Depth. Beauty. Third Space.
Let’s go places we can’t get to any other way.
Metaphor gives us the capacity to connect with the Divine.
Metaphor, the language of the right cerebral hemisphere, hooks us up to Something greater than ourselves and unlocks our greatest gifts and human capacities.
But let me back up and tell you how I got here.
My entire life has been driven by a deep desire to understand how we humans learn in life. This question has given me a life steeped in both academia and non-ordinary experiences.
After I received my Ph.D. in adult learning from the University of Chicago, I taught in several graduate schools and internationally renowned retreat centers, including UC Berkeley, Esalen Institute, and Pacifica Graduate Institute. I’ve also had the good fortune to have had a lifelong mentorship with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, New York Times bestselling author of Flow and founder of the field of Positive Psychology. (Click here to check out a popular article on learning and creativity that we co-authored. It’s been reprinted several times, including in two book chapters). My own books include Deep Knowing: Entering the Realm of Non-Ordinary Intelligence, a 2022 National Indie Excellence Award winner, 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.
Dovetailing my academic work, I experienced three separate shamanic initiations.
Shamanic initiations are spiritual tests where the initiate faces physical or symbolic death. Through these ordeals, initiates develop skills and capacities for navigating the Spirit world and drawing on it for healing.
I survived each of the shamanic initiations by accessing the power of the intelligent field. Each initiation showed me something different: how to locate the field, how to enter it, and how to work with its energies.
I was a tough subject. It wasn’t until Spirit gripped me with a third and final shamanic initiation—an encounter that rattled me to my core—that I came to a point where I could no longer dismiss my own experiences.
My skills for opening this realm have become finely honed. I’m able to quickly shift people out of spiritual and psychological distress into profound beauty, healing, creative power, and alignment with their highest self.
But my primary spiritual call is not healer. It is that of teacher.
Spirit made it clear that my task was to expand our human capacities and teach this forgotten way of knowing and learning to others.
I work in-depth with incredibly gifted, creative visionaries who are doing paradigm-changing work on this planet. I also teach a wide variety of classes. A graduate course for Ph.D. students on the Psychology of Metaphor provided the academic foundation for my work and a framework to help me integrate the shamanic initiations.
Creative power wants to shift you into your highest self. It wants to help you fully express your creative gifts and capacities, heal, and live firmly connected to your own divine inner knowing. But because our culture is solely focused on perceiving the world through our left hemisphere, we haven’t understood how to access and draw on the extraordinary creative powers that lie beyond our thinking mind.
To directly experience the power of this intelligent realm, I would suggest getting a quick virtual reading or purchasing an audio course. To learn more about the power of metaphor, I highly recommend my new book, Deep Knowing: Entering the Realm of Non-Ordinary Intelligence. Also, check out the articles, interviews, videos, and blog posts in Media.
Creative power doesn’t come from humans. It comes from a place that lies beyond us.
It’s time for us to tap it.
Give your creativity a kick in the pants.
Download my free ebook “17 Tips for a Creative Breakthrough”