Eliza Lynn Tobin

Are You Living in The Land of Later?

ElizaTobin — Thu, 17 May 2012 17:01:13 +0000

Do you ever find yourself thinking things like…

I will start that project once I have enough money/time
I’ll start exercising after the weekend
I will commit to my meditation/yoga practice fully as soon as I’m feeling better
I will start painting daily when I have a larger studio space
I will work on growing my business as soon as I move to that new location
I will start eating healthy as soon as the holidays are over
I will [insert something you will start doing as soon as XYZ is in place]

If your nodding your head at the computer screen, then welcome, because like me, you may be spending a lot of your time living in The Land of Later.

The Land of Later is an ambiguous landscaped place where your ideals/plans/best intentions often get washed up on the shores of inaction. It’s a place that looks a lot like life, but may not leave you feeling very alive.

Over the weekend I had an epiphany about Living in the Land of Later:

I was kayaking on the Snake River in Grand Teton National Park with my husband. Evening was falling. The sun was descending towards the horizon and beginning to paint the mountains as giant silhouettes, casting them in deep purples and blues smattered by the lightness of leftover snow. We paddled around a bend of the river to a scene gushing with a moving, flowing beauty and yet still, in it’s calm command of itself.

Here the river slowed and widened. An Audubon’s worth of birds were hanging out on an island of earth and grass: Cormorants with their wings spread wide to dry. Geese, singing and squawking. Ducks meandering mud and padding through the ripples. On the other side of the island, four Trumpeter Swans glided side by side through the water. As we slid our kayaks quietly past, the swans startled and in a symphony of great white wings, the four birds lifted into the air, framed by the mountains and touched by the dying, golden light.

I was in deep awe, as if a single, high and moving musical note had echoed through my body, quieting the whole of me. The Land of Later (and it’s corresponding chorus of thoughts) dissolved and my skin tingled. I felt light, content and inspired.

As if I’d paddled into a new realm of myself, I had a moment of knowing that this is what it’s like to feel fully alive, to be truly here and breathing in the container of the present.

For this slight shadow of time, I’d emerged from The Land of Later and it came to me that

I don’t have to wait for the perfect conditions to start fully living. I can start living right here, right now.

And you know what? So can you.

working at it every minute of every day,

Embracing Your Raw and Wild Side

ElizaTobin — Fri, 11 May 2012 19:12:32 +0000

{to purchase this original painting click here it’s in the “Yantras and Chakras” section of the Gallery}

I really like stability. I like knowing what’s going on and having a good idea of where I’m going and what I’m doing. And while I love adventure and learning new things, there is always that undeniable pull to the routine, the regular and the resistance to change.

However, life it seems, doesn’t always like to cooperate with this modality of familiarity. It doesn’t always let you rest and sleep with the lights on, does it? No, sometimes life is messy. It’s unpredictable, untamed and wild.

Life as we know it, often contains a raw power, a turbulence like energy that has the ability to shake us to the core.

There is a Tantric deity called Kali that represents this kind of energy and I have been finding myself thinking a lot about her lately. Kali is the goddess of transformation by fire because she has a way of throwing us into the flames of the Unknown, that raw unpredictable place where fear and doubt reside. But in my experience, there is something about that terrifying place that actually has the power to totally transform me. It can make us braver, stronger, and maybe softer too (in a good way). We come out the other side, better for the burning.

Kali comes from the sanskrit word, “kala” which means time or death. Kali devours time, she eats it up on us by pressing us through the cycles of creation and destruction. It’s like the process of baking bread (not that I’m much of a baker, but I’ve already used my painting analogy in the video below…oh yes, I forgot to mention..I made a video!) But I digress…when you make bread, you throw the ingredients together and then through the process of baking, it’s transformed from wet ingredients into yummy baked goodness, a lovely process of creation. Then you eat the bread (perhaps with some delicious spread) and it’s dissolved back into the darkness of not being bread anymore. Look for these cycles in your life, watch as you go through them again and again.

