Creative Ground

Spurred on by good friend Andrea Hiott who started the magazine Pulse in Berlin, I wrote a piece for this month’s edition on money.  I struggled to write for a while, because my relationship to money has been so, well, tortured.  So I found it easier just to interview myself and put some distance between me and my emotions.  Lo and behold, I discovered things I never knew about money and me.  And it’s changing my relationship to it already.  It’s also expanded my idea of how we might generate money, for ourselves and our community, in the future.  So check it out and add to the thinking why don’t ya….

Lisa

I seem to recall always questioning “the way things are.”  Hearing an uncle, or was it my grandfather, explain reality to me as if it were carved in stone, immediately prompted a question.  The problem was their explanation of reality didn’t match my experience of the world.  And so, because I must have had some innate courage to ask questions of confident-sounding adults, or because I grew up the single child of a single mother who did the same in a world heavy with patriarchal explanations of “the way things are,” I found myself consistently challenging authority.

I questioned the rules at school, especially the arbitrary ones.  I questioned the bureaucracies I worked within, especially and whenever I heard “because that’s the way we’ve always done things.”  I wrote opinion-editorials for the newspaper, challenging our acceptance of the massive disparity in access to resources or in rates of imprisonment, even when such writing threatened my own access to resources or inclusion in the circle of people considered politically savvy.

I challenged authority again and again, not because I had an image of myself as a radical and not because I had any intention of becoming a martyr figure in the spirit of Joan of Arc.  I challenged authority at every turn since I can remember because I could never live through someone else’s prism of how things are.  And I couldn’t imagine anyone else having to live that way either.

It took a long time to see just how many of my beliefs came from somewhere else.  We’ve all been raised in a culture with deep grooves defining how things are and who we can be inside that context.  The problem is that’s a tight box.  Those deep groves felt like heavy chains keeping me locked away in someone else’s idea of life.  And it ain’t working for me or anyone, not for women or men, not for people of color or Caucasians.  No one wins in a system of embedded belief, which dictates “the way things are.”

The truth is what we don’t know is immeasurably larger than what we do know.  Only 4% of the universe is even visible to us, while 96% if the universe is dark matter, hidden from the naked eye.  And while we receive 40 million bits of information through our complex nervous system every second, we can only be conscious of about 40 of those bits.  The rest of it goes into our subconscious, into the darkness we cannot see.

Given this enormous disparity between what any one of us can know, and what is yet still a mystery, how can anyone claim to know reality and “the way things are” with any certainty?  Those trying to claim it, or define it absolutely, are just wrestling with the very vexing and historically destructive problem of “control.”

When I hear the same stories explaining reality through the lens of  “national security interests,” “global competitiveness” or “military preparedness,” it doesn’t match up with the reality of my experience of myself and of others.  It sounds instead like an old story that’s been told over and over again, with mind numbing consistency, until such reality became an unchallenged authority.

So how do we challenge this “authority”?

–It may be as simple as reminding anyone speaking from this “authority” that reality is so much bigger than any of us will ever know.  And in truth, there is no such thing as “the way things are.”

–It may involve a commitment above all else to the mystery, even when we want desperately to hold onto something solid.

–It may require that we honor the complexity of the human condition and our propensity to err frequently, and to hold that sacred above all else, even above our desire to win, to be right, or to tell someone we love who is desperate for answers that “yes, this is how it is.”

–Perhaps the antidote to authority’s increasingly tyrannical explanation for “how things are” might simply be a promise to ourselves to choose vulnerability over certainty.  A promise to live more fearlessly with ambiguity.   A promise to respond with curiosity and openness to everything, rather than to accept anyone else’s version of “the way things are.”  And a promise to remember that in challenging authority we are simply expressing our universal desire for freedom.

To challenge authority is simply to challenge assumptions, our own and those of the world around us.  It’s one of the most essential creative habits of mind, because to open our doors of perception, to expand our consciousness and access a more creative realm, we must unhinge the blinders that keep us from seeing more.

Lisa

Summertime is winding down, Labor Day has come and gone, and I’m in planning mode for the coming year. There are books to read, curriculum to write and teach, and preparations to be made for our Moloka’i Retreat, Transitions: “Clearing the Way for Change,” October 7-14, and our Whidbey Institute Retreat, Creative Practice for Renewal and Authentic Leadership for Non-Profit Organizations, October 21-22.

