Art Journals
From Solo Retreat
Post five of seven, in section My Experiences
In February 2025, I went on a short solo retreat in the Ardennes, Belgium. I created an art journal of some moments from retreat — capturing some of my experiences of what it’s like to be in the world.
My baseline experience is very psychedelic (without having to take any drugs), and this comes through in the images I created.
Underneath the rational mind’s reified ways of looking, life is a lot more shamanic, interdependent, embodied, and direct than most people can begin to imagine.
It’s a very modern phenomenon that contemplative practice is used as a complement to a mostly rationalist worldview. Being able to relate to experience in a rational way is a superpower, but getting stuck there and not being able to move beyond into the more ineffable and intuitive qualities of experience can easily become an incredibly narrow way of practicing.
Dharma is about deeply opening to the true reality of experience beyond your individual self-view, which tends to be much richer and more surprising than a typical modern mind can conceive of.
If you want to hear me describe more about the Universe being psychedelic, you can listen to this interview I did with Alex Olshonsky.
Walking through the woods. Threads of energy both exploding outwards from my core and rushing inwards from the nature all around, in a kind of resonant loop.
I came across a river about halfway around the trail I was walking. There was a plunge pool, and I stepped over the icicles on the edge and dissolved into the flow of the river.
Cold dips are one of the best things for doing a complete reset of the body – it’s like turning the body off and on again – and lots of content can be released in that process.
Walking and feeling very merged with the landscape around me. A stream of multidimensional stories and interdependent energies leaving my body as I hiked through the woods.
Practicing with music; moving emotions and energies in the body and creating resonant, synesthetic vibes
Walking on the third day. My experience was a lot more empty and spacious, more like being a vast sky and moving through a crisp landscape of details.
There was a lot of pine forest and mixed woodland on the trail I was walking.
Turning a long, slow corner walking up a steep hill, I could feel that I’d entered the territory of oaks even before I had looked up and seen the trees. Oaks always hit me with a specific transmission of a kind of wholehearted ancientness that I really appreciate.
I also love the feeling of being small that you get in nature. It feels expansive and humbling at the same time.
Working with dark energy flows and eros. My main practice path was shadow work, with realness and wholeness being a couple of my strongest practice values. I find it as rich and sacred to be present with dark energies as with connecting to light energies, in part because it’s the doorway to accessing a more creative relationship with life.
One aspect of this is that I get a lot of eros arising on solo retreats; some of it is sexual, and sometimes I find it beneficial to work with it and to allow it to come to life.
A lot of purification and transmutation can happen at this level. Sexual energy is the same energy pathways that are involved in the way you access power, creativity and connection on a broader level, so having more mindfulness and clarity around them can be both empowering and create more possibility for being present. The purpose of practicing with this is to be able to hold energies related to sexuality in yourself in a more spacious and wholehearted way.
Making space for sexual energy to be present in a safe way is also really beneficial for helping people drop more deeply into their bodies and their aliveness.
If you’re at the start of your practice or have an addictive response to sexuality, power, or eros, it can be best to abstain from all sexual energy during practice time while you build basic skills of mindfulness and presence without distraction. It’s also super valuable to do periods of time without it at any stage of practice because it can open up the richness of other aspects of experience that are more subtle and can easily get steamrolled by stronger energies.
While on this retreat, I also had a dark and intense past-life experience. I went up to the woods at night to see the stars. I walked past an old chapel, up a long, steep path onto a plateau, and into a dark woodland.
In a clearing in the woods, I stopped to take a photo. To be able to capture anything in the dark, you have to hold the camera still for 3 seconds in the pitch black, and while I was doing this, I started to feel how scary it would be if something was in the photo when it appeared.
My adrenaline started rushing. I walked a little deeper into the woods and held my nerve. My heart was racing at every little sound that I heard. After pausing for about 30 seconds and staying with the fear, I had the feeling that it would be good to run and let some of the fear energy complete itself on a nervous system level. I ran through the woods until I reached the gate at the edge of the forest, where the lights from the town below started to become visible again.
After going through the gate, the path became steep, so I slowed down my pace. As I walked down the rocky path, a vivid waking dream (or past life memory) moved through me. The sensation of being a Viking woman, holding a knife, being chased by a man through a woodland flooded my experience. I had a very clear choice – to surrender, to run, or to stop and fight. The memory was of stopping to fight before everything faded out. My sense was that she had been killed.
This whole series of events was a shamanic release of an energy pattern in me where I was willing to fight for the things that I care about, even in the face of almost certain death. It felt like the energy pathway had been planted more than a lifetime ago and buried in the depths of my being. The energy had now served its purpose and, through this whole process, had been unearthed and was releasing back into open spaciousness.
I wandered into a church, and the sun was coming through these beautiful, psychedelic, stained-glass windows. I felt like I’d walked into one of my paintings.
Being a receiver in the world with experience moving through; open space with nothing for it to catch on.
Feeling into the depths of nothingness
Listen quietly for the tiny opening;
A crack in the surface of being sure
That you already know what experience is
Run a finger of your heart-knowing
Over the contours of this opening
And allow it to take you somewhere
You have never been before
Lying down that evening, I dissolved into a series of mini cessations interspersed with symbolism, shadows, and energetic forms in my body, revealing and releasing.
I normally don’t remember what emerges in this state, as it happens in a totally different dimension from rational thought and the place of being able to form memories, but a vivid image of the underneath of an octopus stuck with me. It was scary enough and surprising enough to switch my rational mind on for a couple of seconds. It always amuses me that octopuses have a beak hidden away in the middle of their tentacles – the last thing you’d expect to find there.
I’m also reading about Yoga Nidra and the different brain wave states that it takes you through, as this is an interesting way of systematising and understanding this process.
Cessation.
The 7,000 silk-thin threads of meaning and social models that hold reality together, however loosely, all unhook at once. The whole of reality turns just a couple of degrees to the right, and the infinite void that lies directly next to everything you hold onto as real appears before everything dissolves.
Noticing a cut-through in the woods, I ended up in one of my favourite places of the whole trip.
A vibey, moody valley, it started as a dank and rich pine forest with a stream flowing through it and then opened out into a slightly wider valley floor. The stream had burst its banks and ended up staying that way — the water flowing through islands and tufts of grass.
Just before it flowed into a small, icy lake, four tall trees, dead from being flooded, stood across the stream. They looked like the large statues that guard the entrance to new lands in stories like Game of Thrones and Lord of the Rings, but an entirely natural version. I felt very affiliated with them.
I’m currently writing and illustrating a book called, ‘Being Buddha Nature,’ which includes my framework for awakening, alongside art and poetry.
