ART AS A WAY OF KNOWING
An Interview with Carrie Grossman
By Ned Arvidson
Ned: Carrie, please explain what art modalities you practice?
Carrie: I practice the art of living!
Ned: Excellent!
Carrie: My understanding of art encompasses everything. Typically certain things are considered to be art forms—like writing, singing, dancing, theater, carpentry or things like that. But my view of art has expanded—I think it’s a way of living authentically from the heart. So it’s not something that has to be relegated to a particular practice or form. Still, given that, I do nurture certain creative hobbies that are more like spiritual practices for me. That would be writing, and singing devotional music.
Ned: Beautiful. Thank you. At what period in your life did you begin your journey in art and in noticing that it was more “art of living” than any specific modality?
Carrie: Like many people, as a child I was very uninhibited and creative. I was always dancing around and creating plays and writing songs. Anybody who came over would have to watch me dance and listen to me sing songs from “Annie” at the top of my lungs!
I just felt very free, but then at a certain point I developed an intense amount of self-consciousness. As I entered my adolescent years, I shut down a lot of that expression. When I was 13, my family moved from New York City to Connecticut. It was traumatic and I shut down most of my creative pursuits. I stopped singing. I stopped acting, and all I did was turn within and write. Since then my path has been a journey to reclaim that innocence and purity of a child—of free expression without self-consciousness. As I’ve gone along in my journey it’s been like a return to that, with more of a discerning and mature mind at times… hopefully!
Ned: I like that “returning” aspect. Please speak more about what has been drawing you further and deeper into a more expansive experience in this realm?
Carrie: Well, I would say that, in some way, suffering—what the Buddha calls dukkha (the uneasiness and the unpredictability of life)—pushed me into myself in such a way that I was forced to find my voice. There were certainly specific rites of passage through difficult experiences that contributed to this: the ending of a painful relationship, three years of being ill with an undiagnosed illness, etc. but also touching into the depths of my human experience—feeling loneliness, longing, and other primal emotions. Those painful things drove—and continue to drive—me deep inside.
Ned: Thank you. Please share more about using art as a way of knowing.
Carrie: Art is a way of knowing myself. And it is also a way to be at ease with not knowing anything. Because the truth is that I really don’t know anything at all. In some sense, true art is when the artist is no more. There is a self-forgetting that happens and that’s the bliss of it. It’s like when I am singing or writing, and completely absorbed in what I’m doing—there is a total surrender and acceptance of the fact that I don’t know anything. I don’t need to be in control anymore and that is a very beautiful thing.
On the flip side, there is a clarity that comes from being at peace with not knowing. So they work together. In fact, they are kind of the same thing. When I can embrace the fact that I don’t know and not have to scheme, manipulate, or control life anymore—when I can just let it be the mess that it is—there is sometimes an intuition that arises.
Ned: Have there been any “liminal space” periods that really stand out in your journey? And what I understand it to mean is a transition period where we have ended something or left something behind, and we are heading away from it but we don’t know where we’re going or what is next.
Carrie: Kind of like a bardo. I’ve always loved the notion of the bardo. In the Tibetan tradition, it’s considered to be the 49-day period between one life and another. I feel like there are so many bardos that happen in our one incarnation. In some ways I’m always in a liminal zone because everything is constantly evolving. I guess you could say that consciousness is static and unmoving, but as far as the ego and the personality go, there is always evolution and movement. So it feels like you can never really hold on to anything and it’s all a liminal space.
But that’s a somewhat esoteric answer. More practically, yes, there have been many liminal spaces for me. However, oftentimes it’s in those periods when it seems like nothing is happening that the deepest work is going on. I remember my teacher Amma shared this beautiful metaphor about the Chinese bamboo plant that really stuck with me. She said when you plant the seed of a Chinese bamboo plant it stays underground for five years and shows no sign of growth. You don’t see it sprout. You just have to keep watering the patch of dirt. And then all of a sudden, after five years, the plant shoots up out of the earth and in weeks it can grow to 80 or 90 feet!
I find that to be such a powerful metaphor. And it’s been true in my life. There are times when it feels like everything is so dark and so dry—that none of my efforts are bearing fruit. At those moments it appears to my limited mind that nothing is happening, and then all of a sudden there’s a breakthrough or an insight or something shifts. It happens miraculously, as if by grace.
Ned: Yes, I can really relate to that in my own experience. Please share any specific experiences in that regard.
