About Me

I’m Nachaya , an artist, writer and philosopher with a long-standing fascination with consciousness, symbolism, archetypes, sacred imagery 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 us 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. So meditation, Buddhist philosophy, Tibetan teachers, ritual objects and sacred imagery were simply part of the landscape I grew up in, along with all the normal peculiarities and complications of family life.

I think that mixture probably set something in motion quite early. I became interested in what people believe, what they experience, what they think they experience, what images and symbols do to us, how the mind constructs reality, and why extraordinarily sophisticated spiritual ideas can sit alongside the ordinary messiness of being human. That question has followed me for most of my life, turning up in different clothes 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, the natural world, diet and herbalism can all keep me occupied for far longer than is probably sensible. I’m fascinated by recurring symbols and archetypes, particularly those that appear across widely separated cultures and periods, and by the strange ability of an image to communicate something before we have found the words for it.

Ancient Egypt has been another enduring thread, particularly the idea of heka, which is usually translated as magic, although I find the word rather too small for it. I think of it more as a kind of deep magic, an old understanding of the potency of image, word, symbol, ritual, imagination and intention, and of the human tendency to participate in reality rather than simply stand outside it looking in.

Then there is the part of me that wants to know exactly where something 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 quietly become a fact simply because everybody has repeated it for long enough. I’m quite comfortable with mystery. I’m equally comfortable poking it with a stick.

The practical side of life has had plenty of opportunities to keep all of this grounded. I spent many years living in rural France, raising children and renovating a roughly 400-year-old house, which at various points involved growing things, repairing things, moving things, dealing with animals and feeling as though I had somehow acquired a small farmstead without quite remembering agreeing to it. Old houses are excellent teachers of impermanence, although usually while leaking on you.

Art continued through all of this and has always been one of the ways I think. Much of my work draws upon Buddhist, mythological and archetypal imagery, and I’m particularly interested in the point where an image ceases to be something we merely look at and begins to act upon the imagination. Some images seem able to slip past our usual intellectual defences and reach into older, quieter, stranger parts of the mind, which is probably why human beings have been making sacred images for an extraordinarily long time.

Writing grew alongside the art. I have written extensively for Buddhistdoor Global, including book reviews of works from publishers such as Shambhala Publications, as well as pieces on Buddhist philosophy, iconography, mythology, art and the broader territories around consciousness and spiritual practice. Reviewing has been particularly useful because it forces me to slow down, look properly at what somebody is actually saying, and occasionally argue with them in the margins.

Much of what I have been circling for years is now gathering itself into The Liminal Mind, a book I appear to have been accidentally working on for well over a decade. It explores archetypal imagery, meditation, neuroscience, psychology, Buddhist thought, philosophy and imagination, especially the ways imagery might be deliberately used for meditation, insight, creativity and manifestation. It is also written with people in mind who find conventional meditation difficult, because some minds become quieter through breath and stillness while others seem to want pictures, symbols, stories and something interesting to do.

Underlying most of my work is a fairly persistent desire to understand how things fit together.

I am interested in those odd places where disciplines that developed centuries or continents apart 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.

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

It all makes sense in my head, anyway.

The MISSION

My mission is to explore how art, archetypal imagery, contemplative traditions and contemporary understandings of the mind can be brought together in ways that deepen perception, support meditation and make our inner lives more accessible, useful and alive.

My work is about helping people gain access to parts of the mind that are often difficult to reach through language alone. Using image, archetype, symbolism and contemplative practice, I offer practical ways into meditation, insight, creativity and change. It is particularly suited to visual thinkers, restless meditators and people who already sense that imagination is doing far more than simply making things up. I help you learn how to work with it.

Mission

My work is about exploring the meeting place between image, mind, meaning and experience, and making that exploration useful.

I am interested in how ancient contemplative traditions, archetypal imagery, mythology, art, psychology and contemporary research can help us understand the mind more deeply, especially the parts of it that do not always respond well to words alone. Much of my work grows from the idea that imagination is not simply decorative or escapist, but one of the ways we perceive, organise, rehearse, remember, transform and sometimes even heal our experience.

My aim is to create work that is intellectually curious, visually alive and practically useful, whether through writing, art, teaching or The Liminal Mind. I want to offer people ways of working with symbol, image and attention that can open up meditation, insight, creativity and self-understanding, particularly for those who have found more conventional approaches difficult or strangely inaccessible.

