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Dana

Sacred Imagination
February 2002 Column & Gallery

 
by Dana Reynolds

Each month, Dana Reynolds shares her life-transforming thoughts, ideas, and sacred imagination based around our "theme of the month."  Dana is a visionary Spiritual Midwife, who devotes herself to helping women birth their creative gifts into the world.


The Crafting of Relationship

Creative visualization is a powerful process. However, it takes more than visualizing to create and invite change in one’s life. Positive, constructive, action and an attitude of optimistic confident perseverance, combined with prayer and gratitude, are also necessary ingredients for drawing forth the desires and needs of the heart.

In a relationship, creating a unified vision of what is desired to benefit and enrich the life of the individual partners, and also the relationship itself, can be a very powerful process. This month I would like to share with you some suggestions for ways to co-create your "Relationship Visual Prayer" with your partner. I’d like to share a personal story with you to illustrate this concept.

When we turned the calendar to begin the New Year, my husband and I decided that we would take our New Years’ resolutions and create a collage to express what we were desiring to do and to manifest in the coming months. We spent an afternoon making our individual collages to serve as a visual reminder to our commitments to our personal goals. Later we shared them with one another, finally placing them on our desks to help keep us on track and focused.

In the week that followed, our personal visual prayers proved to be such very powerful icons that we decided the following weekend to work on a co-creative collage to create a visual prayer to our marriage/relationship. Here’s the process we created. Please feel free to elaborate these ideas to fit your particular relationship and creative inspiration.

We began by turning off the TV and getting quiet. We lit a candle and sat quietly for a while meditating on our life together. Then each of us took time to individually write a list of things we would like to change, enhance, or begin as a couple. Think of this as a wish list. For example, my husband wants us to take more weekend getaways to nearby places of interest. I would like for us to take a continuing education class together to learn more about a topic that is intriguing to both of us. Both of us wrote independently that we want to create opportunities to be with our children and granddaughter as often as possible. After our lists were complete we shared them, and as we talked, we came up with a few more ideas that we believed would improve and deepen our relationship.

When we had discussed our lists, we gathered some magazines, scissors, and glue sticks and moved to the table in my workspace where we could settle in for a couple of hours to create our relationship visual prayer. Visual prayer is a visual representation of intention. This may take the form of a collage, an altar, a painting, sculpture, or arrangement of touchstones created with a specific intention for healing, manifestation, or blessing. Intention is at the heart of the creation of a visual prayer.

Don and I intended to create a collage to visually portray not only our love for one another, but also the various attunements we desire to make to our relationship in the coming year. For an hour we each cut and tore images that held meaning for us from the stack of magazines.

When we had gathered a nice pile of clippings we used an 8 ½" x 11" piece of cardboard for the backing of the collage and we worked together, selecting and placing the various images to form our visual prayer. The process itself stimulated more conversation about our relationship and also led to a lot of laughter when we discovered we had clipped some identical images.

Everything came together in a matter of minutes, as though we were simply acting as the hands of our relationship, as if the relationship itself had energy of its own. We carefully glued the pieces in place... our visual prayer felt complete. The next day we took it to our local copy shop and reduced the collage by fifty percent on the color copy machine, making two copies. We placed each copy in a small plastic frame and now they rest on our desks next to our individual visual prayers.

These icons are constant reminders to stay focused and to take time for those things that we have deemed important to the health and well being of our individual bodies, minds, and spirits, and also the spirit of our relationship. Perhaps on Valentine’s Day you and your beloved would like to create your Relationship Visual Prayer.

We placed the original collage for our relationship on our marriage altar. In our bedroom we have a table that serves as a devotional-offering place for our relationship. A heart-shaped silver bowl holds a collection of heart touchstones we have collected together. There are also meaningful poems for inspiration and photographs depicting us throughout our thirty-eight years together.