Sometimes life is difficult, sometimes it’s delicious, either way it’s going to find ways to throw us into the fire and transform us. The only way out is through.

With this time munching, fire inducing Goddess of transformation Kali on my mind, I was inspired to dedicate a painting to her and incorporated her yantra as a way of embracing her raw and wild energy in my life.

And speaking of terrifying, I made a video talking a little bit more about Kali and the inspiration behind the painting. Check it out and I’d love to know what you think. (Would you be interested in seeing more videos? And if yes, about anything in particular?)

So how about you, how do you deal with terror and turbulence? How do you embrace your raw and wild side?

With lots of Love and Rahhhhhhhhhr,

Resources for the post: The Tantric Way by Ajit Mookerjee | Tantra by Georg Feurstien | Tools for Tantra by Harish Johari

The Generous Gift a.k.a Mandalicious

ElizaTobin — Thu, 10 May 2012 22:20:30 +0000

with love,

Rest Mandala

ElizaTobin — Fri, 04 May 2012 00:01:08 +0000

yours in circularity,

Mandalas for May

ElizaTobin — Thu, 03 May 2012 01:01:23 +0000

Mandalas are incredibly soothing to make. There is something so satisfying about drawing and playing within a circular shape. While creating mandalas, my mind becomes very calm and focused. It is very much a meditative process.

I have been making Mandalas for a couple of years now and decided that this month, I want to attempt to create a mandala every day! What do you think? A May Mandala Marathon? I will create them in my sketchbook (like the one above) or incorporate them into my paintings perhaps. I also love finding mandalas in natural objects like flowers:

So, I invite you to follow along in this journey of Mandala-making over the next month!

xo,

Mo’ Projects, Mo’ Play

ElizaTobin — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 23:34:13 +0000

I have to admit, I’m not a one-project-at-a-time-kinda girl. I’m a project playa. And even though, this way of working can make me feel a bit crazy at times, I love the thrill of having multiple things going on, all in different stages of progress.

Most recently, I’ve been working with the amazing Courtney Pearce once again on a new project for 30 Days of Yoga and Art and as part of that, I created a new logo for the site and have been giving the site’s design a bit of a makeover:

Speaking of logos, I’ve created this one for yoga teacher and studio owner of Community Soul Yoga, Kristen Holmson, who is doing such great things in the world and I was so excited to help her create this part of her branding!

I’ve been working on reopening an etsy shop with pieces from my Swirl and Bloom Collection of artwork. One of these prints just might make the perfect Mother’s day present, eh? (It’s coming up on May 13th! Just saying…)

And I’ll be adding more the Swirl and Bloom shop soon, including these earrings, which is another project that I’ve been playing with!

I’ve continued to play with some more big paintings, adding more layers on. I think this one is getting closer to finished:

I’ve also spent a lot of time in April resting, thinking, brainstorming, and incubating new ideas and mo’ projects (yup, more.) I think part of what I love about this work is that there is always somewhere new to go, something new to explore. I think this makes me what Margaret Lobenstine calls a “Renaissance Soul.” She describes the qualities that Renaissance souls possess in her book, Renaissance Soul:

Renaissance Souls have three primary characteristics:

1. We prefer variety to concentrating on just one thing.

2. Our process involves widening our options instead of narrowing our choices, and going more by what our energy feels like than by what our schedule says we should be doing

3. After we succeed at something, we often opt for going on to something new rather than expanding on that success.

What about you, are you a one-project-at-a-time kinda person or do you get super stoked about having all kinds of irons in the fire?

Happy Weekend,

Who do you need to be today?

ElizaTobin — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 17:41:36 +0000

This morning during meditation, the question “who do I need to be today” floated into the spaciousness of my head. In the quiet that followed, my heart answered:

Today, I need to be

Eliza, the Joyful.
Eliza, the Outgoing
Eliza, the Confident
Eliza, the BRAVE
Eliza, the girl who DOES what she says she’s gonna DO.

