Socrates, drawing and the birth of a method

Ever since school, both Socrates and drawing have always been huge inspirations for me.

Socrates taught me to ask myself the right questions, the same ones that still help guide my approach, even now, nearing my 50th birthday.

Who am I? Where do I come from? Why am I here?

Socrates pushed me to keep on looking, until I’d find an answer at least worthy of the question.

And he’s also helped to give me what feels like a kind of scientific rigour, to do with the unseen world, to do with consciousness, to do with art.

“Who are you?” Socrates would ask his fellow citizens in the marketplace.

People would feel unnerved by his endless strings of questions, trying to find the answer based on their daily life experience. But that’s not what he was after.

“Not your name, not your job, or your race or religion. I mean who are you?”.

The questions would get harder to answer the deeper people went into themselves. Others, especially younger people, might find the openness and curiosity to actually start a real process of introspection, even if they couldn’t come up with a confident answer.

So what does any of this have to do with drawing? For a start, after 20 years expressing myself in English, I’ve found the verb “drawing” to be almost as intriguing as questions from Greek philosophy.

There’s “drawing” in the sense of making marks on a sheet, copying reality or from the imagination.

Then there’s “drawing in”: concentrating, condensing, retracting, or “drawing out”, encouraging, revealing, extracting, shedding light on something inside ourselves, rather like the Socratic method.

So what about combining the two, a way of drawing we can use to actually look inside ourselves?

If so, how can we draw our way into our own body, our internal world, our feelings?

And once there, how to draw out what we find, and make it visible?

Using an easy meditation technique I call “conscious breathing”, we can quickly learn to access the consciousness that lies inside, and rests in our internal organs. This can build up, in our daily life, and create emotional blockages, which in the long run can even cause physical illness.

Connecting our breath with our awareness at a cellular level like this, gives us a way of feeling, listening and knowing ourselves at a surprisingly deep level that is otherwise really hard to achieve.

Once we start listening, deeply and carefully, to our own body, we find our own vital movement.

Maieutic Drawing® is all about locating this, and allowing it to flow outwards, through drawing (drawing it out) onto the paper, free from any judgements or directions from our minds.

Like that, we join a meditative state of relaxed alertness. There’s a word for it in Sanskrit – vilamba – the space between the thoughts, where we connect with our existence beyond the mental activity that normally takes up all our attention.

Descartes’ “I think therefore I am” isn’t so relevant any more, the idea fades before an experience of the Self that is much more intense, brilliant, and connected with all its parts (including the body, and the emotions), not just with the mind.

“Who are you?” Socrates again, still asking me.

And through my drawing, I can finally reply. “I am not just my thoughts, not just this body, and I’m not just these feelings and emotions, that rise and fall, or these desires and ideas that I can never seem to fulfil.”

In this space, free at last from the noise of my thoughts, I can actually see, listen, connect with my surrounding reality, with others, and above all with myself.

What appears on the paper is the voice of those parts of me that too often and for too long stay in the shadow, in my non-consciousness.

But when I finally learn how to bring them out, they help clarify who I really am, here and now, in this moment of my life, and help inform the choices I’m really capable of.

Light and dark finally take their place together on the canvas of our existence, and show us the form of our lived experience, where we are today. They show the path ahead to heal the soul, and to reach a more complete realisation of our true selves.

Caterina Monaco offers Maieutic Drawing® courses online and in person, one-to-one or in small groups. No artistic experience is necessary. Find out more HERE

Contact her direct: +44 7969 347 351 / +39 333 162 4218 www.angelistudios.com

This article was first published by Esistomagazine.it