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OLIVIA ASHTON PHOTOGRAPHY

Welcome
About Me
blog
Contact
Categories
- Faces
- Places
- Love

the neilsons!

January 13, 2014 Olivia Ashton

In family Tags San Francisco, San Francisco family portraits, family photos, oregon family portraits

← LEXI + CONNOR // ENGAGED! →

LATEST:

Kenny // In bloom 🌷 @chapolibre

Togetherness around ceramics //shot for the ever talented @wolfceramics ✨🤲🏽✨ #wolfceramics #oliviaashtonphotography

∞ ancient 🤲🏽 connection ∞ #sacredselflovesession #oliviaashtonphotography @hannahruthdyson

⛲️🌾🌜 The honoring of Her entirety🌛🌾⛲️ @essenceofthemother #sacredselflovesession #oliviaashtonphotography

Whole from the moment we came in
∞ 🌌🌏👁🤲🏽👁🌏🌌∞ #sacredselflovesession #oliviaashtonphotography @wyatt_piro

Part of my karma in this lifetime is this deep desire/need/obsession to “figure things out” “understand” or “know” with my thinking mind and intellect. But what I’ve been shown the past few years (yet still seem to consistently forget 😉) is that the “knowing” I crave so deeply doesn’t come through my rational mind. It arises from the timelines space within me that already knows, has always known and will always know. This space is beyond words, void of neat packages, lacking linear timelines and without any concrete, quantifiable certainty from the POV of my rational mind.
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It can be so hard to remember that this timeless space opens and deepens through quiet practice, stillness, and the cessation of thoughts, not the propagation of them. If I’m stuck up in the intellect spinning my wheels, quieting down my mind can feel so counter-intuitive! Because as a desire to “figure it out” in my mind grows, the volume of my thinking gets turned up up UP and it feels like the only “way out” is to “solve” it through more thoughts.
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However, if I can take even a moment to come up for air from this headspace of “needing to know” and sit in meditation, grace descends. There is a release that occurs through this space. I focus my attention on the breath. I sink into my heart. Open. Soften. Let the awareness that is my true nature become the foreground of my experience and let the darling mind have a break for a while. Allow her to rest. Observe thoughts coming and going while steadily bringing the attention back to the breath, back to awareness. There is a sweetness and a tenderness to this process 💕 I often view my thinking mind like a little child who desperately wants to have FULL REIGNS of her experience here. To have total freedom to do whatever she wants. But! She’s only 3, and just as desperately wants to be parented and taken care of. She simply doesn’t have access to all the pieces yet! It would be exhausting and scary to try and navigate this world on her own and we would never expect that of her. My mind is the child and my awareness is the wise elder. (Continued in comments 👇🏽)

We are our own access point in 👁💕 Sacred Self Love Session with the infinite @wyatt_piro #sacredselflovesession #oliviaashtonphotography

The past three months in under three minutes! 🌎Forever in awe of this transforming dreamscape of space and time 👁✨👁 #1secondeveryday #OliviaAshton1SE #1seme @1secondeveryday

Togetherness around ceramics ✨ shot for the ever talented @wolfceramics! #sarahwolfceramics #oliviaashtonphotography

A day for basking in the infinite realm of love that has been created by the fierce, compassionate women on this planet 🌎 and by the Great Mother herself 🌿 Feeling you all today, no higher praise 👑🌸🌜⛲️✨ #internationalwomensday
Artwork by the boundless @merakilabbe

Little love note for this badass, kind, compassionate, radiant human being who is putting such brilliance out into the world! If you aren’t already following along on Haley’s journey and listening to her heart opening music — the time is Now!! 👁✨👁 @haleyjohnsenmus

I was reminded today that it’s been 7 years since I lived in a little town along the Neckar River in Germany. At the base of castle ruins and cobblestone streets I spent the year falling in love with exploring my inner landscape, turning towards heartbreak and loneliness, inviting in discomfort and playing in the unknown. It’s where I first discovered photography as a path to more deeply understanding the world around me, and connecting with others from a place of intimacy (into-me-see) 👁✨👁 I didn’t know it then, but it was the start of so many aspects of my life that would unfold ❤️ Honoring that brave, young One today and the path she blazed for currently-day us ✨

Radiant Gretchen connecting in during the opening ceremony of her Sacred Self Love Session at @soulseedgathering ✨ Nestled at the base of the Sierra Nevada Mountains in Colombia.

Sacred Self Love Sessions are a powerful opportunity to dive deeply into the infinite waters of Self, and lovingly bare witness to what unfolds. They are intentional portrait sessions designed to hold space for the exploration of your being and invite you to express and play freely from this space of intimate connection.

Together we get to celebrate the magic that is YOUR unique light, and have it mirrored back to you through imagery for further soul exploration 👁✨👁 #oliviaashtonphotography #sacredselflovesession

I love to think of our eyes as windows through which The Infinite/Source/God gazes upon this dimension through 👁✨👁 Pure, luminous, Awareness. There is nothing to obtain! But rather the slow process of cleaning the smudges off our own windows of perception so that we can clearly see through the eyes of our True Nature. It’s always here! There’s not a thing that needs to be earned or gained or collected outside ourselves first. I’ve personally found that cultivating stillness of mind has been the most effective de-smudging technique for my own windows:) And the cleaner and clearer they get, the more I forget that there is even a piece of glass there at all. And in moments of pure Grace, I’m shown that the glass itself is God too, and all separation dissolves.

Celebrating this Ray of sunshine over on my blog today!! 🌻✨🌞 The link to all the flower powered birthday goodness is in my bio!

sharing this warm, flower powered birthday evening on the blog tomorrow! 🌻🌾 getting to capture memories for those I love will forever take the cake in this life ✨🍰

Ash, I am in awe of who you are! Thank you for sharing your radiant, brave, compassionate, heart with the collective. You are an inspiration ✨👁 A few glimpses into @ash_mudra ‘s Sacred Self Love Session in September ✨ #oliviaashtonphotography #sacredselflovesession

“Try and imagine what it will be like to go to sleep and never wake up. It’s one of the great wonders of this life. And if you think long enough about this, something will happen — you will find out, among other things, that it will pose the next question to you: What was it like to wake up having never fallen asleep?

Years ago this excerpt from an Allan Watts lecture put language to a feeling that was multiplying at the core of me. This growing hunch that there was more to this experience of being alive and awake than I had since realized. Since I didn’t remember a time of ever NOT being alive, it felt like what was going on here was “normal” — like this experience of being a sentient, self aware, breathing body, gravitationally rooted to an ecologically interdependent planet spiraling through infinite time and space wasn’t the craziest thing I’d ever heard of!
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When I began to wake up to the mysterious nature of my own life, I felt like I was seeing and experiencing the word through completely different eyes. Everything around me was exactly the same, yet I’d never SEEN any of it before. This spiraled me into both ecstatic wonder and deep depression as I tried to find footing in the Middle Way. Over the past few years, my balance has solidified in so many realms, but this process of falling asleep, and waking up a-new continues to be my greatest teacher. As I fluctuate in and out of connection, passion, equanimity, anxiety, love, fear, wisdom, wonder, confusion, excitement, understanding, numbness, elation — the whole spectrum of human emotions — it seems that in every moment, there is only the thinnest of veils separating awake and asleep within my own life. Like the truth is masterfully hidden in plain sight, always quietly beckoning me towards the remembrance of it — yet never insisting I see. (Continued in comments 👇🏽)

To the end of the Earth with you 👭💕🌏👁🌌👣

Thank youuuu Portland sunshine for an inspired workspace!☀️🎶☀️