Above the altar is a shrine that hangs on the wall. It is made of aged tin and has a small glass door that opens to a small inner compartment. At the back of the compartment is our wedding invitation and a photograph of us as newlyweds. Standing against the photo is a rolled paper cylinder tied with a white satin ribbon, this is our marriage contract that we created together several years ago following a stormy period in our marriage. Our original wedding rings are tied together and placed alongside our contract. We choose new rings when we renewed our vows and made our new contract.

A relationship/marriage altar or shrine should change and evolve just as the relationship changes and evolves. Changing the arrangement of touchstones, placing fresh flowers on the altar, adding a new treasure or tokens for your beloved makes this sacred place a living breathing expression of your love and commitment to one another.

For those who may not currently be in a relationship, but are desiring to attract their partner or soul-mate, you can create a relationship visual prayer or altar by including those things you hope to share and experience with your future beloved. This process can help you to discover what the truth of your heart’s desire truly is.

February is the month of hearts and the expression of love. Open your heart and pour love into all of your relationships this month and let that love grow and spill into next month and the next and the next and the next...


You are invited to submit your story and accompanying photos to be considered as a feature for the Sacred Imagination column. E-mail me at dana@sacredimagination.com for details.

Copyright© 2002 Dana Reynolds. 

 

Read Dana's Past "Sacred Imagination" Columns:

January 2002 - "Meditating with the Higher Self"

December 2001 - "The Prayer Cord"

November 2001 - "Explore, Express, Imagine"

October 2001 - "Seeking Sacred Alchemy"

September 2001 - "Invoking Your Muse"

August 2001 - "The Blessings of Daily Bread"

July 2001 - "Entertaining the Dream Visitor"

May 2001 - "Embracing the Whole: Choices for Conscious Living"

April 2001 "Nourishing the Souls of the Children"

March 2001 "Opening the Senses to Beauty"

February 2001 "The Eyes of Love"

January 2001 "Patterns of Authenticity"

December 2000 "Finding Peace in the Fields of Time"

November 2000 "Cultivating Gratitude: Heart-Hugs and Prayer Leaves"

October 2000 "Journey to the Center - The Sacred Mystery of the Labyrinth"

September 2000 "The Heart and Craft of Healing"

August 2000 "Transforming Life’s Challenges into Beauty and Story"

July 2000 "Sacred Spaces Invite the Muses of the Soul"


Read Dana's Soulful Living Feature Articles:

Visual Prayers

Intuition and the Sacred Imagination: The Dance of Co-creation


Leaf
For ten years, Dana Reynolds has been facilitating women’s spiritual presentations and retreats nationwide. Her work as a Spiritual Midwife, one who assists women as they birth their creative gifts into the world, is the foundation of all her endeavors. Her background as a visual artist and writer enriches her Spiritual Midwifery: Birthing the Feminine Soul workshops.

As the creator of an art making process known as visual prayer, Dana teaches women how to combine ritual with sacred intention to create altars, collages, spirit dolls, and other touchstones. The creation of sacred spaces is also paramount to the Spiritual Midwifery experience. Her web-site http://www.sacredimagination.com offers samplings of her visual prayer collages, poetry, and a workshop catalogue.

Be An Angel

Dana is the author of the whimsical and colorfully illustrated book, Be An Angel, a co-creation with illustrator and graphic designer, Karen Blessen, (Simon & Schuster). Her essay, Visual Prayers is included in the anthology, Our Turn, Our Time: Women Coming of Age, edited by Cynthia Black, (Beyond Words Publishing).

Our Turn Our Time

A trained labyrinth facilitator, Dana incorporates the labyrinth and other spiritual wisdom into her retreats and workshops. She recently traveled to Chartres and Vezelay Cathedrals in France to gather information pertaining to ancient sacred mystical traditions. She currently lectures on such topics as spiritual midwifery, sacred journal keeping, feminine spiritual wisdom, and the early Christian women saints and mystics.

Dana’s life follows the spiral path from rim to center and back again. She looks for the sacred in forgotten places and openly embraces the great Mystery of life. Guiding women to the discovery of their creative inner gifts is the passion that fuels her soul.

 

Visit Dana at:
www.SacredImagination.com 

 

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