For many years I led creative writing workshops. Early on I noticed that some writing prompts tended to keep people entrenched in analytical thinking and their subsequent writing was heady and dry. These exercises often involved using a word or newspaper headline to write from. Their writing might have been slick and witty, but it [ Read more … ]
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Check out my new article in The Psychologist: What’s Your Metaphor?
An excerpt from my book, Deep Knowing, published in The Psychologist: “The ability to comprehend our experience through metaphor can be thought of as a sense like seeing, touching, or hearing. Metaphor is connected with intuition. For example, someone might walk away from a conversation and say, “I can’t put my finger on it, but [ Read more … ]
A deeper human language
When I work with a client’s deep inner images, I draw on the same visual language that artists work with, and so I find visual art, especially drawing, fascinating. I tell my students and workshop participants that we need to shift “how we are looking” to understand these potent inner images and allow them to [ Read more … ]
Uncovering the image that’s guiding your actions
Each of us has a primary metaphoric image that gives life to and feeds our passions and gifts. These primary images usually come from childhood, and they’re often associated with that natural world. My metaphoric image is of my father and grandfather planting in their farm fields. One of my students who grew up in [ Read more … ]
Fundamental change depends on our capacity to engage with metaphor
Metaphor is at the core of nearly every scientific breakthrough throughout history, and celebrated scientists like Niels Bohr, Richard Feynman and Albert Einstein relied on metaphor to help them make new discoveries. At all levels of society—personal, cultural, scientific, social, political—fundamental change depends upon our ability to engage with metaphor. Aristotle claimed that his soul [ Read more … ]