Dr. Kim Hermanson

Facilitating Creative Breakthroughs

xBlog

Creativity roots us in what is alive

At no point in her life did my mother ever ask me about my work, nor, to my knowledge, did she ever read any of my three books. But in her final hours, something changed.

It was the height of the pandemic and I was teaching an online course at Pacifica Graduate Institute. Sitting next to my mother at her bedside, we quietly looked into each other’s eyes. I told her I was in the middle of teaching a course and needed to step away occasionally to respond to student posts.

It was a profound moment I will never forget, because she asked me what I was teaching and what the students were writing about. I told her the course was “The Healing Power of Creativity” and I took that moment to acknowledge her own creativity. She spent a lifetime creating magnificent gardens; she loved music, was the organist at her church, and made sure all of her three children could play instruments. Her life was about beauty.

I also said that my Dad wasn’t creative and she immediately corrected me. “Oh no, your dad was very creative.”

Her words shifted me and shifted how I saw my late father. All of a sudden I had a larger view of him… and much more appreciation for what he brought me.

We all have times of barrenness in life—-when the kids go off to college, we get a divorce, the new business venture doesn’t work out.

But creativity roots us in something far greater than the external events of the day. To regain a sense of rootedness and meaning, all we have to do is pause… and create something. 

It’s a pause for what is alive. To engage with what is real.

Our creative work is the personal legacy that we each leave to this planet.

In their lives, my parents never embraced their creativity.

But I got my creativity from them.

an ode to Jacob Needleman

The brilliant philosopher Jacob Needleman passed away one year ago today.

Needleman is the one who famously said, “We’re built to serve something greater than ourselves.”

In a letter to the president of the Fetzer Institute, Needleman wrote something else that has continued to inspire me throughout my career:

“I believe that the group is the art form of the future…In our present culture the main need is for a form that can enable human beings to share their perceptions…and through that sharing, to become a conduit for the appearance of spiritual intelligence.”

I love that.

And in an interview with The Sun Magazine (writer D. Patrick Miller at Fearless Books), Needleman spoke of his experiences with D.T. Suzuki in ‘stopping the mind.’:

MILLER: Suzuki was inducing in you the same experience that a Zen koan is meant to induce: stopping the mind.

NEEDLEMAN: Yes, because to stop the mind within such a context is to touch someone’s being, to touch his or her yearning, the essential need in the person for a relationship to something higher.

MILLER: So when Suzuki threw you back on the experience of your own being, you found yourself wordless.

NEEDLEMAN: Yes. At the point of encountering your own being, you either have to remain silent or start singing. If you’re going to talk about “being” in any meaningful way, you may have to use special language, perhaps mythic language. Myth, in this context, is not falsehood. It’s the language of the heart and mind together, and it surpasses our ordinary way of expressing ourselves. Nature often speaks to us in mythic language. We tend to paper over nature with scientific language and think we’ve fully described it, but to look at nature only in that way is to muzzle it.

NEEDLEMAN: Suzuki was not going to give me an intellectual answer; he meant to put me in a questioning state so that I could experience something about the self — what it isn’t, what it could be, and so on. As Kierkegaard said, direct communication between people is not real communication. Real communication is indirect: it allows one to experience something rather than intellectually understand it.

Bless his brilliant work.

The desire to create certain outcomes hampers transformation

The desire to create certain outcomes hampers transformation.

No matter how much we push, intend and effort, it’s clear that we don’t often have all the answers that we seek.

But Something else does.

We humans are brilliant when we align with Something greater than ourselves.

When we loosen our fixation on what we think, a deeper way of knowing has the space to emerge.

There’s a reason bank buildings are square

There’s a reason bank buildings are square. There’s a reason that when we need rest we go to a large body of water… or the desert. There’s a reason web designers use lots of white space. (Space allows readers’ eyes — and brains! — to stay calm so they can absorb the material.) There’s a reason why group facilitators seat people in a circle (rather than lines of chairs) when they want to create a sense of cohesiveness and group bonding.

Underneath the surface of your conscious mind lies a common language that’s universal among all cultures— the language of aesthetic form.

Corporate advertisers consciously and strategically use shapes in their buildings, products, and advertising because different shapes appeal to and awaken different parts of our brain. But the power of shape isn’t just for savvy marketers. 

Every one of us can tap their potent power.

Click here to read The Power of Thinking in Shapes article on Medium: