It’s hard to value play, it seems so… childish. But play is effective because it takes us beyond the bounds of what our minds think is reasonable.
Play gets our energy moving.
Facilitating Creative Breakthroughs
It’s hard to value play, it seems so… childish. But play is effective because it takes us beyond the bounds of what our minds think is reasonable.
Play gets our energy moving.
Your creative yearnings are REAL. They’re not make-believe. The characters in your novels are real, your business idea is real, your vision is real. It’s real energy that wants to come through and be expressed through you. It’s not make-believe.
If you’re getting a vision for something, you’re not making it up.
When I’m scared or confused or thrown off by something, I open up metaphoric space and usually… see myself drawing a square. When I become third space–the ‘space in which it happens’ and allow sacred square energy to permeate my Being, I feel Square’s amazing strength, clarity and boundaries. Square has no trouble being fully present. It is not wobbly. It holds up under stress. I leave this realm… shifted.
Is there something in your life that’s a bit intense, overwhelming or challenging right now?
Stress often creates a feeling of being “boxed in” and having nowhere to move. But no matter what is happening in the external world, third space is always available to us. Metaphoric images are portals to another realm that is abundantly loving and nurturing. Its transformative energies will shift you.
Close your eyes and imagine a vast, very peaceful desert terrain, so expansive that you can’t see the edges of it. Then imagine yourself being the desert terrain. You’re not looking at it anymore more—you are the desert plain. Stay with it for a few moments, until your body is quite comfortable in this expansive place. As you hold this place of expansiveness within your body, what happens to the overwhelm? It disappears, doesn’t it? We can’t hold peaceful expansiveness and overwhelm together in our bodies at the same time.
When I was in school, I loved the precision and tidiness of it—each class a container with a tidy list of assignments by week. All these fascinating subjects, like chests full of jewels, and if we only sign up and listen, we might uncover some of those jewels. Looking at new syllabi at the beginning of a semester, going out and purchasing new books at the bookstore. The whole process was exciting and full of fresh adrenaline—like gifts would lie behind that door, for sure. But often, the sense of excitement turned into a bit of drudgery, as we slogged through the material and assignments…until finally at the end of a term, I just wanted the whole thing to be over.
After I finished my Ph.D. at the University of Chicago, I was so burnt out on reading that the sight of a book or words on a page made me physically sick to my stomach. Even the words on the back of a cereal box swam in front of my face and made me nauseas. So that summer I gathered together stacks of dissertation notes and literature, and dumped them all into the massive recycling container at the corner of Ashby and MLK in Berkeley.
I stood on top of the ladder and watched as seven years of academic research dropped away in front of me, never to be seen again. Throwing away all scraps of information related to a PhD dissertation that I spent years working on gave me nightmares. “Surely I must have just thrown away something that I would need someday?”
The only thing, the only direction, that felt right was the creative arts. I took pottery and creative writing classes, bought paints and started painting. The creative arts made me feel spacious and free—they gave me life.
So when I started teaching, I found myself split—on one hand was art, image, beauty and creative process that I loved so much; and on the other hand, teaching and learning which I also loved. They seemed hopelessly separated. Over the years, as I’ve continued to pursue the question of human learning, those two hands have come together.
Decades of research has clearly demonstrated that creative process and metaphoric images are our native language. “Men sang before they spoke…they learned the language of water, fire and clouds before they produced more formal and sophisticated language systems,” writes Harry S. Broudy in Reflections from the Heart of Educational Inquiry.
At a deep level, we learn through metaphoric image.
When I discarded my books and academic papers, what I really wanted was to learn at this deeper level.
Might you be ready to tap into your own depths? Join me for a Doorway session.