Traveling to Gay Mecca: The Art of Being Therapeutic

A week before the solar eclipse on April 20, my birthday, the last degree of Aries, I am writing you from Puerta Vallarta, the Mexican beach resort city on the Pacific Ocean's Bahía de Banderas in the Mexican state of Jalisco. What kind of “gay” am I, to quote Tanya, that I have never been to this gay Mecca, as beautiful as it is commercialized? I must admit, I adore this gay “zona romantica.” But I also had a few struggles while there that required some inner work—and art making.

Being a noble child of children of the Great Depression can be depressing, but sobering. I also studying Marx in College, who is a profound philosopher, taking the mental abstractions of Hegel into the real world of the “means of production” and the “alienation of labor.” As such, I was acutely aware of being considered one of those people who could be said to take advantage of the “estrangement from labor” while in Mexico. Mexico is a place worthy of the greatest study. It possesses a deep and powerful revolutionary past and a pre-Columbian one — also a mystical mythology. For example, the poetry of Sor Juana’s should be . So I actually felt guilty during this trip. And this guilt threatened to interrupt the very good I was trying to do for my work-a-holic self. Could I calm the fuck down?

So what did I do to manage my internal contradictions: I started to paint, which is one way I do inner work. Inner work can be fun. You can also do it on vacation.

Very few people know this about me. I am a painter. I have never had any formal training. But when I started doing serious psychoanalysis when I was 29-years-of-age, I learned how painting through one’s non-dominant hand, to channel the unconscious. worked as a healing art.

When I feel myself attacked internally by various forces and complexes, I have learned that is best NOT to drink them into oblivion (and that also means not over-eating nor over-sexing) but to address their concerns as if these forces and complexes were “people” in their own right. Along with my trusty journal, the act of painting takes the “edge” off the harshest neurotic voices and settles everybody down into a kind of mystical calm where I feel almost a collaborator with existential angst rather than a protagonist or an antagonist.

I carry this painting with me wherever I go anywhere. It is a rendering of a dream of my dead homophobic father lying in a coffin. In this “visitation,” he asks me to forgive him for the crimes against my gay humanity he committed while drunk or filled with frustrations of hi sown. I I felt compelled to paint this dream into life as a ritual of healing and of loving kindness to myself and to all the people with whom I come into contact.

That’s a secret that I am now sharing with you.

This paintings have been collecting dust for the last thirty years—hundreds of paintings. I decided when I was on the trip to Puerta Vallarta, as part of my new life, and as a honoring of the major changes happening astrologically, to now share them with you in these blogs but also they will be made available on a new account I am creating. You can click here if you are interested in this form of “active imagination.”

An interesting new insight I had while drawing in PV: There is no reason to feel guilty about feeling guilty. Suffering with one’s own mind is not all bad. If one can work with the kaleidoscope of throughs and reactions which arise from the magma of the mind, powerful insights about how to balance oneself emerge: how not to run away from oneself, how to work with the intensities and internal struggles that plague one, whether at work or on vacation The idea is not to lose oneself in tending to the guilt voices but engaging them in a push-and-=pull. Self-criticism is healthy if it is matched with the voice from a deeper source of wisdom that teaches us how to deal with multiple feelings and multiple realities. In future blogs, I will share more paintings and how to mediate my struggle between my needs for “rest,” “dissociation” and “action.” Each one can be differentiated and to do so, in my mind, is really the one form of freedom we can have.

Meanwhile, I am dying to hear how you handle the upcoming eclipse.

Astrologically, eclipses are considered powerful catalysts for change. They usher in powerful new beginnings that could sometimes feel too abrupt for one’s liking. I am strapping on my seat belt. Check back with me in a week. And maybe buy yourself a pack of colored pencils? IDGAF how busy you are—or self-important, or guilty for drawing! LOL