P A I N 

Pain is a fine path into the unknowable - Rumi

We break - we restore - we create and we destruct.

We open and we close - we live and we die.

Life and death shares the same body - the paradoxes opens us - the landscapes hidden in our skin and being!

Why am I writing about pain? Because Pain is also a part of life, and we spend so much time avoiding it. Through deafening the sounds of inner knowledge and wisdom we escape our awakening. We avoid our truth and our authentic life. We avoid our souls light!

And why pain? Not because pain alone can cure our souls illness, but by constantly avoiding it - we create poison in our system. Ignorance, fear, shame, guilt, declaiming our own wholeness. And that makes our lives shallow and dark.. and instead of taking the darkness of ourselves in our own hands - we put it onto others - we blame and we shame - we judge and we moralize...we create right and wrongs, we separate. If we dont acknowledge our own darkness - it will shadow itself out in to our unconscious life. And that is human, but it is also a choice, not to take responsibility for our soul to grow, both up and down. If you only stare at the light, the shadow grows high. The brighter the light, the sharper is the shadow, So let's go into the shadow - into the "pain" - and let's become medicine.

Pain bears it's own cure as a child / The cure for pain is in the pain - Rumi

But that does not mean - that we should self harm or harm each other, but by avoiding the truth of ourselves, we create more harm. Pain is not equal to harm, trauma, damage, hurt, danger or anything like that. Of corse, if you harm someone - it can give pain both ways. But giving or being in pain - is not necessary done to harm. It can be done to heal! By ignoring our pain - we create illness, pain is sensations that tells us how to deeply take care of ourselves, it shows us the path - into deep love, compassion, care, affection and it can create deep trust in the ability to take care of one self and each other. By suffering, and living the truth of our selves - we heal.

So - I believe in the body as a metaphor for the soul, for real life and death to come home. I believie in the body as a poetic place to reveal and access our stories of past and precent. I belive in the body as a pathway.

And I can't really explain why I "chose" this as one part of my artistic expression, this why of working with the soul, body, mind and life... why Am I attracted to this art form and being a body of emotions?

When I feel something, I don't want to ignore or neglect it. I want to live it, and feel it, and share it - transform it - into something that can give deep and real nourishment to the soil of the soul. And for our lives to become whole.

Many people see my art and gets scared - disgusted and can feel repulsion, and some even concern for my wellbeing..

And yes - we are foreign in each others realities. We are strangers in each others worlds. So again Rumi guides us into wisdom:

There is a field outside right-doings and wrongdoings - I'll meet you there..

And I want to meet you there, in respect for what I do and do not understand. Knowing that I dont know - who you are. I'm a mystery to myself, so I can never tell you - what is true for you. But I want to rest in my truth, in my experience of myself and my art and life. And I want you to know - I am not harming myself - I am loving myself and I want to be set free - to be whom I in my truth can be. And I want the same for you. To allow and give permission for the wholeness of life to arrive in life.

I do belive in pain - as a fine path into the unknowable, accessing the deeper part of myself, and what is really alive.

Again Rumi tells us so beautifully:

Through Love all that is bitter will be sweet, Through Love all that is copper will be gold, Through Love all dregs will become wine, through Love all pain will turn to medicine.
- Rumi

And Khalil Gibran:

Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.
Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that it's heart may stand in the sun, so must you know pain.

And our friend Carl Jung:

There is no coming to consciousness without pain

They might not have ment it to become so physical, but I belive in through the body, so for now, this is one of my ways to find home - to find healing in the soul and soil. To walk with my heart into my feet, and dig into the deep.

Research and ritual comes together in art.

"Dance, when you're broken open
Dane, if you torn the bandage off
Dance in the middle of the fighting.
Dance in your blood
Dane, when you're perfectly free"
- Rumi

My work, life and being is circling around : Pleasure and Pain with Purpose - with love and for love to grow and for totality to arrive home. For the paradox of life and death to live in the now. For my soul to be a bridge between spirit and matter and for my body and life to be a prayer and place for love to find habitation.

Love and gratitude from Kjærsti Øverbø

Photographers: Anna Horgen, Adrian Axel, Ole Pettersen