26. Wisdom Recipe - How you see the other? - Sitting with Seema Kohli

<p>I met Seema Kohli serendipitously at an event in London called The Art of Kindness. <a href="http://artofkindness.co.uk/home/?i=1">http://artofkindness.co.uk/home/?i=1</a> in 2017, where I interviewed her about what kindness is and posted the video on instagram.&nbsp;</p> <p>We became friends and she hosted me to stay at her place when I went to India in 2019. When I stayed with Seema I got to see her connection with wisdom and how she lives her life.</p> <p>Seema Kohli’s canvases are layered with many, many stories rooted as much in philosophy as in knowledge gained in modern times, a parable of tales both imagined and real, till one can no longer tell the real from the imagined. Art columnist Kishore Singh says “if you look closely at her canvases and the tapestry of motifs unravels into more legends; turn voyeur and the epics are but a background to the unfolding melodramas of daily lives turned epic. She serves up the Upanishads and newspaper headlines in doses of caffeine. It is this that gives her canvases credible status as a chronicler of narratives past and present, Indian in their essence but universal in their context. “I am a mirror,” she says. “When I paint, you see not what I have made but what you want to see.” “I,” Seema Kohli, painter and teller of stories, “am both myth and reality. Pick the one you want, but remember, the mirror distorts, and so the myth might be reality, and reality myth.”</p> <p>She describes breathing with awareness is what mediation is. She simplifies what others may make more complex. We talk about flowing and flying, you loose that sense of gravity when she focuses on her work.</p> <p>She shares her ritual of coming into the studio.</p> <p>She touch's on different beliefs and how they amalgamate as one.</p> <p>There is only one consciousness. There is only one womb which we all come from.</p> <p>We talk about morning and evening routines.</p> <p>The very idea of being born is an act of violence and kindness both.</p> <p>We are being born every moment. We are alive beca