Emma Kunz (1892-1963) was a Swiss artist, healer and spiritual researcher, born to a family of weavers. She made large drawings on graph paper, one of which I reinterpreted here with embroidery.

Entering the gate.
Remembering the North Pole and back.

Delving into the Brazilian spiritualist traditions to dig into the fear and rejection of spirituality as a form (objects and rituals), as well as ancestral patterns with the cult and occult. The day I arrived a man told me about soul connections, Kundalini and the blue pearl. The day I left, I saw light beings dancing all around me and a duet rising far up in the sky. In between, a psychic surgeon -in jail today- scratching the eyes of an old man with a kitchen knife.. and people from all around the world in search for less suffering.

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Who’s calling?

Jumping from mind to mind, stuck in obsessions, the little things of others, the little worries of others. She channels the possibilities. « Let go, let go even more, until there is nothing left. » Caught in aerial thoughts, she flies away, she hides in the clouds. I want to be safe, I want to belong. Birthing on earth as she goes, it’s a long landing on the fastest route. 21 years of age.

A cardboard box full of colorful feathers

Small objects from her travels

Ottoman oracles

Lie on the table.

Once in a while she reaches out from the ethers where she serves for the souls.
« I help them go away, I light them a candle for a smoother transition. »

Hills of Mexico
Pale and dry
I have come for sunny pills
On the land of cochineal
Strings
Huipils
My pulsing blood
Hung on walls of cacti
Calling for fourteen years
When the plumerias were shown
In between lights
By the greatest bloom
A snake
An eye
Adorned by dog bites
Rays in hues of blues
Pull the universe
Out of round bellies

And I wonder why
I went this far to come back
With all and nothing
But one more paradox
On our path of return
To whom has ever lost
The seeds of eros
To whom is catching up
With the golden flower

A dual sight, weaving and embroidery

Oaxaca, Mexico, April 2017

Bona fide temazcal experience with our dear zapotec weaving teacher maestra Norma and her family at the end of the residency. Despite our mutual language barrier, they let us share their private lodge for a cleansing ritual with warm kindness.

Temazcal is a meso-american structure (« sweat lodge ») for healing, health improvement and purification. Our teacher’s sister entered the lodge -entirely, from head to toe- and lied beside us as we got in -one after the other- to cover us with herbs wet with hot water. But all of us 3 visitors had to keep our breath at the entrance of the lodge as it is extremely hot inside, enough for our bathing suit to quickly get super wet from our own sweat. After 3 cycles of heat and cooling down, we were wrapped in total  well being. It’s somehow easy to sense that Temazcal was and is also used as an access to alternate states of consciousness.

Returning
From fires and the heavens

There is Life
And the golden flower

Gopi Krishna’s « The Awakening of Kundalini » along with Jana Dixon’s « Biology of Kundalini » stress on the fact that evolution cannot exist without physiological evolution. Spiritual evolution is no more a mere belief system or concept when the physical changes felt in our own bodies are this tangible and visible. It can not be of a separate pursuit. A rewiring of our nervous system, body light, fluids, cells and chemicals must happen for the soul/energy to awaken and find a new state of being.
But transformation has to bring us back to life, not the light. Happy people don’t chase the light.

We must come back from the light. We must come back from outer space. We must return to Life.

Yet we need Mystery and transcendance stemming from the quest for something else. That is part of our human condition. The numinous. This unmatchable feeling that inspires, creates and finds expression in the world. Not for the sake of a so-called Truth. For nothing really but as a manifestation of what inhabits our psyche and history since forever. The light,  the dark and all their nuances and above. It’s all in flux, it is a continuum and a viewpoint. And there is life.

Gopi Krishna wrote this book in the 70s, stating that humanity was finally ready to delve into this new field of research. Why don’t we pay attention to this driving evolutionary and healing force behind all living things? 50 years later, this is still relevant, maybe more than ever. It is cast out and labelled as esoteric and « spiritual » but let’s see what it truly is, what it really does.