Weaving the threads of an intuitive creative practice ...

a cabinet of coloured threads

Intuitive creativity feels GOOD!! The ongoing offering from The Soul Shed is the space to find into a personal practice of encountering the imaginative affordances of your square mile, and their reflections and correspondences in your inner world. This journeying can really re-source you in new ways and wake up parts of you that you had forgotten about, and very much hope we can share this kind of creative time together. This piece is for you if you'd like to read more about the why? About the ideas that have led to The Soul Shed being built and that permeate all of its offerings.

A map is not the territory, but it can be helpful to have one to orient you in a new place, until you don’t need it anymore. The Soul Shed map of your intuitive terrain includes the spaciousness of knowing that we're beings with energy centres with different re-sources and capabilities. Although communicating these ideas to you here involves head-centred conginitive processes, the openings intuitive creativity offers are more than a head-centred experience. Deep-mapping is a sensibility that perceives 'portals' into other ways of experiencing. Your gut and its instinctual responses and your heart with its capacity to be real and to know emotion, are also involved.

The 'place' intuitivity reaches towards can be conceived as imaginal, in the way that Cynthia Bourgeault conceives it in 'The Eye of the Heart': a transpersonal space connecting the human with the spiritual, comparable metaphorically to the way inter-tidal zone connects land and sea . A place of spaciousness, of generative energy, and of transformation. Indeed Bourgeault positions humans as having an important role - as witnesses and potential transformers of consciousness.

And yet it can also be perceived as imaginative - using our individual human capacities of pattern recognition and re-patterning, and of responding to and transforming what we perceive in our environment via our capacities for play and creativity. I'm suggesting that imagination is part of how we as individuals find into a great experience of the imaginal which is both intimately personal and expansively trans-personal. A bit like Russian Dolls - when they are stacked, each is nestled invisibly inside the others.

Russian Dolls

To approach the trans-personal without fully living into the grounded and personal can lead to dissociation and spiritual by-passing. I'm reminded of a fascinating observation by a barrister, Polly Higgins, interviewed by Sharon Blackie in her book 'If women rose rooted', who depairs that a lot of the thinking that shapes our world happens in sky-scrapers. It can be argued that from within the vertiginous psychology of its architecture, a human can have the illusion of an all-pervasive objectivity of the mind, and that this can lead to decision- making that is myopically self-serving. In her words: 'They make poor decisions because they're literally disconnected from the earth'. In your embodied felt sense of location, where all experiencing is really happening, regardless of the psychological and somatic tricks played by some architecture, this needn't be the case.

Noticing how your inner state and relationship to the external changes moment to moment is a part of staying present to yourself and to the world around you. What part of you is most involved when you are out walking? Does it change depending where you are? Spending time close to trees and other wildlife doing its thing, can be an opportunity to perceive differently, ecologically. Its possible when I am in proximity to wildlife to remember that rather than looking down on anything from on high, I am part of an interconnected whole. How is it for you?

This approach to including an intuitive creative practice includes the central nervous system. Indeed it positions this part of our organism's life as the seat of our being, where our experiencing is most direct and instinctual. Here we know what we like, what we want, what we need, what we resist. Indeed you might have noticed how this part of you is soothed and even restored to consciousness when you are out walking in nature. It's my belief that it's very helpful to imagine a kind of co-regulation happening each time we reorient ourselves into the energy of the wildlife around us in this way. Its a process I frame as Deep-Mapping, and it underpins all the invitations in my book, 'Take it to the Trees', as well as being included in all Soul Shed offerings, and in my approach to offering SoulCollage®.

Tree line at Anstey Park, Alton, Hampshire

If we approach our organism and its responses and engagement with life with a kind of compassionate and tender curiosity, then what happens at the contact boundary comes to offer all kinds of interesting openings. If you're getting an inner 'yes' to exploring these openings and allowing them to work their magic in you, then I hope to share creative space with you soon.

Learn more about deep-mapping here

Learn more about SoulCollage here

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