Carrie: Well, being sick for three years seemed to be a total liminal zone. I felt like I was nowhere—neither dead nor alive. I was just trying to get through every day—even to make my bed was an effort. I was exhausted and I couldn’t imagine how I was ever going to come out of that. But there was a process happening during what seemed to be a totally nonsensical, worthless experience to my ego. There was a deeper process going on that was basically burning away these layers of self-consciousness. And because I felt such desperation to heal and to not feel so depressed and separate from everything, this call just came out of me. Much to my surprise, the call came out as music, which had never happened before! If I hadn’t been in that liminal dark night of the soul for so long, then the conditions probably wouldn’t have been created for that call to come.
Ned: I think it is fascinating that experiences we don’t want—like desperation and depression—can be the catalyst for opening us up to receive answers we could not have imagined possible. These perceived negative experiences seem to accompany liminal space experience.
Carrie: Yes, that seems to be true. To be honest, I actually feel like I am in a liminal space right now. I have been working on an album for over four years and I’ve felt incredibly stuck. I’ve had to confront certain obstacles and patterns of self-sabotage over and over again. It’s been a relentless challenge and yet, from a bird’s eye view, I know there is deep learning and growing that is happening. While on the surface it may seem like nothing is moving forward, underneath there is tremendous energy.
It is sort of the age-old notion that sometimes we need chaos for a breakthrough to happen. When we’re ready for change, there is often stress or tension that arises—we can choose to follow it and evolve to another consciousness or we can go back to a comfortable, safe way of being. Sometimes the friction won’t stop until we actually make a leap. But that friction is nothing but the great intelligence and great love of our own soul propelling us to grow. I am very much in that space right now as I speak to you.
Ned: I am extremely encouraged at the moment!
Carrie: You’re encouraged?
Ned: Yes!
Carrie: I’m glad!
Ned: What are your thoughts about unlived potential?
Carrie: That’s a really important question and it’s obviously very personal and open to interpretation. But I think that ultimately underneath we are all born to express our full human potential and, in some ways, we feel the pain of not doing so. That pain is like the grain of sand that creates a pearl. It’s like the painful thing that drives us onward.
If you ask me what is our fullest human potential, I would say it’s not what we may traditionally think of as our full potential—meaning a great job, a beautiful family, fame or recognition. To me, our fullest human potential is knowing who we are. To be able to know who I am beyond the body-mind-intellect—beyond my limited stories about who I am; beyond any attachments to wounds and baggage and habitual patterns and samskaras and all of the illusions of separation… To be able to wake up from that feels like the fullest manifestation of my human potential. Everything else is just a doorway pointing towards that.
Ned: “Our fullest human potential is knowing who we are”. Imagine everyone speaking that message to each other!
Carrie: Yes! It seems like the saints and sages have been saying that for eons, but somehow we don’t listen or we forget—I know I do. But I also believe that every person comes to earth with a special gift. And the ocean of life is so vast there will never be another wave like each of the seven billion waves that are out there. Each person has their own unique expression and the soul longs to manifest that. Even if it’s just in the simplest way a person puts a flower in her hair or makes a bowl of oatmeal or creates an amazing skyscraper or mows the lawn, whatever it may be—each person longs to express that fully. And because of our histories, sometimes we are not always able to do that in the most uninhibited way.
I’ve learned that the spiritual path is intimately connected to psychological growth. When we are still and quiet inside, it makes room for old, unconscious things to be exhumed and come up from underneath. That can be a very painful experience, but when we can ride with it, it’s like clearing out layers and layers of stuff—opening the windows of the heart and letting the darkness out. That exhumation is a powerful process and I believe it helps us get that much closer to embodying our full potential.
Ned: Ah yes, it is a powerful process!
Carrie: A couple of years ago I was on a meditation retreat and a friend gifted me a session with this healer who was there. He asked me what percentage of your potential do you think you’re manifesting? And I thought, “I don’t know, maybe 80%.” He started laughing and said, “No, you’re using hardly any of your potential!” Meaning you have barely tapped into what could be possible. At first I felt really upset and I was like, “Hey, what does this dude know?” But then I started thinking about it and I realized that he was saying something that I felt inside—which is that I want to give more and share more, but there are unconscious programs that have held me back. So while I’ve gone beyond what I thought was comfortable, there is so much more.
Ultimately it’s all unfolding in the way that it has to unfold, and it’s about trusting that. But I do think that we are all destined to flower into our full potential. We don’t necessarily know how or when it will happen, but I think that is all of our destinies in some sense.
