Photography as Meditation

your most unplanned, impulsive, casual photo taking opens up this well of knowledge and wisdom and witnessing of yourself that can actually help you live your life more deeply.

It opens everything up to what actually matters.

The only thing that matters is right now.

And right now, whatever, you're looking at, pressing a button to, there is something so earth shatteringly vital about that because you're choosing to do that.

You are intuitively choosing, “this” out of everything available to you in your whole life.

This.

Now.

 

Most mornings I wake up with a racing chest.

Before the sun even has a chance to rise, my blood pressure does.

Thinking of all the things.
All the things I have to do.
All the things I want to do.

The most frustrating part is the translation.

I’m bombarded by ideas I want to create and my brain starts trying to immediately get to work before I even sit up. Before the inspiration has a chance to breathe into the love and enthusiasm of what it has to offer.

I start feeling this immense agitation that I’ve only recently started to understand-

My brain is trying to translate my gut.

And I'm realizing that doesn't work.

I was on a coaching call expressing that I have this really frustrating sensation of so much enthusiasm and energy of things I want to do and create and experience and then it feels like it hits a combination of a brick wall and a barbed wire fence-

aka my forehead - my brain.

Trying its hardest to speak and make sense of:

the intuition
the gut
the creator
the visionary.


But I'm asking it to do a job that is impossible for it to do.

The person guiding this call, Pea the Feary said, “Can you invite? The mind to take a seat in the back instead? The mind can come out later after the transmission is complete. After that flow has taken place. But putting it in front of the visionary/gut/intuition is stunting it.”

As she was speaking I was like, “Yes. Oh, my God. Yes. That is it.”

That's why it's never a problem when I'm taking photos, because I never let that bitch ass brain in front of my intuition.

As I’m laying in bed I keep thinking about what’s going on inside of me.
I’m essentially writing in my head- but I noticed, it wasn't just pure thoughts. I was editing too.

And that's the problem.

Our most sacred inspirations are not here to be edited as they come through.

A channeling of creative energy and vision is gift we must open to without judgement. Let all of that through in its full embodiment and expansion. All of it.

Our brain can come visit it after and take a look.

I'm not vilifying our brains. Brains are fucking incredible.

But-

I think we put them too high on a pedestal in comparison to our gut and that inner magic in every one of us. Our brain has limited ability to recognize all that's available to us in any given moment.

But our art making comes from a 6th sense.

Our photo taking or our art making, whatever it is- is on a different plane. It’s a wand/facilitator/translator of the unseen.

And it does exactly what we need it to do. (even if our brain had other plans)

That's why meditation is so important and also so hard. We are so used to our brains taking the lead. And when we're asked to sit there and just let it all go, to just watch your thoughts and not attach to them, it feels impossible. Even if the alternative is stressful and doesn’t feel good, it is our normal and it is what we are used to.

But by attaching and clinging to any one specific rumination or thought you're immediately shutting off your ability to perceive a universe of possibility.

Your brain can only process so much.

That's why photography as meditation can be this extraordinary way of not only helping quiet the mind because you're satisfying it in the way of “doing a job” by taking a picture but the decision to take a picture and how you choose to do it is not a cerebral act. It’s instinct.

If you really allow your impulse, if you free it and let your hand & your finger become an extension of whatever the hell's coming up without trying to make it anything without trying to make it pretty, without trying to do it the way you've seen it done before-

Then the act in itself removes you from that hypervigilance of judgements/shoulds/productivity,

And it opens up this well of knowledge and wisdom and witnessing of yourself that can actually help you live your life more deeply.

It opens everything up to what actually matters.

The only thing that matters is right now.

And right now, whatever, you're looking at, pressing a button to, there is something so earth shatteringly vital about that because you're choosing to do that.

You are intuitively choosing, “this” out of everything available to you in your whole life.

This.

Now.

When I really plunge into the gravity and fullness of this, I feel myself attempt to temper: maybe this is just me. maybe i’m going off the deep end on this.

and then I look at any picture.
really fucking look at it, and cry.

Why do we do this to ourselves?

Why do we try to wrestle our deepest wisdom, our deepest knowing, our deepest joy- out from our own hands.

Our mind tries to rationalize
the magic away.

How do we benefit from that?

What good comes from simmering ourselves down?

We find a synchronicity and start feeling tingly: “oh my gosh, oh, my gosh.”
Filled with this feeling of this other worldly presence trying to communicate with us.
Astonished and feeling a deep knowing of “of course” at the same time.

And then we shit on ourselves: “Ummmmm, well actually the likelihood of seeing that is like probably not that uncommon.”

