Creating Your Destiny Matte Paper Print - 16" x 20"

Choices. We are confronted with them in every moment of our experience. From the simplest choice “What should I have for dinner?” to the ‘big questions’ of life such as having children or going child-free, living in a big city or small town, even the difficult ‘end of life’ choices in a will or living trust. Living confronts us with moment-by-moment choices that are sometimes unwanted, confusing, and even frightening.

Perhaps the biggest choice of all is how to expand our awareness of our own mind. How do we increase our awareness of our unconscious brain-mind? How do we harness the power of our brain-mind to increase our happiness, have better relationships with others, and experience healthier and wiser experiences so that our present self is better than our past self? In other words, how do we utilize our thoughts (beliefs) and feelings to construct the best life possible given so many external pressures and oftentimes dysfunctional demands?

For many people, these questions remain unanswered until the external world forces them into confronting their own consciousness. This can be through unemployment, eviction, divorce, legal trouble, bankruptcy, disease, and many other destabilizing circumstances. Using myself as a case study, it wasn’t until the pandemic of 2020 that the external world forced me to analyze my own mindset. It became necessary to assess my own thoughts (beliefs) and feelings and how they were determining the choices I made and therefore the experiences I was having. My first increase in awareness was noticing how my roommates were able to navigate the emergency with ease compared to my experience. Their jobs allowed them to work from home; some moved back home. They had savings. They had resources and networks of people guiding them. I lost everything: my job, what little savings I had, and survived on one jar of peanut butter per day. I was too ashamed to ask for help, which worsened my experience!

For all the misery, the pandemic increased my awareness of my own thinking and behavior and caused me to ask myself serious questions about my own mindset. Why wasn’t I having an easy time like they were? Why was my experience so radically worse than theirs when we were all educated, skilled, and talented? Far from blaming myself, I got curious about how I had unconsciously moved through the world into the position (experience) I was having. Through humanistic psychoanalysis, I discovered that the unconscious part of my brain was directing the show of my life. My experience was the direct, and indirect, result of thoughts and feelings totally hidden to me. My roommates had a better experience because they had made better decisions prior to the pandemic. They were able to make better decisions because their unconscious brain was the passenger, not the driver, of their adult selves. On the contrary, my inner child/unconscious was driving the car of my life recklessly and way over the speed limit; no wonder I kept hitting so many roadblocks!

I searched for a way out of the financial hardship and emotional turmoil and discovered my own agency through painting. The first painting sold for enough money to buy groceries, and that sale was enough motivation (and dopamine) to try again. After the second sale, and then the third, painting felt like a life purpose rather than a side project, and after years of doing it, the paintings grew in value from the hundreds to the thousands and beyond. Eventually, Paris Hilton followed StudioTumazi; her mom Kathy followed on Instagram; and several of the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills have followed as well. This all happened because I increased my awareness of all the unconscious thoughts (beliefs) and feelings lurking inside the basement of my brain-mind. With a new perspective and fresh insight, it was possible to choose better and to modify my behavior, which in turn resulted in greater happiness. I went from homelessness to furnishing my first apartment; from hunger to abundance; from loneliness to fulfilling friendships; and more.

This painting represents this journey and the reality of our agency in the construction of our experience. “Destiny” is not some external place to book online; it is not a physical place we can visit by plane, car, or train. It is an ever-increasing awareness that at any given time, we examine ourselves and think, “I would never want to trade places with past me.” When the present is more rewarding, more fulfilling, and more enriching than the past, that is destiny, and it happens because we choose it, and we choose to construct it by making our unconscious conscious. No matter what happens in the external world, we have agency. In fact, even the denial of agency—the choice to just let the external world decide our fate—is still a choice. I did not choose to have abusive parents, for example, but I chose therapy. I chose to heal, to develop my brain-mind and take my power back from the perpetrators. Avoiding therapy, refusing introspection, and rejecting my own responsibility in my adult experience was also all a choice I could have made. Whether we approach or avoid our own development, either way, we are making a choice; we are always exercising our agency and producing an experience for ourselves.

My hope is that every time you see the imagery of your new matte paper print, you keep a perspective and hold on to your agency to make your destiny better, healthier, and wiser—a destiny that past you would be proud to own.

• Paper thickness: 10.3 mil
• Paper weight: 189 g/m²
• Opacity: 94%
• ISO brightness: 104%

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