I am Anita Alexandra, the owner and creative talent for Elemental Art Solutions® and all related endeavors. Probably the most interesting factor in my story is that prior to 4 years ago I would have said that I "couldn't draw a stick figure" and consequently had primarily pursued things of an academic nature. I believe that through my study and practice of Chinese Medicine and hypnotherapy and years spent excavating my life and personality through many different kinds of therapeutic techniques that I accidentally hit the subconscious groundwaters of my own artistic abilities!
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Although a work of fiction, the roots of my story can be found throughout the weavings of my novel, Labyrinths of Lunacy. I wasn't someone who could just set a goal and reach it, I felt compelled to explore my past through therapy and become someone able to help others through my understanding and the ownership of my unique interpretation of my experiences in life—both the things I have chosen and the choices that have been seemingly made for me.
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I believe that our "gifts" in life, can also become your "curses" or greatest challenges. The "gift" of my early years is that I learned to disconnect and to not be as influenced by the conditioning that is designed to form and bond group mind. The very "gift" that delivered me into a search and drive for a better life has also come back to haunt me as I continue to be more objective than most and bond less easily to established rules and perspectives. Still, I persevere and because potential fascinates me, and that is how and why I went marching off to a Chinese Medicine education and subsequent practice of the medicine that I believed at the time would be my "till death do us part lucrative profession only to be profoundly and mysteriously opened and altered by the journey. The changes in my profession and the changes in me due to witnessing how differently the work moved through each individual in my office forced me to step back from my original commitment to see what else was possible for me. It was giving up my practice and taking up faux painting and letting life show me where I was going next that lead me over the course of several years to the concept of Elemental Art Solutions®, the Five Element Meditation Deck, my original love of writing, and all of the other related endeavors that continue to gestate in me.
My greatest challenge in the office seemed to stem from how difficult it was to give a solid foundation of Chinese Medicine's vocabulary and understanding of ourselves. The concept that we contain an invisible meridian system connected to our organs and the structure and function of ourselves is as difficult as teaching a foreign language to an adult. But it is in this foundation of the medicine that I believe people truly make a connection to their health and will be able to commit to exploring it as well as maintaining it throughout the course of their lives. The "advertising" campaign to sell what the medicine could do as opposed to teaching people what they could become didn't help me in my own quest.
The cultural move toward a "quick fix" in acupuncture without an interest in the soulfulness and preventative nature of the medicine was leaving me frustrated and unfulfilled in my ultimate goals. I believe that you can affect profound change in a person's health without their understanding of the medicine but that a long-term foundation of health cannot be established without that understanding at some level and without the daily practices that create a healthy profile. Chinese Medicine and acupuncture, although slower than any western treatment, can effect lifetime changes in even difficult predispositions to disease over time and with the proper lifestyle changes in a person, but they have to be connected to that system in a way that makes sense and brings people into a deeper relationship to themseleves and the ways in which we are connected to and affected by every aspect of our lives—from our spiritual predispositions, personalities, heredity, internal and external environments and our relationships to everyone and everything in our lives. To have even a cursory understanding of the philosophy of the medicine has such profound potential to affect a human being that I consider it an act of evolution to participate in its unfoldment.
In the meantime, there are a lot of journeys to be taken on the way to health. I didn't see many easy or linear explorations in my office nor in my personal life. It is a commitment to a more dimensional look at ourselves on the shoulders of a many-thousand year evolving philosphy. It is the only thing I am intersted in and have dedicated my efforts toward for more than a decade. So, let's begin at the beginning...a look at the journey of a less mature human being struggling to make sense of her life, the subsequent struggles and successes from exploring, experiencing and allowing that journey to evolve her perspectives and choices...then on to an artisitc approach to understanding our personalities through color and traits...next a deeper understanding and awareness of ourselves and our environment's affect upon us...an entertaining journey through two seemingly different philosophical approaches to medicine that in fact contain many similarities...then on to a more complex and comprehensively expanding understanding of ourselves that is only possible by starting at the simplest foundations of a system whose philosophy encompasses every single aspect of a person and a life and teaches us the relationships between all things while we take in color and concepts...
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