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Anyone can make art. Finding one's spiritual center can come of making art. Making art can come of finding one's spiritual center. Nancy Azara has been teaching the making of art, art-making as a spiritual practice, and other spiritual practices for thirty-five years. She has developed a system that combines her lifelong spiritual practice with techniques designed to help anyone get and stay in touch with their own inner artistic souls. Spirit Taking Form is a practical book. It offers lists of materials to work with and exercises and meditation techniques to help everyone bring out their inner voice. It includes specific meditations for healing the inner critic, cultivating imagination, and finding one's artistic heart. Its meditations and exercises can be done many times, and each time they can bring the reader new and richer experiences and deeper insights. Throughout the book Azara shares her own story and the inspirations that have made her a successful artist. Using an old Sicilian folk tale taught to her by her grandfather, she has always sought to look at life with one eye open out to the world and the other closed, or turned inward. It is this skill more than any other that she seeks to engender in the reader through exercises such as "The Visual Diary." Learning and teaching about art from a place of spirit calls us to a challenge, a challenge to look at something very familiar, yet distant and remote. Spirit Taking Form offers insight into artistic expression and how it can be applied to life as a catalyst for growth, change, and expression.
Pagan News Review by PaganNews.com
Successful meditation is fundamental to our spritual development and emotional well-being, but for many, it can be an uphill struggle against the body, environment or lack of visualization ability.
For those who may suffer from these complaints, this new book by Nancy Azara is a great tool to aid in focusing, meditating and Becoming!.
This book contains a series of beautiful guided meditations, mantras and exercises which even the most adept will in many cases find profoundly moving, insightful and useful in improving not just one's meditative ability, but visual memory, creative mind and third eye.
Here is an example exercise from the book for Developing Your Visual Memory:
"Go into a familiar room and make yourself comfortable. Take a few minutes to look carefully around. As you do, memorize what is there. For example, see a favorite chair in the center of the room, see the curtains with the light coming through the windows, see a table.
Let your eyes memorize all of these things that you see. Now close your eyes and visualize in your mind's eye this room
Recreate the visual image of this room with your eyes closed.
Open your eyes and look around and note again very carefully what is there.
Now take a drawing pad, oil pastels, pencils, and whatever else you like and go into another room.
Draw your room from memory.
Capture the things in it that you remember from your looking.
When your drawing is finished, compare what you drew from memory with your actual room. Notice the differences between what's there and what you drew. But remember, this is an exercise in developing your visual memory; it is not an easy one and not a demand for perfection.
Train yourself to use your eyes in a new way."
This book is just 140 pages plus change, but is not a book to be read quickly and put away. If you are at a new stage of your life, this is a great book to build into your daily renewal schedule, to refer to and work from as you evolve and grow!
