These and other thoughts crowd my head until I can still them.

Does art echo life, or the other way around? I believe it’s the same phenomenon. Whatever we undertake, doubts surface at some stage and there is an inability to move forward.

I conquer my artist’s block by making a mark on the canvas. The first mark leads to another, and so forth. It’s the inaction that’s the worst. Sometimes, I warm up on a piece of rough paper, getting ideas and helping my hands to remember the moves, my eyes the colors, my spirit the essence of what I want to create.

I use many of the same suggestions with clients, knowing that inaction holds us in a particularly unpleasant limbo. I know from years of experience, both as a coach and as an artist, that one small step is essential to begin every journey and that, once taken, it will lead to other – often unexpected – steps.

When painting a picture, you soon come to realize that every stroke of the brush makes something new possible (and maybe something else impossible). Each brush mark changes what’s already there on the page, and so it is in life. Each action, each shift in belief, each emotional change, each spiritual insight opens up new possibilities and closes others. Things we thought impossible suddenly become inevitable. Things we were attached to and felt we could never leave, disappear into the mists of a new layer of paint – a new scenario.

Art employs the whole body. Life does too. We tend to believe we can think our way through every issue, but this is not so. Life is not lived from the neck upwards. It needs to include the conscious awareness of every emotional state and every cell and sinew of the body that actually take the action. When body, mind and spirit are aligned, events seem to flow, but it is ourselves who are flowing. We are the ones who see more clearly, hear more precisely and with more openness, move more fluidly, smell more acutely, touch with more sensitivity. We are the ones whose emotions shift to open states and whose spirits are lifted by the alignment. Events in the world are neutral. The paints on the palette remain the same, the unfinished canvas unaltered, the brush still poised, yet I am suddenly propelled into action, using the tools at my command with all the skills I’ve learned and also with the unnamable essence of life that I’ve tapped into.

Most remarkable of all is the fact that I sometimes end up painting quite a different picture than the one I intended. Or I might paint over an old picture I had discarded, noticing that parts appear through the new paint looking quite different. The god of art is a trickster who loves to surprise and tease me. Unless we go through life with the same willingness to be surprised, we can never allow God’s presence to unfold within us because we’ll always be striving to be in control.

Art, in the end, is a mystical experience, paradoxical in its execution. I let art teach me about life, and in the end, some people will love what I do and others will be unmoved. That’s life.