Preparing for the retreats inspires me to look more closely at the role of creative practice in how I live my life. I reflect on the ways in which I draw from this practice to help navigate all my relationships–with my husband Don, family and friends—and with my garden and all my learning communities. Being present and reciprocal in relationship is, for me, what collaboration is all about.

This past year has been a wild ride, full of magic as well as profound challenges. There is the creative challenge of developing a new business and deepening my collaborative relationship with my partners, Lisa and Sarah. There is the recalibration and adjustment needed to return to my former role as exclusively a teaching artist with Arts Corps. Then there is the dormant art-making part of my life that re-emerges as I write this. I have just now finished organizing and cleaning my studio!

Looking back over this year through my work with Creative Ground, I have come to better understand what it means to be in “practice.” When I am in the flow, all of the creative habits are in play…

Present Moment Awareness
Observation of the Natural World/Technology Hiatus
Challenging Assumptions/Critical Thinking
Imagining Possibilities
Tolerance of Ambiguity/Trust
Courage and Risk-Taking
Persistence and Discipline
Reflection

When I am fully authentic and intentional in the way I move, engage and create in the world, these eight habits are bubbling away.

Strangely enough, when I would recite these 8 habits to someone in casual conversation or in a workshop, I would often forget Persistence and Discipline. This one habit that seemed to be hiding from me became the attribute I’ve most needed to develop, the one that has taught me the most about myself.

This learning came to a head when I embarked on my Vision Quest, a 48-hour solo experience out “on the hill,” in deep connection with nature, without the comforts of home, food and water. Out there on my own, I learned, sometimes in painful and humiliating ways, that when you make a commitment to your creative spirit, you need to be persistent and disciplined about the integrity you hold for yourself. It’s easy to see when I haven’t been accountable to others, but more difficult to see when I’m not accountable to myself. To take myself seriously, to put my commitments to self first, was a life changing experience. I had the opportunity to observe myself with clarity and honesty. I made myself laugh! I know myself well, yet I discovered at a new level what I must do to walk with integrity–to “keep the decks clean, baby!” Keep ‘em clean!

To “retreat,” to take time for you, to meet with a new part of yourself, is a powerful, creative learning tool. It allows for all that you have learned and experienced to percolate, bringing new information to the surface. It creates space for integration of life’s changes and challenges to happen, within yourself and within the container of a safe and trusting community.

Creative Ground is offering two amazing retreats this fall. Moloka’i is for those of you who are ready for a week-long, intensive submersion into the primordial elements of creation to birth something entirely new. Whidbey Island is for those of you who want to discover new parts of yourself and learn how to shape that more purposely for the world. I invite you to come put your toes in the water, to give yourself “retreat” so you can return to your daily life with renewed clarity and strength in navigating this rapidly shifting world we share.

Hope to see you soon!!! Lauren

I’ve been on a busier speaking circuit of late.  Always about the same topic…you know…creativity.  The upside to all this speech giving is I’m forced to continuously refine my thinking and find new metaphors for challenging ideas.

In the last round of preparation, I was able to articulate why the idea of “more creativity” unto itself, why more creative responses to our world, is not the panacea we sometimes name it as.  Perhaps, even, as I have written about or tried to persuade people to believe.

Because creativity, unto itself, is simply the most potent force in the universe.  It’s the force of all creation and destruction.  Creativity is our ability to imagine and bring into being the material and immaterial worlds.  And when we are more creative, we can access the seemingly impossible.

So it’s beautiful like the Roman Aqueducts, floating wind turbines, or cloud computing, and it’s horrible like the 9-11 mastermind, the medieval rack or the atomic bomb. Through creativity we access the realm of infinite possibility, and it’s literally the whole range.

Which is why creativity, unto itself, is not enough.  In fact, looking out at the world, I would say we are already being incredibly creative.  The range of experiences we can have right now through technology alone is mind-boggling.  And the ways in which we are exploiting human and natural resources for financial gain is startlingly creative.  So it is not that we live in a world lacking creativity.

It is that we live in a world lacking creativity with a moral anchor, or better said, a collective consciousness. A consciousness that considers the implications of our creations, all of them, before bringing them into being.