As these words filled me, sunshine began to filter through the shades and glint off the bronze statues of Ganesh and Shiva Nataraja that sit on my alter, splashing warmth across my face. And I thought yes, today is going to be a good day. Then I took the words to my art journal:

What about you? Who Do you need to be today?

P.S. I’m teaching a Yoga and Creativity Series: “Yoga and Art Journaling” here in Jackson, WY starting Thursday April 26th. Are you in Jackson or know someone who is who’d be interested in participating in the series?

Click here for more details!

Happy Monday!

xo,

What’s a Yantra?

ElizaTobin — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 19:04:32 +0000

If you’ve been wondering what the designs are in my newest paintings, well then you are in luck cuz I am here to tell ya! They are called yantras and I’d like to share with you a little bit more about them:

A yantra is a geometric diagram that is meant to be a representation of the divine or the cosmos.

Traditionally, yantras are used as tools for meditation (as a point of focus). One can meditate upon a yantra that has already been created or one can even use the process of creating a yantra as meditation!

Each yantra contains a specific type of energy and are sometimes thought of as being “power diagrams.” The myriad of symbols that make up a yantra (for example, upward facing or downward facing triangles, circles or lotus petals) all have a special significance and can be arranged in all sorts of ways to create a specific, energetic resonance.

“Sri Yantra”

One of the most recognizable yantras, is probably the Sri Yantra. This beautiful yantra is made of up interlocking upward and downward facing triangles, representing the unification of the masculine (up) and feminine (down) principles that create the universe.

Madhu Khanna (who I the incredible oppurtunity to interview while I was in India) writes in her book Yantra,

The [Sri] yantra is divised to give a vision of the totality of existence, so that the adept may internalize its symbols for the ultimate realization of his [her] unity with the cosmos.

I should mention that yantras, whose root comes from ‘yam’ which means to “sustain, hold or support the energy of a particular element, object or concept (Khanna)” are also related to mantras—the seed syllable sounds like “om” that you might hear at the beginning of a yoga class. Mantras, seed sounds, have corresponding vibrational images (yantras) that those sounds create. So when you say a mantra syllable like “Sa” it has a vibrational quality that produces a particular color, image and energy!

Many Hindu dieties, such as Shiva, Vishnu and the many faces of the goddess Shakti (feminine creative energy) have their very own yantras as well.

The yantras I’ve used in my most recent paintings are both related to the energy of the Goddess Kali (a form of Shakti). Kali embodies the quality of destruction (destruction that therefore makes space for new creation to begin).

She is like a forest fire that burns to the ground, so that the forest may have the nutrients it needs to support new life.

So that’s it for now! I hope you enjoyed this little introduction to the world of Yantras.

****It’s important to tell you that this is a very deep, vast subject (one I personally find incredibly facinating) and what I’ve just shared with you is a very brief description. However you can find out MORE about yantras using the great resources I used for this post. Here they are:

Yantra by Madhu Khanna

The Tantric Way by Ajit Mookerjee

Happy Wednesday,

In like a Lion, Out like a Lamb

ElizaTobin — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 16:02:26 +0000

March came in a roarin’ this year, sidelining me with a nasty flu at the beginning of it’s days. Luckily, the rest of the month melted into a gentle spring break in which my husband and I took off for Utah. The sunshine and warmer weather down there was so uplifting and refreshing after a long cold stretch of Jackson winter. And not only did I enjoy having the sun on my face, I was also so inspired by the incredible landscape:

Red rocks against milky skies that splashed both gray and blue.

Architectural wonders made by wind, water and time.

Canyons carved into the landscape like ancient monuments.

Now it’s back to Jackson to enjoy the rest of spring, to watch the snow slip away and to feel the sun start to thaw these beautiful mountains. And for me, it time to get back to painting!

Happy April!

xo,

Inspired

ElizaTobin — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 00:17:22 +0000

I’ve been thinking a lot these last few days about what really inspires me, what ignites my personal creative fire, what makes me feel alive. So I did a journal page about the things that inspire me:

What about you, what inspires you?

with sparkle and color,