Art Completes You: Transformation Through Art and the Science of Completion

By Shraddha Nithyananda

Are you interested in art? Are you spiritual? The fastest method to become an excellent artist and drop your negative self-talk for good is presented in the #1 bestselling Art Completes You book. It will lead you to creative breakthroughs, learning art technique as if you went through a professional art training. It is designed to help you experience deep personal growth through the means of making art. The book sets forth a unique and effective way to gain art skills based on tapping intuitive knowledge within and rewriting powerless ideas. FB group "Art Completes You Course" has lessons based on the exercises from this book.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Shraddha Nithyananda
• Release date: Oct 2, 2018

Shraddha Nithyananda

New York-based artist and international coach Shraddha Nithyananda has released her #1 bestseller, Art Completes You: Transformation through Art and the Science of Completion to help people heal through art. A person’s progress in life can often come to a halt due to negative self-talk, self-doubt and many other limiting factors. Also, utilizing the Vedic tradition in her book, the author helps beginner and seasoned artists start a transformative journey towards not only becoming a better artist but also towards improving their life quality. However, the book does not solely address artists. Anyone looking to express themselves and heal themselves through art can learn from this book.Art Completes You is a revolutionary way to learn to draw and paint while dropping all negative self- talk. The book combines Vedic art principles with the ‘science of completion’: a meditative method that helps people let go of past traumas and initiate new experiences. Using the methods mentioned in the book, Shraddha has been able to eliminate many limiting factors in her life. Readers can implement these easily adaptable practices to their daily routines to find depth and meaning in life. Those readers interested in learning art will learn art techniques in a very short amount of time as compared to conventional learning methods.Shraddha Nithyananda is the pen name for a New-York based Russian artist, Elena Zelenina, an author of multiple books and an international coach. With each of her books, she uses a Vedic pen name with a significant spiritual background. Growing up in a family of two Russian master artists and being exposed to art from a young age, Shraddha has always sought spirituality in life. Other than being an art instructor and author, she has coached people in Russia, USA and India. One of her most noticeable achievementsincludes founding and running the Biryukov Academy in New Jersey for 11 years. She has worked proactively for over 30 years in the field of education, art and empowerment.Throughout Shraddha’s life, art has been her medium for self-growth. Through art, she has taught herself to overcome challenges, let go of negativity and embrace new opportunities. She has successfully pursued many business endeavors, healed her daughter’s learning disability and accomplished many other milestones in her professional and personal life. Always passionate about spreading the message of art and helping people improve the quality of their life, she has now authored Art Completes You, which is a testament to Shraddha’s unique outlook on art, life and spirituality.

Book preview

Dedicated To H.H. Paramahamsa Nithyananda



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I thank my family, friends, and students who were a huge part of making this book possible. I especially thank my daughter Alice Sungurov for all her love and creative contribution. My deepest gratitude to my editor Jeff Ourvan for his excellent guidance and support.

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INTRODUCTION

ART COMPLETES YOU will lead artists to creative breakthroughs by applying the Vedic principles of completion to their art and lives. Readers interested in self-development will experience growth through the means of making art. They will contemplate different art concepts, like creativity impulse and line as an expression of it, emotions or color, proportions, shape and how they build the world around us. For people interested in drawing and painting, the book will set forth a unique and effective way to gain an art skills set based on tapping intuitive knowledge within. And for those seeking to nurture spirituality through art practices, the techniques presented here offer a roadmap to permanent emotional healing.

Completion, the essence of this work, is a state of being where past hurts and doubts no longer produce negative effects. In fact, ART COMPLETES YOU does not teach art techniques per se; rather here, while we will point to approaches to color, good composition, perspective, and rules of light, the reader will reach his or her inner source of knowledge to form his or her own artistic rules and methods.

The work on completion in this book will create an opportunity to heal self-doubts. Moreover, the work on self-doubt makes the artist's vision clearer, and one ’ s art quality immediately changes for the better. Art skills and life skills will be equally improved – like two sides of the same coin.

We come to this life void of powerless beliefs about ourselves, but in the process of socialization we acquire ideas that do not support us. We even choose hobbies that often elevate stress, and then the constant comparison to how a person next to us is doing poisons the enjoyment of learning something new. We transmit the same powerless ideas to the next generation, and the circle continues. Once our self-doubt is healed, however, our paintings and drawings become expressions of authenticity.

Here, the word authenticity is used in the Vedic tradition. In this context, being authentic means to manifest one's highest potential. I see incredible results every time, with every student, in every class after application of the completion technique towards our journey to authenticity. You will learn to do this through our exercises as well.

The structure of the book is based on self-discovery. An idea is expressed in verse or a series of questions at the beginning of each chapter. That is typically followed by a corresponding art practice, along with suggested materials and minimal advice. I would recommend that the reader writes down all the realizations that he or she has while working on an art piece. After an art practice is finished, the reader has the option of looking at the author ’ s explanation and analysis.

