Welcome to
The Lotus Project

This is my gift to you.

I’m here to collaborate with you on a personalized lotus painting, for you or as a gift for someone you believe embodies the lotus. If it is for someone else, it may be important to know their story, know their heartache, and know their beauty. Because I have a couple of questions for the lotus we are about to create together.

Please take time with these questions, sit with them, truly reflect, and do not be afraid to be brutally honest. Get really clear with yourself. And remember sometimes no answer is better than an unclear, and possibly untrue, answer. It may help to journal with these, meditate on them, take a walk with them. However you feel you can navigate truth the best. Your pain deserves to be honored, and I’m here to hold space and honor everything you share.

Of course, bringing this pain back to the surface may be very difficult, take it slow and if it becomes too much take a break and find some support and comfort. This is not to re-trigger you, this is to continue the healing by honoring the wisdom and the pain.

When you feel anchored to your answers, please send them in a email, clearly marked, to me at fosskinzieart@gmail.com and I will promptly respond to you with more details about our project. You can copy and paste the questions into the email and answer underneath them, or the Collaborate button below will lead you to an email with the questions already set up there.

And if this is a little too much or doesn’t align with you, but you would still like this done for you, send me an email and let’s chat about other ways to approach this. I’m open and available to help nurture you in your healing in whatever way suits you.

Inquiry:

What color was the pain you endured?

What color do you feel your essence to be after enduring this pain?

Where in your body can you still feel this pain? Where does the scar remain?

Were there any practices of healing or honoring that you implemented into your life to work with this pain?

What part of your story do you find the most beautiful?

What is something you learned about yourself?

Where in the world do you feel most at home? Most held? In the city? In a large field? By a river, or ocean? Be specific, and if there is a exact spot please name it.

If any, which piece already displayed calls to you and your pain?

What else would you like to share about your experience? Again I’m here to hold space and honor you.

I’m so excited to take this journey with you.

All lotus paintings are on a 12 x 12 x 3/4 panel boards (unless we discussed otherwise) and will cost $250 plus shipping (unless discussed otherwise.) They will take approximately 7 days to create and dry properly, then be moved to delivery, from the estimated start date. I appreciate your patience as I want to give each painting the time it deserves, and may have other projects or work occurring.

Feel free to add any questions in your email.

I believe that all beings go through deep pain. Almost as a rite of passage into further understanding ourselves and the mass amount of pain humans can endure.

This pain, in a way, conditions us. Wires our brains to think and act in a certain way. This pain clouds who we really are, the core of our being, most likely as a strategy for survival during the period of trial.

“What happened? Technically, nothing happened: you - in your essence - are still exactly the same as you were before… The only difference is that now you have a toxic piece of information on your mind.”

This “toxic” piece of information may have stemmed from a trauma, and your response at the time held great wisdom. It saved you. Protected that beautiful core of yours. And I’m writing this to tell you that your core still remains untouched.

The lotus creates a beautiful image. It is planted in soaked, dirty mud. I see the mud to be the “darkness” that we all feel from time to time. This can be a large looming darkness that you feel you carry with you, or the darkness that came around for an hour this morning. Either way we find ourselves in a place where we are presented a choice. To germinate? Or to wither away? Often times we find ourselves germinating as resourceful humans who naturally face many challenges.

The lotus stays in darkness for many days in a row. How long has your darkness been here? The goal of the lotus is not to reach the light right now, not to “feel good.” The goal is to use the darkness as it’s strength for when it emerges.

And when it finally emerges, the lotus petals show no sign of dirt, mud, slime, or struggle. It emerges pure, untouched.

“The self-cleaning lotus exemplifies an empowering narrative of integrity. It manages to remain itself, pure and unaffected, and to grow to its fullest amidst the impurity of its circumstance.”

This is a metaphor I keep close to my heart. As the mud represents the battles we must endure so that we may emerge whole, authentic, and bright, when we courageously chose to sit in the darkness. This process of becoming a lotus happens many times in the course of a life. Just when we think we’re “fine,” the process seems to happen all over again in a new form. That’s okay, trust the process. You were meant to be many different lotus’s in this lifetime.

This I’m sure of, and so I have one question for you…

Can you see your beauty?

Can you see how this external or internal warfare has made you stronger? Has made you more compassionate? Has made you more tender, given you more grace? Can you see the beautiful heart that now shines brighter because of the strife? That’s what this whole project is about, making sure you see your beauty. Join me in celebration of ourselves.

Quotes taken from The Lotus Effect by Pavel G. Somov, PH.D. pg, 5