This is why the creativity we teach through Creative Ground is as much about accessing the extraordinary creative power we all innately have as it is about developing our collective consciousness.  This is why all of the experiences, retreats, and workshops we design to build fluency in creativity focus first on ourselves, since expanded self consciousness is the first gateway to a collective one.

When we apply the 8 creative habits of mind to our internal engineering, we expand our own field of possibility, spontaneously affecting the world around us, including our external creations.  When we learn about the new science of our brains and apply it to our internal dynamics, we directly experience the benefits of this knowledge and have the courage to apply it to other areas of our personal and professional lives.

What does a collective consciousness look like? I offer a fable that has deep relevance for our lives and choices today.  It’s the story of the Titanic, which was officially launched 100 years ago last month.  The staff and crew of the Titanic, on its maiden voyage from England to America, were narrowly focused on meeting the needs and wants of its elite passengers.  Indeed, some first class ticket holders paid the equivalent of $100,000 in today’s dollars for the one-way passage to New York.

While the radio operators of the ship were busy forwarding messages through to its many important passengers, prioritizing their needs and wants, and while the captain was focused on getting to the destination as quickly as possible to meet passenger expectation, the messages coming in from other ships warning about the icebergs ahead never got through.  Nearly two-thirds of the Titanic’s passengers were lost that night, but those with the least resources died in greatest number.  In fact, while none of the children in 1^st class died, all 52 of the children in 3^rd class perished.

In the end, this fixation with the first class passengers’ needs and wants blinded the crew responsible for servicing them to the importance of the ship itself.  The fixation parallels our world today with all of the priority going to meet the needs and wants of the developed nations in massive disproportion to everyone else, all of it impacting our own planetary ship.

The messages we get about her are dire. The oceans are losing the bottom of their food chains, the melting of the polar ice caps are dramatically effecting ocean levels, currents and climate, and we’ve just heard that we now need 1.5 earths to sustain our resource demands on the planet into the future.

With a collective consciousness, we see that we are the passengers, we are the crew and we are even the ship. As the passengers, we must look at our needs and wants and measure them against the escalating crisis.  And as the crew, as the corporations servicing our every need and want, we must integrate a higher, more complex aspiration into our company business models that includes not just fulfilling customer demand, but also sustaining the health of the ship.  In fact, choosing a higher aspiration is what harnesses the greater creative capacities of all our employees and, at the same time, ensures the longevity of our companies, and customers, for many years to come.

And as the ship, well, we show signs of toxicity, illness and disease, both the earth itself and the humanity that feeds on her.  Without a healthy ship to carry us safely to the next shore, all of this fantastic creative potential of ours, all this seeking to create the next amazing, mind-bending thing, becomes a solidly moot point.

Love, Lisa

passenger, crewmember, ship

Creative Ground’s team just returned from its second creativity retreat.  Our base? The island of Moloka’i, Hawaii.  Number of guests? 6.  Scope of work? Creative practice.  Results? Unparalleled transformation…..for all of us.

Six individuals arrived carrying dark clouds of personal grief, duffel bags of dissatisfaction with work, loaded backpacks of self-doubt, and most challenging of all, clouded mirrors obscuring the truth of who they are.

Seven days later, all six individuals returned home having left the heavy weights behind and carrying instead a clear vision of themselves, their unique essence and life force, and tools for remembering.  This memory of our authentic selves, free of our own as well as others’ projections, is essential for joy, creativity and freedom.

By the end, joy, creativity and freedom reigned.

Like the first retreat held last July, I came away with profound insights about myself and the world.  Two weeks have past, and I can now more clearly see the purpose of creative practice for ourselves and the world.

And it’s all about a new way of playing together.

Because the game we’ve all been playing for millennia is so old and so broken, it’s killing us.   It’s killing us, the natural world and all the creatures who share it with us.  To work, this game has a set of built-in rules or assumptions.  These rules drive and dominate everything — our systems of education, politics, commerce, justice, and healthcare.  And the status quo depends on them.

The rules that are destroying us, ever more quickly these days, are these:

#1: Success = scale and size

Results from playing by this rule: Unsustainable exploitation of human and natural resources.  Global climate change. Planetary collapse.  War.