What?!
fuck. off.
It's so rude.

WHY try to strangle that glorious feeling?

That's like a kid coming up to you with excitement in their eyes over something and you “correcting them.”

Meanwhile kids are the ones with uncanny ability to perceive what's actually going on in life. We do too if we stop rationalizing ourselves away.

I've always had this really weird relationship with time…

I think that really feeds into me opening my eyes in the morning and feeling this, “Oh, my. Get up. Do something do get, get this out, do it, do. Be live, breathe. Go get space. No one else is up. Go wake up, be in space.”

Even before I had kids I would wake up way earlier than I even wanted to because I would get off on being the first one walking around the neighborhood in San Francisco.

No one else is up. I have this whole place to myself.

I remember, even when I worked a job that I enjoyed in a photo studio, I would have a doctor's appointment or something in the morning and then I would be in an Uber on the way back and be looking at people that are sitting at a cafe, reading a book or on a coffee date and I would feel like an animal in a cage.

Look what you're doing with your time. I have to go be in a building. Not allowed to leave. I loved my job. I loved the people I worked with. And yet, I recoiled at having to be somewhere with this precious time.

Come 11:30 a.m. on the weekend I’d get the sunday scaries that the day's almost over.

Every Sunday. sometimes even on saturday, lol.
Only helped by Larry David & curb your enthusiasm. (how ironic that I just went on a tirade about how we should not curb our enthusiasm but thats one of my favorite shows lolololol) I would start feeling really anxious and just tell my partner “I need Larry.”

Ah, such fickle creatures we are.

I was sitting on my porch rocking in the middle of the day, and I had this feeling come over me…

But here it is.

I've always wanted this.

Right now I’m perusing the job boards for possible part time work to ease monthly expenses but,

I've always wanted to meander through my days, however I want to meander through my days. And it's here.

And ironically, I'm spending a lot of my day looking for ways to take that away from myself again.

What have you wanted for so long and then once you got it,
you didn't realize you had it?

How can we reverse engineer?

i.e.: Instead of getting a part-time job, what else can we take away from the expenses?

There's many different ways to slice this.

Seeing the forest through the trees.

“if I could just do more. I have to do more. I have to be more, make more.”

But that’s trying harder, something that has been glorified by societal norms. It’s tricked us into starting from a place of not enough. “If I do enough, if i AM enough, I can MAKE it work.”

At this point, I feel the upholding of that is just to keep us on this hamster wheel that keeps the economy turning in a very specifically beneficial way. (while being specifically/personally detrimental to most.)

What if I am enough, already?
What if I actually have enough, already?
What if there’s another way?

I'm in a season of pruning.

Healing & pruning.

With my kids in school, it's been really strange & glorious to have this much space.

It’s taking a concerted effort to not make that mean pressure for me.

"OH! HERE IT IS! HERE’S ALL THAT SPACE YOU WANTED! NOW WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO WITH IT?! ARE YOU GONNA MAKE IT WORTH IT?! NO EXCUSE NOW! GO.”

barf.

Sometimes writing out our internal dialogue can feel sobering & gross, but it’s so vital. It’s so much easier to see what’s really going on when you get it out of you in this way.

I've really been intentional about giving myself, dare I say, leisure time.

I’ll have a bunch of stuff on a list I want to get done but then stop and go outside and read on a rocking chair. It’s as if I’m soothing myself as a child.

In a way, I am.

Despite this version of freedom, it still hurts my heart so much.
Silas, my three-year-old who has never been in daycare or school or anything, was so stoked the first week of school. Now the novelty has worn off and he said he misses his mommy.

And as much as I, in that moment want to jump to say, “It's fine. You can stay home!”, I've noticed in myself over the past couple of days this feeling of lightness. A lighter love that overwhelms me in a GOOD way.

I’m able to tap into that good overwhelm because I am not filled to the brim with the anxious overwhelm anymore.

I now have the knowing that safety & space for my nervous system is never an immeasurable distance away. And with that, I'm able to enjoy a different kind of presence with them.

We were going on a family walk on Sunday night. I went to grab my phone for the camera:

"mehhh maybe not. I want to be free and not having anything to hold onto."

" oh, but pictures, I want to be able to take pictures…"

" naw, You don't need to take pictures. It's the same old walk. It's fine. Just be present."

^ !!!!!!

My ears perked up- nearly gave myself whiplash.

I know better than that.

My version of presence IS the photo taking.

I don't have to take the photos, but I want the option.
So I brought my phone.

4 seconds in, as soon as we get on the sidewalk off our driveway. Bam. Bam. Bam.

