Incredible Lightness of Beingness

High on a hilltop at the height of summer in Tuscany a group of people have gathered; there is loud music, dancing and laughter; this is not a party but they are certainly celebrating something. They are dressed in simple clothes and on the ground surrounding them are discarded paint brushes, empty pots of acrylic paint and a large paint soaked canvas sheet. But it’s not just the canvas that is covered in paint, the people are too. One woman, her toes doused green, wears a t-shirt graffitied with paint and a barely visible slogan that reads – ‘You Save Happiness.’ She’s laughing and holding hands with the group as they spontaneously slide onto the canvas, their bodies playfully making shapes in the spreading paint.

Welcome to the Primal Painting workshop at Osho Miasto, a commune in Tuscany, where you don’t learn to paint by numbers; you learn to paint with your consciousness, which sounds heavy – and at times it was – but as the scene above shows it was also a lot of fun. I had enrolled in the workshop because several years ago a friend gifted to me the book Reawakening of Art by the talented artist Meera Hashimoto. In the book she writes about her career as an artist and her time learning meditation with the mystic Osho in Pune, India. She subsequently developed Primal Painting – a fusion of art with modern therapy techniques, meditation and dance; with Meera there was always dancing. She believed when we open up to creativity through painting and movement, we release our minds from habitual thoughts and connect with our original selves. In Primal Painting we are both observers and participants, communicating our truth and ‘beingness.’

Get out of your head and get into your heart. Think less, feel more.”
— Osho

Continuing Meera’s work (she unfortunately died in 2017) is her husband, Svagito Liebermeister, a spiritual teacher and author of several books about meditation and self-healing. An experienced psychotherapist with over 40 years of working with people, he is soft-spoken and compassionate but direct. His workshops are a mix of candour, humour and practical self-work. Through Primal Painting, he says, he is still connected to Meera and wants to continue sharing her healing work. On this particular course he was joined by Kantu Nishigori, a gifted artist who also trained with Meera and runs workshops in Bali. Between them they guided us through a series of meditative and playful activities that involved dancing or painting or, more often than not, both.

Tuscany in August was hot – 38 degrees hot. And while I wanted to be there, I also really wanted to leave and check into a 5-star hotel, I had already started googling possibilities on Airbnb. I went to the first session out of curiosity and a sense of duty, but also mostly because I knew the hall was air-conditioned, unlike my room.

The first day began, as every day would begin, with loud music and wild dancing. Initially I was self-conscious but eventually I thought less about how I looked and more about how I felt. Then it was time to paint. Giant pieces of paper were laid out on the floor next to small jars of acrylic paints in vibrant primary colours along with soft brushes from India. We took a moment to be still, touching the blank paper with our hands, feeling its roughness and readiness to be painted. We were encouraged to create and to experiment without planning; to play, to have fun with the paint and to allow our energy to appear in our paintings. There was no right or wrong and there would be no judgement. We weren’t painting a still life or a landscape; we were painting our inner life – therefore only we could be the judge of the authenticity of our work.

Beauty comes from not the urge to get something, but it is participating with a moment of light and dark.”
— Meera

Over the next few days we alternately worked by ourselves, with a partner or in small groups. Afterwards, we always came together in a circle to share our thoughts and to communicate our individual experiences. The first step to communicating honestly with others is being honest with yourself. What did we really see in our paintings? As I listened to the group, I realised they were like pieces of me, each expressing an emotion that I too connected with when painting. Like a spinning colour wheel there was a fluidity to our emotions, which at any given moment manifested in our paintings. Sharing honestly about those feelings connected us to each other.

During one session, somewhat unexpectedly, my grief poured out and into my painting. Each dot and splatter my buried anguish conversing with me. Deep blues and greens swirled and danced across the paper like I had swirled and danced around the room. My trapped energy escaped and my painting consumed my sorrow. What appeared before me in the paint was a landscape, a vivid map of my emotion. Areas hitherto uncharted. So much of our lives is about finding ways to escape reality. There are parts of ourselves we don’t like to look at and don’t want to acknowledge. But they exist. If we deny the flawed parts, the angry parts, the sad parts – we are denying half of who we are, half of our life. Primal Painting allowed these hidden corners, these veiled parts to emerge. By setting them free I also gave myself permission to be free.

When you become conscious, you give birth to your own being and that is the greatest creativity.”
— Svagito

As the sessions progressed we became more spontaneous, more curious; we became childlike, we played, which is how we ended up creating our giant ‘self portrait’ with our bodies drenched in paint. We re-learnt what we already knew – everything in life is temporary, especially our thoughts and emotions. The phrase ‘to be in the moment’ should be rewritten as ‘to play in the moment’. (Because if we forget how to play, we forget that life is fundamentally a game.)

And now it’s early evening. It’s still hot but I’m not bothered about that anymore as I drive down the hillside away from Osho Miasto, golden daggers of light piercing through the dark green woods. My car lightly bounces along the winding track, crushing brittle white rocks beneath its tyres, creating a trail of dust which billows skyward like a smoke signal to the heavens. Three days ago I arrived, three days later I’m leaving or should that be the other way around? I don’t feel new, or reborn; I feel entirely myself. Turns out my T-shirt was wrong, I didn’t need to save happiness, I needed to save myself.

Dance is the bridge to meditation, dance is the bridge to painting, dance is the bridge to psychology. Because dance means your body is saying yes to life. Without this energy of saying yes to life, you can’t really look at your issues with dignity, with love, with relaxation.”
— Meera

Originally published in femmereview.com – reproduced with permission from the author

‘Joy of Creativity’ Primal Painting Workshop this summer will be again at Osho Miasto, Italy, 24–27 August 2024 – oshomiasto.it

There will also be a Meera’s Osho Art Therapy and Painting Training, in Bilbao, Spain, 24 July – 4 August 2024 – svagito-liebermeister.com

More dates for upcoming workshops: meera-art-foundation.com and svagito-liebermeister.com

Related article on Osho News

• Primal Painting – An excerpt from Meera’s posthumously published book, Dancing into the Unknown: Osho Painting and Art Therapy