I’m Nachaya, an artist, writer, philosopher, iconologist and researcher with a long-standing fascination with consciousness, symbolism, archetypes, sacred imagery, the peculiar things human beings believe, the even more peculiar things we experience, and the occasionally very strange business of being human.

 

Tibetan Buddhism has been somewhere in the background, and quite often the foreground, of my life since childhood. For a period, Geshe Namgyal Wangchen lived with my family in Hampstead, bringing other teachers and practitioners through the house, while our front room opened for public meditation evenings and our home became the Manjushri Centre for north-west London. Meditation, Buddhist philosophy, Tibetan teachers, ritual objects and sacred imagery were therefore simply part of the landscape I grew up in, along with all the normal peculiarities, affections, contradictions and complications of family life.

That mixture set something in motion fairly early. I became interested not only in what people believe, but in what they experience, what they think they experience, how the mind constructs its version of reality, what images and symbols do to us before we have found the language to explain them, and why extraordinarily sophisticated spiritual ideas can coexist so comfortably with the ordinary messiness of human behaviour, sometimes without the two appearing to have been formally introduced.

Those questions have followed me for most of my life, turning up in different clothing depending upon whatever I happened to be reading, painting, researching or obsessing over at the time.

 

My interests are fairly promiscuous. Buddhism, mythology, ancient history, archaeology, psychology, neuroscience, perception, consciousness, quantum physics, ecology, the natural world, herbalism, nutrition and visual art can all keep me occupied for far longer than is probably sensible. I am fascinated by symbols and archetypes that appear across widely separated cultures and periods, by the patterns that recur within mythology and sacred art, and by the strange ability of an image to communicate something directly, slipping past our intellectual defences and reaching into older, quieter and rather less domesticated parts of the mind.

Ancient Egypt has been another unexpected preoccupation, particularly the idea of heka, which is usually translated as magic, although I have always found the word rather too small for it. I think of heka as something closer to deep magic, as though the ancient Egyptians understood the quantum realm.

 

At the same time, there is a determinedly practical part of me that wants to know where an idea came from, who first said it, whether the translation is any good, whether the research actually supports the claim, and whether a wonderful story has become a fact because everybody has repeated it for long enough. I am quite comfortable with mystery. I am equally comfortable poking it with a stick.

 

I have sometimes described this as taking a scientific route to magic, and I still cannot think of a much shorter way of putting it.

 

The less theoretical parts of life have provided plenty of opportunities to keep all of this grounded. I raised three children, spent around fifteen years living in rural Brittany and helped renovate a roughly 400-year-old house, while growing things, keeping animals and repairing objects-namely the house, that had apparently waited several centuries for me personally to arrive before breaking. At times we seemed to be running a small farmstead without having formally decided to do so. Old houses are excellent teachers of impermanence, although they tend to deliver the teaching while leaking on you.

 

Travel has provided another kind of education. I have been fortunate enough to move through a fair number of places and cultures, although being well travelled can mean little more than having developed unusually strong opinions about airports. But speaking with taxi drivers and hearing their stories, understanding a little more about the air another person breathes, the land they navigate and the cultural waters they swim in is what broadens my thinking, rather than simply arriving somewhere, photographing it and leaving with a slightly more complicated collection of electrical adaptors.

 

Naturally, life isn’t all lavender fields and sparkling rosé at dusk. Like many people, I have known some chronically long periods of depression, years of raising children with far more love than practical support, long stretches of isolation, and a persistent sense that I did not fit terribly comfortably into the worlds available to me. Much of what I understand, I have had to find my way towards alone, following ideas across disciplines because no single school, label or community seemed able to contain the questions. This was painful long before it became intellectually useful, but it also taught me to trust the strange connections I noticed, to look beneath received explanations, and to build a life and body of work from the edges rather than waiting indefinitely to be invited into the middle.

 

Art has always been one of the ways I think. I have worked professionally as an artist since 2009, although the line between professional practice, research, obsession and simply needing to make something has never been especially tidy. Much of my work draws upon Buddhist, mythological and archetypal imagery, particularly Buddhist and feminine divinities, with ancient Egypt, psychology, symbolism and the natural world wandering in and out as they please.

