To change our mode of action, we must change the image of ourselves that we carry within us. — Moshe Feldenkrais
In my twenties, I worked part-time as an attendant in the municipal museum in The Hague.
My job was simple: keep an eye on the paintings.
There was a hall dedicated to the work of Piet Mondrian. Painting after painting, the whole wall filled with his geometric world — and then, in the middle of it all, a large canvas called Evolution.
Blue. The most extraordinary blue. Blue in the blue, layer upon layer, that draw me to other places...
I stood in front of it and forgot everything — time, space, my body, the other paintings I was supposed to keep an eye on.
Moments like that made me wonder how attention shapes our lives. What happens when one experience grabs our attention so completely that, for a while, everything else fades into the background?
As we live life, we have many experiences that hurt us, scare us, give us joy, love,… And as we grow, they become the stories of our lives, the paintings in our inner museum.
All of it is there, on the walls of the museum we carry inside us.
And in every museum, there is always one painting that captures the attention more than the others.
Mine was a classroom in the Netherlands: a little girl with buck teeth, spiky hair and a fiery red blush on her cheeks. The teacher making fun of her, the other children jeering at her.
And the girl — I can still see and feel her so clearly, standing in the front of the class — looking at herself from the sidelines as she cringes and slowly disappears.
For a long time, that was the only painting I could see.
I stood very close to it. So close that it filled my entire field of vision. Every thought, every movement, every glance in the mirror passed through the lens of that image — of a girl who was wrong in some fundamental way, who didn't belong, who was better off making herself smaller, invisible and less.
Over time, as this inner painting kept my attention, I felt more anxious, more tense, and more alone.
The body learns quickly. Mine learned to hold itself in a way that matched the painting: tense, contracted, on guard, eyes that continuously scanned their surroundings for danger. A body telling the world, before any words were spoken, that it was bracing for something.
What happens when one painting fills the whole wall
When attention is drawn to one painting for long enough, the rest of the museum gradually disappears from view.
The other stories — of joy, of capacity, of connection, of the moments when life felt genuinely good — are still there on the walls. They have always been there. The body keeps them all.
And yet a nervous system, organised around a particular storyline, keeps returning to the same painting – in search for ‘the danger’, in search for confirmation of what it already knows. Moving through the world as if that painting were the only thing that existed.
The body moves accordingly. We may brace ourselves, clench our jaws, tense our shoulders, breathe shallowly. Little by little, the whole system becomes organised around the story that has come to occupy so much of our attention.
Zooming out
When attention has been drawn to one difficult painting for a long time, it can be surprisingly nourishing to discover another one that has been hanging there all along.
The more experiences the body has, the less it has to organise itself around a single story.
Dancing and moving with awareness invited my attention to other paintings in my inner museum.
Through experiencing different ways of moving, sensing and holding myself, I gradually discovered different ways of being. I began to discover paintings I hadn't noticed before. Paintings that evoked ease, joy, curiosity, confidence, connection.
My body encountered experiences it had no reason to defend against. And little by little, my attention was no longer drawn to just one story.
As my body gathered more ways of experiencing itself, I began to perceive my whole inner museum.
With that came a greater variety of sensations, emotions, and possibilities. Feeling more of myself allowed me to see myself differently, to perceive the world around me differently and to make different choices—choices that felt more in tune with who I am, what matters to me, and how I wanted to meet life.
The difficult painting is still there. It is now simply one painting among many.
From this new place, something shifted in the way I experienced myself, and with it, the way I held myself and moved through the world.