"An artist is a child who has survived."
Is to survive it to live more ? Or just barely living ?
There are so many reasons to feel abused, helpless, raging, finished, exhausted or abandoned on the journey of a life. So many reasons to believe oneself lost or to believe to have lost everything, to be desperate in front of the senselessness - even worse ! - in front of the emptiness in all things.
To live on without becoming definitively tense, closed, resigned, submissive, disillusioned, indifferent... is a course. An initiation. A journey !
Like Ulysse, we go to back. Never completely the same nor completely different. In classical music, the "aria" and the "sonata" form use this scheme : exposition (of the themes) - development - re-exposition. And indeed, the return to the themes is always a little different, if not in the score itself, then necessarily in the interpretation of the musician who has crossed the central core of the work.
As I accompany men and women in hypnosis sessions, I observe the similarity between these art and life forms. A fairy tale, a hypnotic and metaphorical story, is almost always the idea of a hero who sets out to face what will confront him or her, to overcome it, to free himself or herself from it, and to live more fully upon returning from that expedition.
We are, each one, the hero of our life.
Whatever we think, feel, do.
Sometimes they are great adventures, not so perilous. Often they are tiny, but they take us right to the heart of ourselves. The feat is not always a trip around the world. For some, it will be to be out of their house, literally and figuratively. Or it may be, on the contrary, to have entered one's house - inside. In oneself. By small gestures. Invisible. To have scrutinized its demons or its malice. To have dared to love or be loved. To have trusted, to have met, then to have been disappointed and to have faced its own shadows. The most cowardly. The hardest. Some want a marathon to prove themselves accomplished. Others seek to let go... In short, to dare to be happy. Easily or impetuously. Against all the dragons of our unconsciousness. This is the path I am talking about.
But if the form of the quest differs, I have more and more the feeling that it moves through a kind of great sonata form in our lives. For, never really returning to the initial place, we come back much further. More deeply. In that place are our origin. Not the one on our identity card. No, the one that belongs to the silence, where only the truth penetrates, accompanied by our souls. I believe, yes, that we rush towards nothing but our origin. Even if it is through detours to get closer to it.
Thus, the development will be at the height of the theme - or the themes - approached in the first time of the work.
The art of development.
Beethoven was the absolute genius at turning a theme of barely three notes into the most grandiose of developments ! He showed us how, with the strict minimum of what would seem to be a theme, it is possible to believe in infinity.
Other composers will be more succinct in their treatment of the development but more careful with the initial theme.
Whatever the case, it is the magic moment when the theme(s) go astray, modulate, deconstruct themselves to better reconstruct themselves. They look for themselves in order to know themselves. They escape then find themselves again. At the end, a wisdom... without any fuss. When the battles have been fought, when the encounters have been made, rich from all this, one returns to a simplicity that touches the heart like the breath of an old man barely different from that of a newborn.
When we talk about "personal development" (mindfulness), isn't this our destiny ? The theme does not act voluntarily, it lets itself act, through what comes to confront it or sublimate it. What is offered to it. Making it laugh or upset. Just labyrinths of development, splashes of comings and goings, dives and rises... By living it consciously, we touch what is called "spirituality".
In hypnotherapy, there is a protocol that is also played out in three stages. It is called, somewhat barbarously, "bracketing" or "emotional purging". This jargon, which only allows you to learn the concept, describes this three-step process which consists of starting from a sufficiently positive resource within oneself to go through one's worst (potentially traumatic) emotion and to come out of it. Winner. Not that it's a struggle. But of a crossing. A liberation.
This three-beat "waltz" teaches our unconscious that it is possible to go beyond, to the other side of the shore and still be alive. Even more ! Over-living ?
Then everything is possible. Everything is ok.
This is the path that, in our deepest interior, we know. The road map written in our DNA. A score, that's all. The one that allows us to develop what is there, to be transfigured, transcended, transformed. Transgressed ! Matter is, above all, a clay to be modeled. A theme to modulate. From outside, one could think that nothing has moved. But by approaching more closely, everything is different. A life.
Personal development is precisely what makes it possible to go beyond the "persona". Amalgam of terms. Each person's journey. Who am I if I no longer respond in the same way to the same events ? Who am I if I am no longer all what I thought I was ?
A history of Men.
Perhaps we come to the world as old men, inhabited by this ultimate wisdom that crumples our faces when they appear in the world. Then we conscientiously, courageously or awkwardly, but always sincerely, try to give breath to this child who grows, beyond the traces, the breaks or the crashes. To rise through its scars. To see further. And to receive even more !
It is the child who grows and stumbles, the one who is scolded and scolds in return, playing at being an adult without really knowing what he is. The one who, looking for his truth, sometimes balks at the guide. The body evolves and, like a sonata form, believes it is lost, too astray, or finished...
It is only an illusion ! The revelation of this gigantic illusion. It was necessary to venture through this world to find oneself in the heart, close by. To dare to say to oneself that one loves oneself in the simplicity of people who pray in the corner of a church. Where, at last, there is nothing left but one's own consciousness to look back on.
The beyond is what is inside.
This is how a sonata is formed, deformed and reformed. Even in score, it is perpetually reinterpreted and recreated. The themes, alternately joyful or sad, are those of our own epic. They teach us that the fight against oneself is a lost battle in advance ! But that it is allowed to dive into the big bath. That the origin always points its nose at the horizon before our eyes. And that this horizon is there to be overcome.
Then returns this theme, original, as the laughter of child with the heart of the one or the one who loved, loves and will love. And always will. Because it is so. Be it.
To every drop of the ocean,
To every artist on this planet,
To every creator of his destiny,
And since the so-called sensitive note is, in the end, the most powerful of the whole musical scale, I wish you a month of July on the path of what you will want to be.
For the vibration of your soul !
Hélène Tysman
Photo credit Lou Sarda ©