A favorite experience of self-discovery occurred once in my class when a student was studying color. She was contemplating the sentence: Light is the source of color. What is the source of light? She was drawing and drawing and then said: I know. I just got it. I am. I am the source of light! This sort of insight is naturally empowering, and it ’ s useful from the point of view of artistic skills because it affects the choice of colors, perspective, and the subjects of paintings.

We see a myriad of images throughout our lifetimes; we take a zillion photographs with our memories. All these images are stored inside us. The only reason it ’ s so difficult for people to draw and paint is because people believe that only some people can be artists. Why is it that every five-year-old is convinced he or she ’ s an awesome artist, while 90 percent of 17-year-olds are convinced that they are bad at art? Many of the remaining ten percent will lose all hope and belief in themselves while attending art college.

People aren ’ t sure who they are because we base our identities on the opinions of others. We collect somebody else ’ s ideas and build our self-images on other ’ s approval. We tend to emotionally collapse if even one person revokes their approval. But with the help of the process in this book, the reader gets a chance to meet him or herself, and it is the most amazing meeting. Art skills are just skills. They can be compared with driving skills. You can be a professional driver and make money operating a taxi, for example, or you can drive because you love to drive your family around. Some people choose to make a living with their art, and some use it to make their life richer. Both are great choices, and both are available to everyone.

ART COMPLETES YOU provides a path for anyone interested in art and spirituality as a means toward enrichment and healing. A reader might think: I love art, but I ’ m not talented enough to become an artist. If so, consider this case study: Once a woman who considered herself not to be talented remembered an episode from her childhood. She was about seven years old. Back then, she recalled, she arrived to class and sat at the piano. The teacher said: How dare you show up to class with such long, dirty fingernails! The woman still remembered how ashamed she was. She re-lived the episode over and over. She realized that her cognition at this moment was I lack talent. It was a shock for her to see that this life-long, incomplete insight came from an accidental, illogical cognition during a piano lesson. Maybe the teacher was rude, but still there was no logical connection between the cognition she inferred and the fact that the teacher thought she needed a little more grooming. We all carry with us similar, illogical cognitions.

Freedom from powerless beliefs about ourselves and the world makes everything better. A person afraid of public speaking can be trained to enjoy it. A person stuck in an abusive relationship can emerge from it without pain. And remarkably, the completion process works in such a way that a person will never repeat the pattern once the pattern is complete.

Imagine if something you need to deal with becomes instead easy and fun. Nothing changed about the thing itself, but in the first case you might never succeed, while in the other instance, you ’ ll enjoy the process and also acquire a new skill.

It is socialization that leads to incompletions or illogical cognitions. It happens because when the child is born, he or she is born as an independent intelligence, but society does not recognize that. As parents, we ’ re convinced that our children have no idea how to live life, and we need to teach them. But this so-called teaching is often limited to our own powerless beliefs. If our socialization were less restrictive – or one in which our children can believe more in possibility rather than incompletions – these wrong, powerless, illogical cognitions would not be born. The good news is that it is possible to come out of it and create a better life for us, our children and society.

The purpose of human life is to evolve. The beginner artist starts one painting and then changes it, because he or she gets advice from someone else. In contrast, self-leadership allows us to understand what we want and gives us the authority to make our own rules. The first step on a path to self-leadership is for the reader to identify what he or she considers beautiful or interesting or worth painting. Clarity within your own set of rules will make life, not just art, much more pleasant and fun. At the end of the day, this gives rise to not only artistic but personal freedom.

The mission of ART COMPLETES YOU is to show you how to blaze your own path to a healthier and happier life through the love for and practice of art. The book is organized and formatted to support an easy reading and practicing experience. Each chapter is a stand-alone chapter. A reader can direct their way of exploring the material or follow the suggested path in sequential chapters based on the author ’ s practical experience.

CHAPTER ONE

Understanding the Process

Everyone can create art.

Everyone can be complete.

There are many ways for a human being to emotionally grow. We develop when we explore the world as a child, during our school years, in college and at work. We sometimes grow through our relationships. In other words, we expand through our experiences, which does not depend on age. New experiences, points of view, and new ideas open up different dimensions of life to us. If we ’ re curious, if we are seeking, we ’ ll understand life more deeply. Life is like a workshop, and sometimes we realize that we ’ re so much bigger and deeper than what we imagined.

We mature with realizations. We become calmer and able to see things from different perspectives. We might start seeing that everything is connected. Such understandings do not come from others telling us how things are; they happen when we internalize them. Like an egg that hatches from inside, new realizations break the shell of our consciousness from within. Only after these epiphanies grow inside the shell of our consciousness, and they can no longer contain the expanded version of us, the magic of a conscience shift occurs.

The method I found so fascinating, and the one on which this book is based, is all about inner growth – an evolution through art. You will not be given the answers; you will discover the answers to