Greetings artists, visionaries, entrepreneurs, pioneers, and creatives…
I’ve always been fascinated by how adults learn in life and how change happens, and I pursued this question through research at the University of Chicago where I was mentored by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, The New York Times Bestselling Author of Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Under Mihaly’s mentorship, I received a PhD from the University of Chicago and an Outstanding Research Award from the American Educational Research Association. I went on to co-author several articles with Mihaly and to teach at a variety of prestigious places, including UC Berkeley, Pacifica Graduate Institute and the Esalen Institute.
I’d accomplished a lot, had prestigious credentials… I was on my path to success.
Then, a profound spiritual awakening changed the course and direction of my work and my life. You can read the details of these mystical experiences under my Personal Story below, but for now I will just say that it was clear I was being called. Since then, I’ve devoted my teaching to how we humans can open a realm of deep beauty and wisdom that lies beyond our thinking minds.
So while I have solid academic credentials, the reason I can guide others to this energetic field is not because I have a PhD or studied from mentors or received research awards. I can guide you to this realm because I’ve been there myself; I’ve had my own direct experience of it. Through many years of working with Source energies, hundreds of clients, and powerful mystical experiences, I’ve learned how to enter a realm of vibrantly alive creative energy.
We can’t get to this field of Source energy through our thinking. To access this realm, we must employ another way of learning and knowing. My work is to teach this way of learning and knowing.
Click links below for:
1. Official bio
2. Lectures, podcasts and interviews
3. Media interviews about my book Getting Messy
4. Personal story
1. Official Bio
Kim Hermanson, PhD is an author, coach and educator who currently serves as adjunct faculty at Pacifica Graduate Institute and Meridian University. Her books include Getting Messy: A Guide to Taking Risks and Opening the Imagination and Sky’s the Limit: The Art of Nancy Dunlop Cawdrey, which received an Independent Publisher Book Award. She has also co-authored book chapters and articles with Anthony S. Bryk, president of the Carnegie Foundation, as well as Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, author of The New York Times bestseller, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, who said this of Kim’s current work: “Not since Carlos Castenada’s books 40 years ago have I had such a strong reaction to anything written. This is very powerful stuff.”
Kim has previously taught at Sophia Center at Holy Names University, University of California Berkeley Extension, the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology and the Esalen Institute. Her PhD is from the University of Chicago, where her doctoral research earned her an Outstanding Research Award from the American Educational Research Association. Kim worked as a corporate computer scientist in the field of artificial intelligence before a series of mystical experiences changed the course of her life and launched her calling to expand our human ways of learning and knowing.
In her unique Doorway sessions and classes, Kim has guided hundreds of people to tap into Source Energy and unleash their most vital creative powers. These energies bring a transformative shift, catalyze breakthroughs and answer whatever the person is going through on a wholly new level of creative expression and healing. While our spiritual and psychological difficulties are of the mind and psyche, metaphor is an entryway into the Deep Creative that lies beyond the linear mind.
TEACHING…
INTERVIEWS and BOOK TALKS…
2. Lectures and interviews about Doorway Sessions
3. Media interviews about Getting Messy
4. Personal Story
When I was 26 I worked as a corporate computer scientist for a large corporation in downtown Chicago. One weekend, I flew with my boyfriend to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan to see the fall colors. Late at night as we cruised down the highway at 65 miles per hour, a car crossed the center line and hit us head-on. I did not lose consciousness, but I was critically injured—I had no feeling below the waist and I knew my back was broken.
After being transported by local paramedics to the local county hospital, I had to wait several hours for an air ambulance… I was scared, traumatized and in a great deal of physical pain. When a nurse walked in and when she saw my condition, she whispered in my ear, “Imagine that you’re floating on a cloud.” So I closed my eyes and imagined myself on a light, soft cloud. Almost instantly, my body shifted into a place of peace and calm.
I was eventually airlifted to the Mayo Clinic where doctors told me I’d broken T-12 and displaced my spinal cord by 40 degrees. They gave me less than 5% chance of walking again.
But remarkably, within several months, my body regained full functioning. I healed much quicker than was thought to be possible by the experts at Mayo Clinic and today, no one would ever guess at the extent of my injuries.
I believe this accident was my first real experience of the power of metaphor and how central it is for shifts, breakthroughs and healing. Metaphoric images are how potent Source energies can express through us.
A few years later…
I interviewed for a faculty position at Meridian University and during the interview, the President of the school asked me what I wanted to teach. Instead of responding to him with curricula that I had already prepared, to my great surprise Spirit spoke through me and said that I would be teaching a course on metaphor. The President of the school promptly agreed and I was stunned.
I knew nothing about metaphor as an academic subject.
As I conducted research for the course, I was led by Spirit to remarkable out-of-print resources and books that taken together, suggested there was a realm of deep beauty that lies under the surface of human consciousness. We humans can’t access this dimension through our ordinary ways of knowing, and I developed a deep longing to see this compelling, yet imperceptible, place. I spent months gazing at the world around me, trying to find “the way in.”
As if in response to my plea, when the course ended I had a life-changing mystical experience. Upon waking from an ordinary dream, I found myself in the backyard of the home where I grew up…but nothing about this was ordinary. Everything around me——land, trees, flowers, creatures——was pulsing with exquisite, otherworldly beauty. I gazed in wonder at this stunning beauty, before being forcefully yanked into the air and pummeled through the sky toward distant mountains.
As I got closer to the mountains, I could see that they weren’t “real” —— they were an image of mountains. The image seemed to appear on a huge billboard, and I was being pushed/pulled toward it at a very high velocity towards it. I was frightened…it looked like I was going to slam into the billboard and die. But just at the last second before slamming into it, I was yanked onto a train that was going through a tunnel in the mountain. I looked out the train windows and again I saw the amazing, pulsing energy——behind the billboard image. When I saw the exquisite beauty again, a voice very clearly said, “third space” and I was bolted back into ordinary reality.
Since the age of 13 I’ve had a number of mystical experiences, but the urgency and clarity of this one was very different.
I was being Called, and I knew without a doubt that I was being asked to open this dimension for others.
We humans can’t perceive the beautiful, dancing energy because we’ve been taught to perceive the world cognitively…through our minds.
Metaphoric images are a direct way in to a realm of potent Source Energy that lies beyond our customary ways of knowing and perceiving.
This is the place where creative breakthroughs happen.