#2: Punishment and shame stops violence

Results from playing by this rule: Exponential growth in prisons and military expenditures.  More violence.  More fear. More death.  War.

#3: Productive, creative work only happens separate from play

Results from playing by this rule: Work and schooling environments dominated by external motivation and rewards.  High rates of stress-related disease and disorders.  Emphasis on competition and winning.  War.

#4: Life is a zero-sum game

Results from playing by this rule: Massive income disparities.  Race, economic and gender oppression.  Territoriality and control.  War.

All four of these rules lead us to war, war conditioned these days a prerequisite for freedom.  And the war-making machine of our geo-political powers is certifiably out-of-control.  Witness America’s $13 trillion in national debt.  As we continue to play by these rules, war defines our state of existence and shortly thereafter, our non-existence.

So what’s a way forward?

What’s needed right now is for more of us to stop playing by these rules.  Fold up the cards, put away the pool cue, drop the kneepads, throw away the playbook.  It’s time to find a way to play together, to work together, to practice creativity, to collaborate together based on a whole new set of ground rules — ones that honor our humanity, our life, our love, and that operate from brand new paradigms.

New paradigms.  Like success = depth.  Or nurturing, love and learning stops violence.  Or productive, creative work only happens when infused with play.  Or someone else’s gain is also our gain, and someone else’s loss is also our loss.

How about exploring these as possible paradigms that just may lead to radically different outcomes for ourselves and our planet?  In fact, everyone innately knows they will lead to radically different outcomes.  They’re already built into our spiritual consciousness, no matter what religion we do or do not follow.

So what’s stopping us?  Perhaps it’s the belief that “the game” is all there is.  Or that if we stopped playing the game, those with more power and resources might have to share some.  Or that chaos would ensue.  Whatever the fear, it’s time to face it.  And anyone of us can call it.  Call the game and put down the ball.

I call on everyone out there working in government, non-profits, corporations, farms, local communities, homes, wherever you are — those cards you’ve been holding…fold ‘em.  The game can’t continue if only a few are left playing.  If enough of us stop playing, the rules are no longer unchallenged assumptions, but become trade-able ideas.

It’s true that when the game is this old, it’s scary and alienating to stop playing.   But if more of us have the courage to fold those damn cards once and for all, we just might make it, and also discover the truth about freedom.  That is, that freedom comes not from having so much, but instead from the realization we have nothing left to lose.

Love, Lisa

Freedom Seeker

Last spring IBM released a study conducted with over 1,500 CEOs representing over 60 countries and 33 industries across the globe.   They cited creativity as the single most important factor for success, at every level of an organization, in the coming decades.

What we really appreciated was how the press release listed the seven habits of creative leaders – lo and behold they align almost perfectly with the 8 creative habits of mind we teach and draw from in every project we facilitate.

Significant complexity, the accelerated pace of change, and unheralded inter-connectivity define the world we now inhabit.  Our way forward is with laser focus on mastering creative practice.

• Our team at Creative Ground has developed curriculum in creative practice for groups of 100 and teams of 10.

• We’ve catalyzed the creative capacities of organizations before beginning planning processes, leading to more expansive vision and strategic direction.

• And we’ve introduced creative practice as a way to revitalize staff dynamics and cohesion in just one, day-long session.

To start a dialogue about how Creative Ground can help you locate, flex and strengthen your creative muscles and support transformation in your team or organization, contact: info@creativegroundhq.com

For more information about the global CEO study, link to: http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/31670.wss.

I have come to love the synchronicity of the internet.  The other day I was on Facebook and was checking out my friend Luc Reyaud and his latest adventure with his band of “love bugs,” Luc and the Lovingtons. They were performing their “Freedom Song” with Jason Mraz at a benefit concert at the Freedom Awards, http://causecast.org/freedomawards.

I couldn’t see Luc and the band performing, the footage was only focused on the “star” Jason, so I started to browse www.causecast.org, and I came across Sir Ken Robinson giving a speech about Changing Education Paradigms at RSA animate http://www.thersa.org. This is a great website to watch the visual unfolding of talks given by movers and shakers who are thinking about change ALL THE TIME.

