Depth. Beauty. Third Space.
Let’s go places we can’t get to any other way.
Through a series of mystical experiences, I discovered that metaphor, the language of the right cerebral hemisphere, gives us a way to enter potent visionary spaces where we can connect to something greater than ourselves. In this non-cognitive intelligent field, we unlock our greatest gifts and human capacities.
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 the late 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.
My mission is to teach this way of knowing so we can expand our human capacities.
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 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.
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.
To learn more about my work and the power of metaphor, I highly recommend my latest book, Deep Knowing: Entering the Realm of Non-Ordinary Intelligence. And to directly experience the power of the intelligent field, I suggest a Doorway session or my new digital course: Accepting the Deep Call: Own & Clarify Your Soul Purpose. (The course includes an experiential journey where you’ll receive a primary metaphoric image that will bring a distinct shift of being.)
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”