Facilitating Creative Breakthroughs
When I work with clients, it’s so apparent that deep creativity is not of the head or thinking mind. It’s coming from an entirely different place.
Their creative visions are coming from a place that’s ALIVE.
We need art because to change our world, we need what is alive.
Click here to read the full blog post, “For meaningful change, we need the potency of the creative”
During the final hearing for my Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Chicago, my advisor, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi pulled me aside and whispered to me: “NEVER use the word heart in a job talk.”
My Ph.D. dissertation was on how adults learn in everyday life and I’d mentioned the heart too many times. Mihaly could tell I was making the stodgy professors on my committee uncomfortable.
At the time I felt he was criticizing me. But looking back so many years later, I understand that Mihaly was speaking from his own experience. He was trying to protect me from the derision he’d experienced at the U of Chicago. (He soon left the U of C for greater academic freedom at Montclair Graduate School in California.)
I believe it’s becoming more obvious that the heart is the source of our greatest intelligence. And scientists’ research on the “heart field” is beginning to prove it.
“To ancient cultures, the heart was a sophisticated organ capable of both perception and a unique form of analytical thought,” said Stephen Harrod Buhner in his book, Ensouling Language
“Love is the next step of intelligence,” said Hazrat Inayat Khan. While Mozart said, “Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius.”
And Nishida Kitaro, one of the most significant and influential Japanese philosophers of the 20th century stated, “Love is the power by which we grasp the ultimate reality. Love is the deepest knowledge of things.”
Check out my full article here:
https://www.kimhermanson.com/2022/02/01/love-is-the-soul-of-genius-and-revolution/
Psychologist David Premack writes, “The original and basic unit of mental activity, which remains the psyche’s preferred way of operating, is the image.”
Humans have been accessing inner images since pre-historic times when tribes painted visions onto cave walls.
In the case of every scientific discovery which has been researched carefully, it has been found that it was imagery, either in dreams or in the waking state, which produced the breakthrough.
Maybe we should pay more attention to the power of images?
Spaces instigate transformation.
During the civil rights movement, black churches were instrumental in creating change because they provided “free spaces” for people to meet. Churches were the places where people could come together to inspire one another, plot strategy, and catalyze change.
Without those free spaces, the civil rights movement might not have happened.
I went to graduate school with the desire to understand how adults learn in life and through my research it was remarkable to me how important space was for learning and social change…for any kind of change, for that matter.
If you’re puzzled, confused or stuck, if there’s an area you’d like to transform, you need to create space for the change to happen.
Then see what arises in the space.
Click here to read the full article, “Spaces Instigate Transformation”:
https://www.kimhermanson.com/2022/02/01/spaces-instigate-transformation/
Our brains make stuff up.
Confabulation is a medical term that refers to “the production or creation of false or erroneous memories without the intent to deceive.” (You could call it “honest lying.”)
In other words, we humans can share false stories, genuinely believing they are true.
from Confabulation: A Guide for Mental Health Professionals by Jerrod Brown, et al in ClinMed International Library, Volume 4, Issue 2:
“These false memories may consist of exaggerations of actual events, inserting memories of one event into another time or place, recalling an older memory but believing it took place more recently, filling in gaps in memory, or the creation of a new memory of an event that never occurred. While some confabulated memories are easier to identify as false, in other cases, the confabulated memory may be so personal and unique, only a corroborating witness like a family member or close friend may be able to confirm the veracity of the memory. Confabulation also occurs when an individual unintentionally mistakes imagined events as actual memories.”
Somehow in today’s crazy world, this seems important to know.