Some of you may be aware of Ken Robinson’s work, and have caught him on Ted Talks sharing his perspective on creativity and education. What I love about Sir Ken is his skilled and humorous approach to addressing the issues we are facing with education systems that are chronically 30 years behind the times, and exhausted educators who have been left holding the deteriorating safety net where “our” children are stuck.  And when I say our children, I’m not just speaking about our “blood and kin”, I am calling us to advocate for every child.

He is also asking us to look at the affect that our own educational experiences had on us, and how these experiences affected our relationship to learning, creativity, to being confident, remaining curious and alive in how we experience the world.

Sir Ken is able to succinctly speak to many of the things I have observed and experienced as a creative and as an educator. Creative Ground’s collaboration has created space for folks interested in making creative change, and digging more deeply into exploring and developing effective pathways to catalyze this paradigm shift.

So check it out http://comment.rsablogs.org.uk/videos/ and talk to us!

This piece has been working on me, grinding up from the dark depths where my internal altar emanates light within a netherworld of unconscious seas. Sometimes at 3am, I feel there is a conspiracy involving my liver and spleen.  Together with the hidden shadows, they cause ruckus and mayhem.  Interrupting my dream, they churn together in a demonic dirge of commanding attention.  They capture my brain and send it on looped playback.  They dance the grim fantastic, leaving muddy footprints over my heart.  I writhe, to twist, to run, to step aside, to distract, anything but the whirlpools of Dante’s inferno dragging me down into dark voluminous depths.

If I feel I will drown.  If I feel I will disintegrate.  If I feel I will become the despair.  Oh lord, what then will my outside life think of me?  Oh yes, Sarah was captured by her shadow and is no more.  She is locked up in some asylum, on some forgotten island, she surrendered to the devil and is incapable of doing good deeds…be aware, be aware and stay away.  Untrustworthy, the dirge continues to play, stay away for she is contaminated.

I am spluttering between my pillows, a fish gasping at air. I am having a Ruminesque moment

Suffering is a treasure, for it conceals mercies;
The almond becomes fresh when you peel off the rind.
O my brother, staying in a cold dark place
And bearing patiently the grief, weakness, and pain
Is the Source of Life and the cup of Abandon!
The heights are found only in the depths of abasement;
Spring is hidden in autumn, and autumn pregnant with spring.
Flee neither; be the friend of Grief, accept desolation,
Hunt for the life that springs from the death of yourself.

–Rumi

I want peace from my relentless mind, not some mystical enlightenment of feeling and accepting my neurosis amidst the cup of abandon.  My life spring is lost in my autumn.  And when has desolation been on my best friend list?  Why does life have to be painful to be real?  I should go to sleep in a bed of positive, rosy affirmation and just let these shadows play outside of me in the world’s drama, crisis and things gone wrong.  In that world I can place my power outside of myself and be free from accountability.  I can be soothed in flowery words of denial.  Now that the shadow is outside of me, it is others’ behavior that is the cause of my suffering.  God forbid that Rasputin is part of me. I am separate from badness. I am holier than thou.

Not.…oh so not.

No indeed for I am all of it, for better and for worse, and I may often wake up at three in the morning with my dirge-dancing spleen.  So what?  I didn’t sleep so well…..ah well, I am well.   Here comes the magic thread of dawn licking its enlightened tongue against the shadows.  Now I am distracted by the opening robin’s throat to join the prayer of the birds that sing in our existence, everyday, without missing a beat.  Who knows, maybe they had a ground chick’s nightmare.  I will never know for I am already in the magic of a resonating dawn chorus.  I am sailing in the tones, delighted and entranced in an ocean of peace, kissing my spleen for delivering me here. It all the more pleasurable for the darkness of night.

I am no drunkard, but I am no saint either.  A medicine man shouldn’t be a saint.  He should experience and feel all the ups and downs, the despair and the joy, the magic and the reality, the courage and the fear of his people.  He should be able to sink as low as a bug or soar like an eagle.  You have to be God and the devil, both of them.  Being a good medicine man means being right in the midst of the turmoil, not shielding yourself from it.  It means experiencing life in all its phases.  It means not being afraid of cutting up and playing the fool now and then.  That is sacred too.