A wonderful picture of my partner and my shadows with the kids ahead of us on bikes and scooters.

“couldn’t even make it 5 steps off the property?”

I start laughing to myself thinking about how deeply ingrained it is to subscribe to a certain version of presence- even when my lived experience is knowingly different than that.

After that little tug of war situation for the first two minutes, I found myself really going ham and just taking a lot of pictures.

And the taking of the pictures doesn't always mean I'm looking at the the viewfinder or screen. Oftentimes I'll miss it because I'm looking at them in real life too.

What I really want to highlight and draw out here is what's happening there in those moments and what's possible in that experience.

You know how when you're taking a picture and you're like, “ah, this isn't doing it justice.”,

That's how I feel about reality sometimes.

I go to take the picture because when I'm looking at it in real life in that moment, it’s like the frantic whisper of seeing something so precious that you don’t want to scare it away.

"Oh, my gosh. Look at this."

"Look at this. Look at this. Look at this. "

Silas is riding in front of me, curly red hair sticking out from the sides of his helmet. Riding towards his dad. He’s asked all day for this moment. The sun was behind his dad, I behind Silas. Light blinding me so the whole scene is too strongly backlit to fully see.
A magical movie scene.

I take the picture.

Maybe later I can edit this in a way that actually feels like what it was for me.

It's so breathtaking, but even in reality, it doesn’t look as breathtaking as it feels.

And I think about how we never see all the possibilities available to us.

Life happens really fast.


When I think about the soup of this visual/emotional/visceral/quantum/consciousness at play, I always arrive at an NLP perspective.

I took my NLP certification with the fantastic, magical being that is Hayley Carr. The following information if from the delicious book she wrote-

There are 2 million bits of information coming at you every literal second.

Those are passing through internal filters: your attitudes, your values, your beliefs, your memories, your decisions, your language, your meta-programs and time, space, and matter energy.

So those around seven chunks filter to inform your internal map of reality.

And then your RAS (reticular activating system) is what deciphers which information is let into the conscious mind and what goes into the recesses of the unconscious mind.

So it goes through a process of deletion, distortion, and generalization based on your internal filters & determines which information makes it through to become your experience of reality.

Your experience of what you know, to be real. Your map of reality is less than 0.01% of reality or potentiality of the territory available to you. At all time.

Your memory is stored in every cell of your being at the subconscious level.

It's a snapshot of a lived experience, but every single bit of information for each lived experience, including the raw data without meaning subscribed, is still being stored in the depths of the unconscious.

So when you think your intuition is unreliable or “woo” compared to your conscious logical understanding of a situation, just remember that the conscious mind remembers almost nothing and creates meaning from your memories, which are only a small fraction of your whole lived experience.

The intuition on the other hand has also stored every other piece of data that enters your senses in your nervous system. This is why we can get a feeling before we have words for it. Because the feeling is based on all the information you've ever taken in ever.

Okay, I'm going to stop there.

Think about how much stock we put into what we consider to be evidence/fact/”real”.

Your gut/intuition is almost always right. It's far wiser than what you can cognitively recall and make sense of.

The most important things in life make no sense.

So when I think about this from a photo taking perspective, I think about how that impulse to take that camera up and to point it at the thing that you're pointing it at is not a fluke of inspiration or a fluke of skill or whatever else we can shallowly deduce it to be.

It's every fucking memory in your body, every experience you've ever lived. Every intuitive thought and sense that you have.
All rising up in you and causing you to act.

And then to think about how we can shame ourselves-
"Oh, no, it's not the time to take a picture. Oh, Just be present."

What is more present than every fucking memory in your body, every experience you've ever lived. Every intuitive thought and sense that you have.
All rising up in you and causing you to act?

And then it doesn't stop there because especially if you are a photographic artist that enjoys the editing process, you bring that picture into your world to make it look more like what it felt like in your body when you experienced it.

I'm really gravitating towards super pushed, strong, less natural color.
For years, I was really into more muted tones but I had felt those growing pains of making something that wasn’t filling me in the same way.

I didn’t feel that internal click.

I was creating a past version of truth, but it no longer was for me so I had to catch up with it.

We're always growing, we're always learning. We're always morphing, transforming. Wonder. Pain. Joy. All of it.

But sometimes we can get so locked in the story of who we have been up until this point that there's a push and pull that happens.

You're not quite here and you're not quite there.
You're straddling that line and that can be uncomfortable and really hard to even have verbiage to be able to explain and identify it.

This is why the pictures are these powerful cheat codes.

Cheat codes to keeping you honest with yourself. Keeping you tethered to yourself.

