Lisa

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

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

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

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

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.