Creative Transformation

In this episode, Dr. Sally & Dr. Jen explore the intersection of creativity and transformation. 

Transcript

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0:50 Sally says she has devoted her entire professional life to understanding creativity better. Its is a very complex word, and has a whole division of academia dedicated to understanding it, measuring and quantifying it. Actually experiencing the creative act though, remains a mystery. Creativity is an innate characteristic, quality, and mechanism of the universe. And it is transformative. And inversely, transformation itself is creative. So creativity and transformation go hand in hand. We ourselves are a fractal of that creative universe. We can become part of emergence itself. We can hold tools, we can shape the manifestation around us, we can plant, we can dig, we can build. We have a binary brain for both convergent and divergent thinking – for imagination, and its execution. We can create, procreate, and co-create. This body can produce babies, and ideas. It can problem solve, and manifest truth, goodness and beauty. It can envision the future and bring that into being. When you actually understand the powers of this body and start to practice and execute them, your life will never be the same again. Creativity is the use of the imagination for manifesting change. Sally describes how we do that – with a binary brain. If we are open, curious, and receptive to what wants to come through us, from the subconscious, from culture, or from a download from “somewhere” called inspiration. Then we can transmit that into culture. This actually transforms us, our culture, other people, and the future. It benefits the whole of mankind. All products come through a human body using both divergent and convergent thinking. Yet creativity itself is not highly valued in schools. Sally describes what it was like to be an art educator facing ‘left brain chauvinism’. She also describes the students who are very creative. And the marketplace, that rewards analysis over creativity. The creative act is a birthing moment, whether we use text, image, gesture, rhythm, the multiple languages that we can use symbolically to express our interior life. These are moments of great power, great healing, communication, beauty, connection, imagination, literally all the things that make life worth living, and they come through the human body. 

11:26   Jen asks Sally to share with educators any ideas to nurture creative potential 

12:17   Sally shares her book, available on Amazon - ‘Art-Making with Refugees and Survivors: Creative and Transformative Responses to Trauma After Natural Disasters, War and Other Crises” which has been recommended to all US art educators by their professional body, for helping all students with ACE’s, not only refugees (Adverse Childhood Experiences). The book outlines the criteria for facilitating creative experiences, the most important one being safety, stability and security because we need to find our parasympathetic nervous system to come into alpha or theta brainwaves. The book is a collection of stories from around the world, from leaders in creative programs facilitated in refugee camps, with survivors of genocide, tsunami and earthquake, inner city violence and poverty, colonization, apartheid, pandemic etc. 

14:36  Jen says we are lifting imagination back to its rightful place in the world. To deny our creativity is a kind of trauma. Both transformation and creativity are about generating something new – objects, solutions, expressions, ideas. Transformation is about change, from one form to another. Think of creativity and transformation as best friends, they frequently hang out together, they bring out the best in each other, and they grow together. She describes how when she’s creating, she’s transforming all kinds of things - paint into a painting, but also thoughts, ideas, and feelings. So some times creativity is tangible, visible or auditory, but the creative force is also expressed in non tangible states of consciousness. Jen then describes her own self sabotage, which arose out of her own ACE’s. She learned to replace critical thoughts with positive, kind and compassionate thoughts. This is an act of intangible creative transformation. The imaginal realm is vital to healing, so noticing what we are creating within us is important. Transformative attention heals the pattern of self harm, and that itself is a deeply creative process. She cites Alex Gray, then says creativity requires comfort with uncertainty, and the willingness to explore the unknown. She quotes Henri Matisse on the courage needed to create. Something mysterious dwells in the unknown and our job as artists is to reach into the mystery and bring forth something new. She closes by quoting from Alan Alda.