“I made this. This primal instinct came up in me and I made this.”

And only you can feel whether or not it's resonant.

Only you can diagnose and orient to what you feel about the picture you just took.

So that's why I say when you land on any photo that you took, look at it.
Back up.
Zoom in.
Back the fuck up.
Change your seat of consciousness.

Don't look at it as “I took this photo”
Come out of that seat and look at it as if someone else took that photo and start to think about that if you need to give it some air and space. Sometimes our judgments on ourselves are so intense that we have a hard time seeing inside the bottle. But when you come outside of the bottle, you're able to read the label more easily.

We know that where your focus/attention is expands- no matter what it is.

The photos show you what you're focusing on.

So loosen up that grip.
Loosen up that filtering that might happen around what you do and do not take pictures of, or how you do it. Really give it space.

Breathe into it. Let your instinct live as authentically as possible.

Because that's how you're going to get the most relevant, powerful, resonant information from yourself.

That's what this is.

Our photographs are us teaching ourselves, if we let them.

Your photo habit is a cheat code for listening to your instincts.

It’s seeing & hearing what you're trying to tell yourself.

It's on the tip of your nose.

Still have to do baths. Getting eaten up by mosquitos. Just want to get back home-

"Wait! I gotta get mommy a flower!"

Just that little voice. Wait. I got to get mommy a flower. And what a production it is. Getting off the bike. Running to the patch of grass. Picking up the tiniest little weed flowers that just crumble in his rough little hands.

And then he has to find more.

I lift my phone.

press the shutter, press the shutter, press the shutter.

Oh, my gosh.
Look at him.
Look at this effort.
Look how he's hunched over.
Look at how he's got a backpack on and he's about to tumble over.
Look at the innocence and the purity.
Look at his love for me.

he’s getting so big but still so small.

he walks towards me, click click, click, click, click, click.

he’s so close that it doesn't even make sense that I'm taking the picture because it’s all a blur.

but that’s not the point.

I click for no guaranteed reward.

I click because if I didn’t I might explode from the feelings.

I click for him. I click for me. I click for life.

I click for love.

Being in a moment, in that way, brings you inside of it.

Not around it- engaging inside of it while it's happening.

And there's space for all of it, right?

You could take one picture of that and be content.

But there's something that happens when you're pressing that button.

You know you're pressing it because it's so important.
And so you press, press, press, press, press.

You're finding the pulse of your life,
through the cadence of hitting the shutter.

this, this, this, this, this.

It’s nudging yourself awake.
Wake up, wake up, wake up, wake up, wake up, wake up.
It's here.
It's here.
Now.

And the beautiful thing about the whole process is when you're seeing like that, it seamlessly integrates into your life, into your being, deeper.

You're unavoidably recalibrating your knowing.
Your meaning in life.
Your intentionality
What's important to you.

It keeps you grounded and centered in your core.

A knowing of, life is crazy, but also right now, nothing else matters but this, and even when other things are distracting me, this still holds its center. It holds its weight in importance. I feel that. It's in me.

And when you stray, you go back to the pictures. you listen to the pictures.

Listen to what you did, look at what you did.

I have an unconditional trust and knowing that I am present for my life.

I am tapped into the heartbeat of my life because of my photo practice.

I can harness that in an intentional way choosing to be more active in it, or I can flow with it.
I can go to it for strength and courage and reassurance or I can rest in the knowing that I'm unavoidably, recalibrated to what I've witnessed.

You create your memories.

It is so horrifyingly easy to gloss by your one and only life.
It is so easy to miss when you're not giving yourself the time and space to make meaning of what's in front of you.

Because at the end of the day,
What are we doing?
What's it all mean?
What's the point?

Nothing means anything to us until we assign the meaning to it.
Consciously or unconsciously.
No one is immune.

It's recognizing where and what meaning you're assigning in your life.

Meaning makes matter.
Meaning makes it matter.

I believe the single most important thing we can do for being awake in our life is to protect/nourish/support our instinct and impulses. especially when it comes to our photo taking.

If it's not photos for you, it can be writing, it can be drawing, whatever it is for you-
That creative impulse. Honor your instinct.

Because you're trying to tell yourself something, you're trying to experience something. You're recognizing something vital.

It's a sacred act.

The next time you find yourself feeling that energy and then tightening your grip, grabbing at the mind’s idea of logic or how you should be in any given moment-

Consider what would it be like to let the camera, the pencil, the whatever it is, be the portal to being in it more.

Give that to yourself.

Let yourself really sink into that.

[**all photographs in this post are cell phone.]