Ned: Thank you, that was beautiful. Let’s visit briefly the more specific aspects of your writing and your devotional singing. I’ve witnessed myself and so many other people being drawn to your openness and your gift in offering what you do. What keeps you connected? What is there that keeps you invested in doing them?
Carrie: It is really the desire to know myself, and to see and be seen in the depths of the heart. It’s like a call to the light within. And it’s a beautiful thing to be able to share that with other people. But the truth is I would do any of my creative pursuits whether I shared them publicly or not. Those are things I do to help myself; they are the lifelines that help me come back to center. Generally, no matter how wobbly I feel, how weak or afraid, anxious or sad...when I am deep in the artistic process, there is a sense that nothing can touch me. It’s like a sense of total grounding in my being. And I need to be able to go back to that because I get thrown off of my axis all the time.
I think the despair that our world is facing has a deep impact on all of us, whether we know it or not. So there needs to be a return or a refuge within the heart. A lot of the practices I do help me find myself again. They are a refuge. The Buddha says we need that refuge. He says we need to take refuge in theBuddha, the Dharma and the Sangha—the teacher, the teachings, and the community. I feel like it is taking refuge in my own heart. I’m just learning how to do that, but I taste it when I go into whatever creative mode that I’m in. It’s really healing.
Ned: Wow, that’s beautiful. I can taste it. Boy, I am just so blessed, Carrie, to have been in this moment with you. As we wrap this up I invite you to express anything else that might be there that wants to be expressed.
Carrie: What I’m learning to do is honor the wisdom of my small individual self, as well as surrender to the bigger Self—to allow space for both the imperfect woman and the indwelling divinity. Obviously it’s not something that my ego can navigate. So it’s really about trust and acceptance and coming back again and again. It’s just like the practice of following the breath or coming back to the word, the moment, the page, the musical note or whatever. Just continuing to come back to that without any agenda.
Being free with one’s self is really important. We live in a culture of distraction and abandonment. We live in a world that tells people that who you are is a problem—it’s not enough. You need to be this way and dress that way and think this way and you need “this” to be happy, and that just fucks people up. It’s like we have to dig ourselves out of the dirt that’s constantly being thrown on us with these erroneous beliefs. So as a natural expression of one’s self, art can help us climb out of the muck of illusion and lies. To me, art is just being true to myself and expressing that. I don’t know any other way.
Ned: Well our context today was to help us with structure. Honestly you’ve gone way beyond my expectations and opened this up into such a more beautiful context. My journey into the expressive arts is really in support of many of the things you are saying. It’s a way of opening and trusting and accessing what we don’t know. It’s an adventure. And I want to thank you for witnessing me in the adventure. It’s such an encouragement and inspiration for me to witness you in the adventure.
Carrie: Thank you, Ned—that means a lot. Sometimes people say to me: “Oh, your life is so idyllic. You live in your little cabin in the Berkshires. You write and make music, etc.” And I think, “Ah…do you want to come here and hang out for a day? Because I’m not sitting in a cloud of bliss writing!” These things come about through churning, through meeting what’s really inside—going into that and facing it, and then giving it form. It doesn’t come by sitting in the lotus posture with a rainbow all around me! Maybe it happens that way for some people, but I’m certainly not there yet. Things are usually a lot messier than we reveal, but often we paint these illusions of other people in our minds.
My four-year album process has been pretty public—I’ve written and talked about it, and it’s been somewhat humiliating that I haven’t been able to deliver a product after all of these years working on the project. But in some ways I’m glad because it’s just real life. You know what I mean? You set off to do something and it doesn’t always go along with your expectations. Amma once said that spirituality is the destruction of expectations. I love that, and it also sucks! [laughs] So yeah, I was going to have my album done in a couple of months and now it’s been four years. I don’t even know who I am anymore, but that’s just reality. It’s good!
Ned: It is—it’s so good!
Carrie: I still have so much to learn, but I keep discovering that it’s all about self-compassion and love—awakening those virtues within. And the struggle creates a kind of friction that allows things to be ignited; it’s not always pretty, but that’s the beauty of it.
Ned: Yes, and it seems to be the way it goes.
Carrie: Yes, it seems to be! If you read stories of mystics and creative beings through time, a lot of their journeys mirror one another. There are many similarities in the process of going underground and then rising up again. It’s an interesting journey.
Ned: It is, it really is.