I Bow To The one & already are

Julie Ann Otis

Interview by L. Valena
November 5, 2025

What was your first impression of the prompt you received?

When I first got it, I was struck by the iterations of self and relationship with self. I was also struck with the cyclical nature of the first impression of seeing oneself; specifically feeling attuned to some central aspect of oneself. So that's what first struck me about it visually.

I felt a call to just feel into it somatically. I was just kind of walking around the house, feeling into the sway of it. Then I decided to go ahead and print it out in color, and I was going through each of the expressions, feeling into them somatically and energetically.

Then I went to the woods. I thought, “Okay, let's come into some authentic movement around a feeling in this.” I was so surprised that, when I came into that third movement, which was the one that's down on the beach with the hands kind of cradled, I actually came into a bow. I think that's partly my relationship with nature, and partly my background as a Theravada Buddhist practitioner. It just felt like the reverence was there. I have had such a strong bowing practice in my past, and it felt so natural to bow. It felt like bowing to Self, bowing to the Earth, bowing to Oneness, bowing to Source or the Divine.

Quite often, I work by going back through old photos, sometimes as far as 10 years, just to see which images step forward and say, “I'm for this project. I'm here for this.” There are usually a few different images that volunteer to come forward.

The first image was this wildly strong, multicolored image with a white tiger in the center. The background is actually from a piece by Vance Kirkland, a famous artist in Denver who has passed. He did a lot of amazing work with paint where he hung in these stirrups and splattered paint, just amazing. So this was a postcard of his piece, and I worked with that to super saturate it. And then that pin of the white tiger, I am guessing is from Meow Wolf, also in Denver, but I might be wrong on that.

I worked with that and started to bring in text. As I was playing with the text, it felt like this pointillism, or this dotted kind of text, but repeating over and over and over again, “I Bow To None, I Bow To The One.”

In my work as a consultant and as a channel, there's a cosmology and a metaphysics in the background that knows that this is all Oneness. It's a tapestry of the “WE within me,” and there's a vast connectivity to all of life. And we've got the myth of separation or the myth of dualism at play. It's actually very Hindu: The one became two for the joy of becoming one again. A lot of our work in our own spiritual maturation process, psychological development, and consciousness expansion has to do with relating to the Self and relating to the Other until we remember that we are the Other and we are all the One.

That's what that work really wanted to come forward and name.

What happened next?

It felt like there really was this big roar of self-sovereignty there, and then it went into a real softening into this second piece. Depending on how you read it, it is “Neither will nor surrender delivers you home, for home you already are,” or “You already are neither will nor surrender.” There are lots of different ways, depending on where you start. I wanted to kind of feel into how cyclical our spiritual maturation and consciousness expansion are. You can start at any point on the wheel and have that experience of self-sovereignty, have that experience of the collective, but ultimately freedom only has one taste. That’s the ease that we come into, and forget, and come into, and forget.

We know what clarity feels like. We know what it tastes like when we're in it, but it's not a permanent state. We come into it, we come out of it, we come into it and come out of it, and honestly that's what enlightenment tastes like. It’s a really beautiful, blessed coming into clarity and being able to relish it, and ideally coming into a space of non-grasping around it. It's always going away and coming back in, you know, being forgotten and then remembered in a very cyclical way.

That's a beautiful way of putting that. It sounds like your spiritual journey has really informed your art practice in a lot of ways.

It’s also my clients who engage in consciousness expansion work. They mirror back to me what's happening on the planet and what's happening in me. They’re bringing their spirituality, creativity, and whole selves into their businesses, too.

Awesome. Is there anything else you want to say on the record, as it were?

This is awesome, and I want to do it again. I already had a craving to come back into artistic community, and this has further whetted that appetite.

Call Number: R101VA | R10VA.otiI

Julie Ann Otis is a metaphysicist, artist, and kind of a wiseass, if we’re being honest. She spends most of her time cooking and traveling around the planet, but she also does some work as a business consultant supporting brave souls in expanding their companies and their consciousness. Her home base is in Medford, Massachusetts. You can get her vibe at www.julieannotis.com and www.linkedin.com/in/therealjulieannotis