March Love Letter: Ahimsa and nonviolence
Hello beautiful friends,
March is my birthday month, so happy birthday to my fellow Pisces. I want to start this month’s letter by saying thank you for being here. I truly appreciate you.
This past month I have been focusing on creating space to connect with myself. At the end of January I had just crashed and burned trying to paint my 90 paintings in 90 days still life series and was not feeling great. Journaling is a big part of my life that I never really share about because it is so personal. But a lot of the themes in my monthly mail club are as a result of my journaling practice.
Since moving to Austin I have been spending time rebuilding my relationship with yoga. I have been a yogi since 2013, became a teacher in 2015 and stopped teaching in 2020. But in January I have been able to reconnect with it in a completely different way. I started relearning The Yamas and Niyamas through Deborah Adele’s book (a yoga teacher training classic). These are part of the 8 limbs of yoga and considered the behavioral and self-discipline guidelines. In particular I have been focusing this month on Ahimsa which means practicing nonviolence. When I first learned this when I was 24 in yoga teacher training, I interpreted it as being a vegetarian and being nice to yourself and others. But now I look at it a lot deeper. I think about not just being nice to myself, but understanding why I am not being nice to myself and what it means to accept who I am in every moment. I’m also thinking about what it actually means to love and accept people as who they are and not interfering.
March’s Mail Club
The art in this month's mail club represents ideas, feelings, and behaviors that ground me in acceptance. The colorful dyed painting is one I created last year when starting to experiment with dyeing techniques on raw canvas. I really love all the different layers of color and it gives me a sense of calmness while also feeling very rooted. It is titled Weightless after the song by Ben Böhmer and Panama.
The green painting was the first painting I sold this year. It’s really significant to me because the sale occurred out of the blue. It serves as a reminder that there are a lot of things that are outside of my control. I never know when a painting is going to resonate with someone or when a sale might occur. Sometimes things just take time, but eventually they will find their home (or become another painting). This painting is titled In the Morning I’ll Be Better after the song by Tennis.
The stickers are from a collection called Freedom and Isolation. I made this work a few years ago and it was inspired by the artist Georgia O’keeffe and my grandmother. Both of these women spent a significant part of their life in the desert and away from their families. At the time this resonated with me because I felt like I could only really be myself when I was alone and away from people who knew me. But now I have a different perspective. I feel like freedom comes when you are in tune with and accepting of yourself regardless of who is around you. One of my favorite yoga teachers Elena Brower used mountains as a metaphor for accepting what is. When I heard this it made me think of this collection. Mountains are always changing naturally. Trees fall, streams flow, move things around, and it all serves a purpose. So every time I look at one of these mountain paintings it now reminds me that things change for the good, even if we cannot see the fruits of it yet. It also grounds me when I start to feel like the change I want to occur is not happening quick enough or I need to do something to make it happen. The background of the sticker sheet is the cover of my journal which inspired the color theme for this month.
I hope these pieces can bring some inspiration and positivity to you. I have been putting them up around my house and in my journal to serve as visual reminders to anchor me when I am feeling disconnected from myself. If you would like to purchase March’s mail club mailing, you can shop past mail clubs here. You can join The Club for April’s mailing by signing up here by March 15th.
Thanks for reading, thanks for being here. I hope you have a wonderful month!
love & light
-anna