The first real home for that work was Dakini as Art, a Buddhist art collective and the creative sister of the Yogini Project, where my work became part of a wider conversation around the feminine sacred, Buddhist iconography and the place of women within both traditional and evolving visual cultures. From there, the paintings began travelling farther than I did, reaching international audiences and finding homes in private collections around the world. I am now working with Faith Stone, with my work exhibited at Shoshoni Retreat in the mountains outside Boulder, Colorado.

My work as an artist has also brought me into conversation with people whose lives are deeply rooted in the preservation and continuation of sacred artistic traditions. For Buddhistdoor Global, I interviewed Dr Sarika Singh, master thangka painter and co-founder, with Master Locho, of the Himalayan Art Museum in Dharamshala. What began as an interview developed into a warm and affectionate connection that has remained with us, and I value that far more than being able to add another impressive name to a list.

 

What continues to interest me most is the point at which an image ceases to be something we merely look at and begins to act upon the imagination. Human beings have been making sacred images for an extraordinarily long time,  and much of my figurative work centres upon yidams, the meditational deities of Vajrayana Buddhism, whose forms are not intended simply to be admired, worshipped from a safe distance or treated as portraits of beings elsewhere. Through visualisation, the practitioner enters the symbolic world of the yidam, identifies with its awakened qualities and gradually rehearses another way of inhabiting the mind. I therefore think of these figures as forms of psychological meditation, in which posture, gaze, colour, gesture, expression and symbolic attribute work together upon the person contemplating them. On a neuropsychological level, this kind of sustained engagement may involve embodied simulation and the neural mirroring systems through which we internally echo observed gesture, emotion and intention. I would not claim that anyone has placed a viewer beneath one of my paintings with a scanner and caught a mirror neuron in the act, but the possibility helps explain why figurative and sacred imagery can sometimes be felt in the body before the conscious mind has decided what it thinks. An image can soothe, disturb, reorganise, awaken or quietly accompany us, reaching places that argument, instruction and even language itself cannot always reach.

 

Writing grew alongside the art and eventually became just as important. I began writing for Buddhistdoor Global in 2016, initially exploring Buddhist art, symbolism, neuropsychology and the ways imagery acts upon the mind. This developed into the long-running Silk Alchemy column and then into a considerably wider territory of Buddhism, consciousness, perception, culture, mythology, creativity, ecology, psychology and whatever else happened to be dangling from the original thread by the time I had finished pulling at it.

I later established Nachaya’s Book Corner for Buddhistdoor Global, reviewing Buddhist, contemplative and philosophical books from publishers including Shambhala Publications and Dharma Publishing. Reviewing has been particularly useful because it forces me to slow down, look carefully at what someone is actually saying, examine the sources and assumptions beneath it, and occasionally argue with the author in the margins. It has also allowed me to spend an indecent amount of time with books while being able to call it work.

Earlier in my writing life, I contributed pieces to LEVEKUNST: Art of Life. Other essays have been republished by One Earth Sangha, where my writing has explored Buddhist approaches to ecological responsibility, planetary compassion, social unrest and the increasingly difficult question of how we live intelligently in a world that often appears to be attempting several crises simultaneously.

My work has also been featured by the Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology following my writing around Susan Bauer-Wu’s book A Future We Can Love. Susan was then president of the Mind & Life Institute, and the book developed from the Institute’s 2021 dialogue bringing together His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Greta Thunberg and climate scientists to discuss climate change, feedback loops and the human difficulty of responding to threats that are both enormous and strangely hard to hold in the mind. I interviewed Susan about the book, the thinking behind that meeting, Buddhism, climate responsibility and the psychology of collective response. Inevitably, one article became more than one.

 

My formal training has wandered around almost as much as the writing. I trained and was licensed in counselling and Jung-influenced therapeutic practice, alongside formal study of ancient Egyptian art through Harvard. Around this sits the larger and considerably messier education of a lifetime spent reading and researching Buddhism, mythology, archetypes, psychology, neuroscience, perception, consciousness, history, herbalism, nutrition, ancient cultures and art. One subject invariably opens a door into three others, which is possibly why I have never been especially good at remaining inside one discipline.

