discharge me, like I had hot steam venting from the crown that had been feeling so sore and pressurised a moment before. Suddenly, I was wanting to be on my yoga mat yet was having to scribble my fast-flowing ideas about all of this on a piece of paper kept next to my mat and had pages of notes written before I had finished my routine; my headache now almost gone. This was like my own personal version of the Schumann Resonance rising up from my feet to my crown, asking only to be registered and used to clear what felt most obstructed on its way through and out to meet the solar energies half way. I was that conduit and, in being it, I got to sample my own flavour of what it means to know oneness in tangible form.

On my walk the day before, in the midst of over 50mph gusts triggered by the solar winds, I had come across a massive tree that had just been tipped over by the winds in the corner of the field, its tender innards as sinewy and white as cooked chicken breast at the sudden exposure. This huge mature tree had only recently come into bud and was all a-fuzz with the reddish pink tenderness that precedes the coming season of regeneration and growth….and yet, right on the cusp of her next evolution, one incoming gust of solar wind had taken her crashing right down to the ground. I couldn’t help noticing how, though she had reached a very great height, her trunk had forked quite close to the ground, like she was trying to split herself in two; also how she was tangled and strangled all around with so many dependent creepers that had now so abruptly lost their support. The sight of this seemed to want to remind me that when we split ourselves up in two such distinct ways we only halve our power, trying to divide up our efforts in first this way and then that way. In doing so, we omit to centre ourselves; lacking that column of core balance and its strongly rooted attachment to the earth that sustains us. That all-important groundedness into the soil of this planet, its circumstances, the bread-and-butter world all around  us is something we often forget (or refuse) to give our attention or our interest to yet our most creative urges rely on this downward plunge every bit as much they feed off the driving aspirations that come at us from the ether. We not only crave but are dependent upon the sustenance of Gaia and all her beauty yet we have allowed ourselves to give this so much less of our focus, appeciation or reward; we simply don’t act like we value beauty for beauty’s sake in the same way that we constantly demonstrate how we value material trophies, power and all those other trappings. This is what allows us to tip over in life’s strong gales, not the gale itself, and its our job to right it if we want to thrive (w)holistically. It’s this fundamental imbalance that underlies our current paradigm (still), played out in all the ways we have structured our day-to-day reality to serve left-hemisphere persepctives and the way we value – or don’t – those skills which keep us most appreciative and connected to our planet; Mother Earth, the divine feminine and the kind of beauty that makes our hearts sing.

In reaching this new place, I find I have gained a new foothold in a paradigm that is still grossly off-balance but where I now see a way forward to continue offering my gifts without total compromise to the practical matter of sustenance OR of the joy that is inherent in all that I do. These two aspects felt  like complete opposites until this point; like I was always (frustratingly) being made to chose one or the other, neither of them even close to ideal. Those times that I have ventured into the hard-nosed commercial approach to art have always syphoned away the very source of my inspiration, leaving my creativity as dry as a piece of splintered wood. I now have a way forward…tentative as that is; can see how I might even spiral my talents to a new level on the back of the new challenge that I’m prepared to take on under these new terms (my terms),  allowing my creative urge to continue to thrive and to express in an unfettered way, using new oportunities but not making myself a servant of them. It might even be fun – I feel quite excited. Until the world more readily encourages those of us with these gifts by offering the steady income streams that match our abilities as are offered to those with more left-brained abilities, we must take our first steps to remain grounded and sustained and then draw the “yang” to us in ways that enhance what it is that we already do, without compromise to the spirit of that which we offer, which is not commercially driven in the same way as more left-brained pursuits. Somewhere in that middle ground, I like to think, I have found my own personal place of unity consciousness in action and perhaps it is this one step, from each of us, to the middle line that will see us all meeting there some time very soon.

Related posts:

Using the Nine Waves to Heal Your Life  for more on how to work with the Nine Waves of Creation in some very practical ways. The Nine Waves of Creation by Carl Johan Calleman, PhD is a remarkable book outlining a quantum-hollographic pattern of evolution that has modelled the world as we have known it across several distinct stages since the beginning of our history, culminating in the activation of the new age of unity consciousness that is currently unfolding.

Migraine as the primal scream of the suppressed feminine on my website Living Whole

The realities of art-selling as a spotlight on our culture: Are we ready to evolve yet? on my blog Light on Art