21:08   Sally agrees the more resilience and courage we get from creating the more we do it. She turned towards creativity to heal many of her own traumas. Sally then describes the ACE’s - physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional abuse, physical neglect, emotional neglect, mental illness in the family, divorce or incarceration, or substance abuse. With 50% of marriages ending in divorce, many kids and adults have experienced a lot of trauma. So we're all becoming more trauma informed. And so art therapy is a new pioneering field really trying to address this. It naturally takes adults back to their childhood in some way because it encourages playfulness. It encourages relaxing into risk taking and experimentation. It encourages us to find inspiration within ourselves, find the agency to actually execute change in our lives. Creators find their voices and their story, which is expressed in some art form. We externalize the pain and then we've turned the subjective experience into something objective. And that piece will talk to us about the experience, and so we slowly we heal. Sally has done this work with a lot of traumatized populations. Then she reads from her book the things that can be restored when you make art, when we stop thinking of art making as ‘childish’ or a hobby. She gathered stories from across the world, and collated decades of wisdom into her book. She itemizes exactly what heals through art making. Finding one’s voice, to tell one’s story, is the most empowering. 

27:39   Jen reminds us that after our world became unsafe, we can recreate a safe place, so that the creative spark can arise with its healing magic. Much of her early life had been about managing trauma. All her creative energy went into maintaining that chaos in her mind. When she had her awakening, all that energy was suddenly freed up, and she was full of potential. And she started creating, from a place of ‘being’, and some chaotic writing poured out of her. She created over 100 digital self portraits, trying to express the oneness that she was feeling with all of life. Expressing was the only thing that mattered to her, but when it was done, she knew it was done. The cork was uncorked from her creative potential, she was able to flow creatively in really dynamic ways. And everything she’s doing now, even this podcast, is a byproduct of that great release of energy, that is now free to play, since she created that sense of safety within herself. And now it's flowing. Dealing with unresolved trauma, can be a full time job. Collectively that cork is now being released, and our creative potential is now flowing out into the world. 

33:49   Sally agrees that trauma blocks our flow. And we can develop many manifestations of neurosis when our flow is blocked. By unblocking, we release trapped energy and we create space for the new. Sally then shares some healing indigenous cultural practices she was involved with – carving totem poles and masks with Order of Canada carver Simon Charlie (Hwunumetse in the Coast Salish language). Young indigenous men with some deep traumas including colonization, incarceration, addiction, family abuse, foetal alcohol etc came together to reconnect with their heritage. Her book explores this art-therapeutic cultural practice in depth. The creative act unifies disparate, broken parts of ourselves into wholeness, restoring pride, dignity and hope. Carving a tree into a beautiful form can heal the wounds and turn the story into an incredibly beautiful object. The carver is then initiated through sacred ritual, with ceremony, with feasting. The village can celebrate the young men and their accomplishments. There's no end to the empowerment through the creative act, the unblocking of the gift and the restoration of joy that is the healing process. We are fractal emergence, so the universe wants us to create new forms and beauty through us. We just have to look at nature and the gorgeousness of what the universe creates. We’re part of that, and we get to do that. Once we've recognized that this body is an instrument for emergence, and that trauma and left brain chauvinism shut it down, and that insecure people try to diminish the power of creativity, we can resist. So ignoring all those voices, and finding our creative gift is the most empowering thing we can do. Bringing forth our gift transforms our community.

41:20  Jen says we hit our sweet spot again in this podcast, which is the intersection between personal, social, cultural, ecological, universal, and transpersonal transformation. And all these levels of reality are operating within us in this dynamic way. Transformation and creativity are playing at all of these intersections in magnificent ways. It's a miracle to have a conscious awareness, to be able to even talk about this, and have an awareness of how we are transformative beings, within a field of transformation, who are always transforming, and being transformed. It's wild. Jen then cites Gabrielle Roth, the creator of five rhythms ecstatic dance. Then she asks listeners to notice “When did you stop dancing?”. “When did you stop singing?”. “When did you stop being enchanted by stories?”. “When did you stop finding comfort in this sweet territory of silence?”