For well over a decade, much of this has been gathering itself into The Liminal Mind, a book and wider body of work exploring archetypal imagery, meditation, Buddhist philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, perception and imagination. It grew partly from my fascination with the way images affect consciousness, and partly from the observation that some people struggle enormously with conventional meditation while responding almost immediately to imagery, symbolism, story and imaginative engagement.

 

Some minds grow quieter through breath and stillness, while others seem to want pictures, symbols and something for the brain to focus on.

Around the book is the idea of workshops and related projects concerned with archetypes, contemplative imagery, creative absorption, flow states and the possibility that art can function as an active instrument of inner work rather than simply something beautiful sitting on a wall. My interest is not in treating imagination as decorative fantasy or escape, but in understanding it as one of the ways we perceive, organise, rehearse, remember and transform experience, and in learning how we might work with it more deliberately for meditation, insight, creativity, healing and change.

 

Another plan is The Artists’ Lounge, an event I feel increasingly called to create: a place where symbolic and archetypal artists, philosophers, writers, thinkers and seekers might converge, bringing disciplines and ideas together that are too often kept in separate rooms. I imagine exhibitions, conversations, talks, contemplative experiences and the less easily planned alchemy that occurs when interesting people are allowed to encounter one another without being hurried towards a predetermined conclusion. It may eventually exist as an independent gathering, although I can also see it appearing within or alongside astrological events, whose audiences are already accustomed to thinking through symbols, archetypes, cycles and the invisible patterns by which we attempt to understand ourselves. For now, it is still taking shape, but some ideas arrive less as plans than as a persistent summons, and this appears to be one of them.

I am particularly interested in those odd places where disciplines separated by centuries or continents begin worrying at similar questions, where Buddhist philosophy brushes against contemporary ideas about perception, where ancient symbolism meets psychology, where mythology carries something recognisable about the structure of the human mind, and where the supposedly rational and supposedly mystical turn out to have been staring at the same peculiar creature from opposite sides of the room.

 

This does not mean pretending that all traditions are secretly saying the same thing, or flattening complex ancient ideas into whatever modern explanation happens to be fashionable. I want to keep old ideas alive without romanticising them or pulling them carelessly out of context, while remaining curious enough to allow contemplative traditions, art, philosophy, psychology and contemporary research to illuminate one another.

 

I am married to astrologer Rick Levine, which means that questions of time, symbolism, consciousness and the peculiar choreography of human lives are seldom entirely absent from the conversation, although we are also perfectly capable of discussing airports, misplaced spectacles and whose turn it is to do the dishes. Our lives and work sometimes meet, sometimes run alongside one another, and frequently produce conversations that begin in one century and finish somewhere near a distant planet.

 

I have also enjoyed working on some fairly high-profile film sets, an experience that confirmed beyond reasonable doubt that I am entirely untroubled by fame, although I am often seriously impressed by stunning sets, beautiful costumes, the room for practical creativity, and those who know precisely what they are doing while several hundred other people clearly don't.

 

Underlying everything is a fairly persistent desire to understand the being of existence, and to make that exploration useful. Through my art, writing, research and The Liminal Mind, I want to help people gain access to parts of the mind that do not always respond well to language alone, offering practical ways of working with image, archetype, symbolism and attention that can deepen meditation, encourage insight, support creativity and make our inner lives more accessible and alive.

 

This work is particularly suited to visual thinkers, restless meditators, artists, writers, the creatively curious, and people who already suspect that imagination is doing far more than simply making things up.

 

So this website will inevitably contain a mixture of art, writing, Buddhism, philosophy, archetypes, consciousness, history, psychology, the natural world, The Liminal Mind, probably some Egypt, and whichever rabbit hole has most recently proved impossible to leave alone.

There is considerably more continuity in it than I realised while I was doing it.

It all makes sense in my head, anyway.