–John (Fire) Lame Deer, Medicine man for the Lakota People

Written by Sarah Maclean Bicknell, Collaborator, Creative Ground

I can only somewhat recall my life before Creative Ground’s most recent retreat held on the island of Moloka’i.  Looking back, the woman I feel myself to be right now is not the same woman I saw in the mirror the day I left for Hawaii.  That woman, the one in the mirror, still held to a decrepit and tired idea that she should not take up too much space, that she should perhaps withhold all of who she is for fear of making others uncomfortable, that she must always prove to others why she gets to be here on the planet in the first place.

The new woman, the one sitting inside me at this moment, feels all the ground under her feet, has relinquished her regrets, all of them, and is fearless about being as full, real and expansive as she feels.  This is transformation fueled by creativity, leading to an idea, just one of them, for what is “authentic feminine leadership.”

Six courageous women joined us for this week-long “creativity intensive,” Creative Ground’s first.   When you combine a group of women ready to fly, a potent curriculum, and the intense healing vibrations of Moloka’i, magical things happen.  We were witness to a startling resurgence of power and energy, a deep longing to come home to self, dynamic visions for how we blend our shadow and light to become more alive, and a growing belief that we have everything we need to dream in the new world, with all the beauty we can imagine.

A few days after our return, one of these brave warriors said she was feeling, “an unshakable seam of contentment” that she had never felt before.

Our focus was indeed “creativity,” a word much maligned and misunderstood.  Creativity is often dismissed as something only some of us should do, or that only some of us can do.  How many hundreds of times have I heard someone tell me they are not creative?  And yet, it’s who we are.  Everything about our bodies and minds are designed to create, and somewhere along the way we stopped seeing that innate power of our unique creative DNA.

Abraham Maslow wrote, “The key question is not “What fosters creativity?” It is “Why in God’s name isn’t everyone creative?” Where was the human potential lost? How was it crippled? Therefore, the real question is “why do people not create or innovate?” We have to abandon that sense of amazement in the face of creativity, as if it were a miracle if anybody created anything at all.”

The most exciting thing of all is that the rest of the world may just finally be coming back to life on the subject of creativity.  Newsweek just ran a complete edition dedicated to the subject.  One article in particular (http://www.newsweek.com/2010/07/10/the-creativity-crisis.html) made a decent attempt at unpacking creativity, and reviewing the compelling research about America’s creative demise, thanks to unyielding activity, excessive adult-facilitated play and a massive dose of screen time.  One of the pulls-outs read:

“The correlation to lifetime creative accomplishment was more than three times stronger for childhood creativity than childhood IQ….yet American creativity scores are falling.  It’s very clear, and the decrease is very significant.  It is the scores of younger children in America—from kindergarten through sixth grade—for whom the decline is “most serious.”….And it’s left to the luck of the draw who becomes creative: there’s no concerted effort to nurture the creativity of all children…..Some scholars go further, arguing that lack of creativity—not having loads of it—is the real risk factor.”

Indeed, without a sense of our creative capacities, we live without a sense of our greatest asset, the one that guides us to our unique calling in the world, the one that helps us navigate the world with confidence and clarity, and the one that will empower each of us to dream a new paradigm into existence, as the current one is unsustainable and on the verge of collapse.

How does Creative Ground understand creativity? Creativity is the artful expression of the dynamic tensions inside us.  It is fueled by a belief in an infinite field of possibility, and it depends on our ability to perceive the fullest range of possibilities, the courage to choose from among them, and the persistence to shape them into reality.  To become more creative simply requires a practice of intentional self-inquiry.

Creative Ground is launching a team of people into the world to facilitate creative practice, in each of us as individuals, and for groups and organizations. Our body of work includes retreats, staff renewals, strategic visioning sessions, professional development workshops, one-on-one coaching and mentoring, and leadership intensives like the one we hosted in Moloka’i.  A schedule for three-day retreats in and around Washington State is coming soon.

We believe releasing this creativity is the only way forward to support the massive transformation taking place in every sector of the economy.  Nurturing our creativity is a lifelong journey, so we design a practice that takes you only as far down the rabbit hole as you’re ready to go, always guiding you to a clear objective.  I sense for more and more of us it’s time to take the leap.

Written by Lisa Fitzhugh, Collaborator, Creative Ground