Disruption as a Spiritual Practice

For a long time, I saw disruption as destruction. The tearing down of form, the loss of control, the undoing of something carefully built. But lately, I’ve begun to see it differently. Disruption isn’t the opposite of creation—it’s part of it. It’s the storm that clears the air before new growth can appear.

In the studio, disruption shows up as the moment I stop knowing what I’m doing. The painting resists me. The drawing falls apart. Every instinct tells me to fix it, to pull it back into order. But if I can stay in that space a little longer—if I can resist the urge to control—I begin to see something else forming beneath the surface. Something more honest.

That’s when the real work begins. The mess, the reworking, the uncertainty—it all becomes a kind of prayer. I realize that what’s being disrupted isn’t just the painting, but me. My patterns, my expectations, my attachment to the idea of mastery.

Maybe that’s the point. To disrupt is to wake up. To let the known collapse so the unknown can finally enter. The surface of the work becomes a mirror for the surface of the self—fractured, layered, imperfect, but alive with possibility.

So when I think of disruption now, I think of it as a spiritual practice. A necessary breaking open. The art is not in restoring order—it’s in learning to breathe inside the chaos and trust that what remains will be true.