Destination: Austin
For about a year, I had the strong intention that I wanted to paint a mural in Austin, Texas. I asked my SEO team to work on positioning me higher in the search results for “flower mural Austin.” I wrote in my journal about once a week with the intention to paint in Texas, a state where I didn’t have any murals yet. About a month in, I got a surprise cold email inviting me to paint in Waxahachie, Texas, a small community outside of Dallas. I accepted and went to paint, but I still longed to paint in Austin, for reasons that weren’t quite clear to my conscious mind.
About eight months later, I got a surprise email from a boutique hotel in Austin! The woman wrote in an excited and slightly apologetic manner. She mentioned that she had been searching for a floral mural artist near Austin and had come upon my website. Then she realized that I was not based in Austin! She said she loved my work and was there any chance I would be interested in traveling to Austin. Of course my answer was an immediate and emphatic yes! And, by the way, SEO works!
A Magical Hotel Full of Wall Art
When I arrived in Austin late at night and checked into my room at The Frances Modern Inn, the hotel where I was to be painting my wall art, I felt like I was at home. The aesthetic was exactly mine—there were murals by different artists on each floor. My room was decorated with unique, hand-picked antiques from around the world, combined with lush floral wallpaper in jewel tones and luxurious carpeting and bedding. Floor-to-ceiling deep turquoise velvet drapes shut out the world outside.
The bathtub had fresh flowers on a wooden board across the tub. I immediately bought some Epsom Salt from the convenience store and settled in for a luxurious soak. In the days to come, over long exquisite Italian dinners with the inn owner and some staff members, I got to learn about their lives and build intimate relationships that truly touched me and inspired me. We shared deeply meaningful personal stories and I learned about the vivid inspiration behind the creation of the hotel.
Painting my mural was a chance to do my absolute best work. The wall was small, so I had the comfort and ease of painting each line with intention and even re-painting certain elements several days—which requires a luxury of time that I rarely have in my larger murals. I felt supported and nourished by the guests, the delicious food, the staff, and my gorgeous room. It was truly a treat. However, looking back on the experience almost a year later, I see that my trip to Austin changed the course of my life in an unexpected and profound way.
Unexpected Healing through my Mural Art Destination
I had been recommended by someone in New York to visit a very special healer while I was in Austin. He wrote an introductory email and set me up with an appointment. This healer uses the Network Spinal method, which is a very subtle spine adjustment technique designed to liberate the nervous system from emotional weight that has been stored up over a lifetime. My reason for seeking care was directly related to my mural career. Over the course of eight years painting floral murals, I developed a constant pain in my right hip from twisting on a ladder and using my right hand to paint. I highly recommend to other mural artists that they always directly face the wall on a scaffold, rather than twisting on an A-frame ladder. I, however, learned the hard way.
My first appointment was nice, but not remarkable. In my second appointment, a few days later, the healer passed her hands over my spine, and I felt a burst of energy rush up from my right hip to the top of my head with an incredible speed, almost like a champagne bottle bursting open. I felt light-headed from the force of the sensation, even though I was lying down. After the session, she asked me a few questions about my hip pain, when it had started, etc, and I suddenly started crying. I knew in all levels of my body-mind being that the hip pain had started on a particular floral mural years ago where the client had triggered some unresolved trauma from earlier in my life, by repeating certain behavior patterns and abusive ways of treating others.
After the appointment and in my last few days in Austin, I began to feel incredibly and almost indescribably sad. It was as if all the stored and unprocessed memories from long ago had been released out of my hip and into my nervous system at large, and my body now had no choice but to process them. I felt overwhelmed and almost overpowered by the force of these now re-surfaced emotions. There was no way but through, so I had to surrender and let myself feel all of the sadness and fear that was flooding my system. I now realize that my trip to Austin was even more significant than creating a new flower mural.
A New Mural and a New Inner Peace
I returned home and about two weeks later, the feelings reached a peak. I felt almost drunk with the intensity of whatever was happening in my system. Almost like my body was fighting a virus, I felt like every cell of my being was consumed with dealing with whatever had been released in the upwards rush of energy I experienced in that healing session. In that particular 24 hour period, I felt like I wasn’t in control of my thoughts or emotions at all– that my body was purging in its own way just as the body vomits uncontrollably to cleanse itself of an invader.
I have never had such an experience before or after in my life. After about 24 hours of riding this wave that was bigger than my conscious mind, I felt it subside. I called someone from my past and told them my truth for the very first time in my life. I finally had the words, the clarity, and the calmness to express what my experience had been. It was surprisingly well received. It has now been almost a year since that event, and I have a lightness inside my heart that I carry with me every day. I struggled with low-grade depression for most of my life, but the astonishing truth is that those particular feelings of despair and lethargy unique to depression never come anymore. I live in a completely different inner world.
The calling I felt so strongly to paint a mural in Austin led me to a series of tangential events that truly changed my life. How everything happened feels mysterious and unknowable, but there was an undeniable and marked shift in my life since my trip to Austin. And I know that my mural will light up the hearts of others who visit that incredible hotel in the heart of downtown Austin.
