Reverse Graffiti: The Sacred Art of Unbecoming

By Scott Feinberg

Reverse Graffiti is a spiritual pilgrimage into the heart of the journey home to the soul. Poetic. Illuminating. Graceful. Gritty. Authentic. A refreshingly honest and provocative expression of the spiritual path sourced from the rawness of our shared human experience. Weaving an inspiring tapestry of self examination and poetic dharma, Reverse Graffiti takes its readers on a deep dive into the many layers we traverse on the transformative journey of coming home to ourselves.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gatekeeper Press
• Release date: Sep 30, 2021
• ISBN: 9781662912757

Book preview

prologue

a preface to the poem we call life. the one we are writing ourselves. the one we are writing together…

Have you ever seen a dirty wall?

The surprising answer to this question is no.

In actuality, what we’ve seen is dirt on a wall. What we tend to do is conflate the conditioned nature of the wall with the essential nature of the wall. We have come to see the wall as the accumulation of the conditioning it has collected through the span of its life, all too often at the exclusion of what’s beneath it.

I’ve given this collection of writings the name Reverse Graffiti as inspired by an artistic movement spreading throughout the world wherein street artists have created graffiti not by adding paint to city walls but rather by taking sponges, rags, and pressure washers to remove portions of the dirt and create powerful reverse graffiti images and messages through a juxtaposition of the wall’s conditioning and its underlying, essential nature.

When I first came across this unique form of artistry I was blown away by this one thought: It wouldn’t be art without the dirt.

I saw it as a metaphor for the human journey of coming home to ourselves. I saw that not only do we often confuse the conditioned nature of our lives with the essential nature of our lives but once we realize this we tend to condemn the conditioning. We see it as in the way rather than being the way. We want to overcome it. To get rid of it. And the method for doing so is often packaged in a neatly manicured process of chronological steps to spiritual awakening. And yet, it’s never felt that way to me.

In my own journey, it’s felt much more like an ongoing learning and collecting of the skillful tools to meet my conditioning. Tools like compassion, curiosity, and courage to meet what remains hidden, fragmented, and unintegrated within me. To meet my wounds with my wisdom. And if I could meet my conditioning with these tools, each time I could reveal a little bit more of what resides underneath.

It’s never felt fully finished. Fully defined. Fully polished. Or fully perfect. But it has felt fully human. And while it hasn’t felt like a linear step-by-step process, the progress I’ve made along the way seems to only deepen my embrace of the dirt on my wall. And this too has been the very basis for the depth of understanding and compassion I can meet my fellow travelers with along this journey home to the place that has been here, within each of us, all along. For we can only meet one another at the depth of which we’ve met ourselves.

I believe that we are each reverse graffiti artists. Little by little, learning to lean in. To surf the shadows. To get curious about our own conditioning. To reveal what’s hidden beneath it. And to make our own unique art out of the truly exquisite amalgamation of our shadow and our light.

This book is an invitation to meet each other at the wall. To be unapologetically human. To support each other in stepping into the unrevealed, in service of unearthing our sovereignty and alchemizing our adversity into our artistry and our activism.

May the prose and the poetry of my own life’s journey of unbecoming be an offering to you as you uncover the infinite layers of your own mystery.

- Scott

the receiving

i gave myself to the current and let the current carry me.

but the truth is, the path isn’t what i thought it’d be.

i thought i was becoming free.

but that thought kept me separate from my own divinity.

so rather than trying to define myself, i decided to align myself.

to unbecome who i’d learned to be.

it’s incredible what the mind can see once it learns to shed belief.

who is the one that believes?

and what is belief but a thought made concrete?

am i the one perceiving thought or the awareness that’s perceiving me?

i mean…is awareness even within me?

or am i emerging within it?

maybe i could just drop the thought and merge with it.

it’s wild how the mind is so insistent

to create a liberation that comes later when it’s a journey without distance.

see you can feel it in this instant.

you are the universe percolating.

you are the infinite procreating.

nascent within each moment.

you can taste it but you can’t own it.

you don’t have to become it because you are it.

it’s just beyond believing.

it’s where the current carries you and it’s yours for the receiving.

the travelers

we are travelers.

and we are on a journey home.

home to the sacred temple of our hearts.

home to the soul that we are.

along the way we may get lost.

we may become unconsciously beholden to beliefs or feelings that tell us something else.

that we are not whole, not ok, not enough, not capable.

these beliefs are not just yours.

they dwell within each of us as archaic imprints into our collective psyche.

they, too, are okay.

contrary to our first inclination to get rid of them, they are not obstacles but rather divine doorways.

they are not in the way. they are the way.

this is the paradox of the great mystery.

can you summon up the bravery to lean into them?

the courage to lend them space to be felt and breathed into?

the compassion to do so slowly, safely, and with support?

it is when we allow loving awareness to touch our human experience without interference that we journey home to the purest percussion of our spiritual heart.

our spiritual practice is not to become free.

it is to stop becoming un-free.

the shell (the pursuit of imperfection)

one day i was taking a walk on the beach looking for shells. i was on a two week vacation from the life i normally lead. i just needed a bit of space to breathe.

it’s like i couldn’t really see - blinded by life’s forest, i couldn’t see the trees.

see i’d spent a lifetime trying to figure out who i should be. what i should do.

i could feel the pressure of meeting the standards of what i was handed - some grand achievement but it felt more like perpetual grieving.

achieving so much yet it was never enough.

but never enough for who?

what was i trying to prove?

and whose approval to seek?

it was like a silent judge held his gavel over me.

so i walked.

and i walked.

endlessly down that beach adorned with broken shells.

each breaking into more pieces beneath my feet.

but i just kept walking and picking up more shells.

walking and picking up more shells.

walking and picking up more shells.

every one i picked up i tossed back to the sea.

you see they weren’t good enough to keep.

i couldn’t find a single one that was perfect.

every single one had a crack.

i just wanted one that was good enough to keep but none of them were worth it.

then i saw it just lying there unassumingly, its head poking out of the sand.

i felt it when i touched it- like it was all part of the plan.

man this thing was perfect in every single way.

how amazing that it stayed in tact after traveling all this way.

then i looked it over closely… the front, the sides, the back.

no fucking way, the back of it was cracked.

so i went to toss it back, another shell to step on but as my arm pulled back to let it go, my hand squeezed tighter, pleading no.

it froze me in my tracks. it hit me in that moment. all i wasn’t owning.

that in my pursuit of being chosen, i was discarding all that felt broken.

in my pursuit of being chosen, i was discarding all that felt broken.

i’d spent a lifetime striving to matter.

and each broken piece that felt shattered was proof of my unworthiness.

but this shell was showing me a knowingness hidden beneath the patterns of disowning a worth intrinsic to my bones & skin & heart