I am also interested in keeping ancient ideas alive without flattening them, romanticising them or pulling them out of context, while allowing them to sit beside contemporary questions about perception, consciousness and the brain. The point, for me, is to remain curious enough to let different traditions illuminate one another without pretending they are all saying the same thing.

At the heart of it, I think my mission is quite simple: to help people look more deeply, imagine more consciously, and develop a richer relationship with their own minds.

 

 

Accomplishments

I have been working professionally as an artist since 2009, although, as with quite a lot of my life, the line between professional practice, research, obsession and simply needing to make something has never been especially tidy. My work has centred largely around sacred, archetypal and mythological imagery, particularly Buddhist and feminine divinities, with ancient Egypt, psychology, symbolism and the natural world wandering in and out as they please. I have been represented through the Buddhist art collective Dakini as Art, shown and sold through international platforms, and my work now lives in private collections in different parts of the world.

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, which then expanded into the long-running Silk Alchemy column and a rather wider territory of consciousness, perception, Buddhism, creativity, culture, 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. That work has given me the opportunity to engage closely with contemporary Buddhist teachers, scholars, translators, psychologists, contemplatives and researchers, and to spend an indecent amount of time with books while being able to call it work.

I have also written for LEVEKUNST: Art of Life, connected with the respected Buddhist teacher and translator Erik Pema Kunsang, whose work and lineage sit deeply within the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. Other pieces have been republished by One Earth Sangha, where my writing has touched upon Buddhist responses to ecological responsibility, planetary compassion, social unrest and the increasingly difficult question of how we live intelligently in a world that can feel as though it is attempting several crises simultaneously.

One of my pieces was also featured by the Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology, following my work with Susan Bauer-Wu and her book A Future We Can Love. Susan was then president of the Mind & Life Institute, and the book grew from the Institute’s 2021 dialogue bringing together His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Greta Thunberg and climate scientists to discuss the climate crisis and feedback loops. I was able to interview Susan directly about the book, the thinking behind that meeting, Buddhism, climate responsibility and the psychology of how human beings respond to threats that are both enormous and strangely difficult to hold in the mind. Inevitably, one article became more than one.

My formal training has wandered around nearly as much as the writing. I trained and qualified in counselling and Jung-influenced therapeutic practice and, for a period, held licences to practise, alongside formal study of ancient Egyptian art through Harvard. Around this has grown the considerably larger, messier education of a lifetime spent reading and researching Buddhism, mythology, archetypes, psychology, neuroscience, perception, consciousness, history, herbalism, nutrition, ancient cultures and visual art. One subject tends to open a door into three more, which is possibly why I have never been particularly good at staying inside one discipline.

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. I am fascinated by heka, symbolism, ritual, imagination and those older human understandings of the relationship between mind and world, while simultaneously wanting to know where an idea came from, whether the translation stands up, whether the neuroscience actually says what somebody claims it says, and whether we are looking at evidence, metaphor, coincidence or a particularly attractive story.

My relationship with Buddhism began long before any of this became work. Tibetan Buddhism formed part of my childhood environment and, for a period, Geshe Namgyal Wangchen lived with my family in Hampstead, bringing other teachers and practitioners through our home while our front room opened for public meditation evenings and the house became the Manjushri Centre for north-west London. Buddhist philosophy, meditation, sacred imagery and Tibetan teachers were therefore part of the landscape I grew up in, which gave me an unusual early proximity to contemplative traditions while also leaving me with a great many questions about how spiritual understanding translates into actual human behaviour.

There has been another, rather less easily itemised education running alongside all of this. I raised three children, spent many years living in rural Brittany and helped renovate a roughly 400-year-old house, while growing things, keeping animals, repairing things that had apparently waited several centuries for me personally to arrive before breaking, and at times discovering that we seemed to be running a small farmstead without having formally decided to do so. Art, writing and research continued in amongst all of it.

For well over a decade I have also been developing what has become The Liminal Mind, a book and wider body of work bringing together archetypal imagery, meditation, Buddhist philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, perception and imagination. It grew partly from my own 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 and imaginative engagement.

Around the book have grown workshops and related projects concerned with archetypes, contemplative imagery, creative absorption, flow states and the ways that art can function as an active part of inner work rather than simply something beautiful sitting on the wall.

Looking back over it all, there is considerably more continuity than I realised while I was doing it. Sacred art led into symbolism, symbolism into psychology and neuroscience, Buddhism into questions about perception and consciousness, writing into ecology and the wider human predicament, and all of it eventually began gathering around the same underlying question: what is the mind actually doing, and how much more deliberately might we learn to work with it?