In the twelve interviews in this new summit, our world-class teachers will help you connect with your creative spirit. The Embody Your Creative Spirit Summit will explore creativity and the creative spirit from different angles including embodiment work, dream work, Jungian psychology, and mythology. Each of us comes into this world with a creative spirit. The connection with this spirit is the source of a greater sense of who you truly are and how to live a meaningful life. However, one of our fundamental challenges is to embody this spirit and give form to it. Life is a continuous stream and we are often asked to find new answers and ways of being, when presented with troubles. This summit helps you to tap into your potential and express it. Each session includes a practical exercise or a tool for those seeking inspiration and wanting to bring their creative spirit further into the world.
This summit is designed to help you give expression to your authenticity. Teachers from different traditions have come together in this four-day Summit to provide perspectives and practical tools to deepen your journey.
Day 1 – April 7, 2022
9am | Mythic Imagination and Creativity
The hypnotic storyteller Michael Meade weaves mythic tales with street savvy insights into a practical way of being with creativity. In this session, Meade will talk about the various ways we can find and connect with our creative muse, bringing for us the good news that everyone, not only the artists, has a muse. Creativity is a larger force than ourselves—it is spirit, the muse, the divine. It wants to flow through us, be expressed, and given to the community around us.
Meade shares rituals we can engage in to help us move through these different stages of creativity. He shares myths that have to do with endings and beginnings. These myths show how creativity is present, in abundance, during times of ending, danger, and despair. Times of chaos also births creativity and will lead us to the next phase of life, in an never-ending dance of chaos, order, and ongoing creativity.
10am | Living Your Embodied Soul Spark
Join this session with Tina Stromsted. Creativity, she says, is the ‘divine child’ within us. Our body, the temple holding this creativity inside it, dreams of the potentials yet to come. But the task is not simple. Even though it can spring up through the cracks of adversity, pointing to where our life’s energy is taking us, the creative spirit needs tending and cherishing for it to bloom.
Breath, curiosity, and a hovering awareness allow us to become more comfortable with the unknown. As we open ourselves to the deep treasures that have been incubating in the dark, the creative spark sets into motion events that bring a profound sense of nourishment and renewal from an inner source.
Through Jung’s Active Imagination and natural movement, we can give form to what was not yet visible in the unconscious. And, we can then begin the dialogue with it—through free writing, dance, drawing, dream work, singing, and other arts—to inform, direct, and enrich our life. These embodied methods allow the body to remember why it is here, its purpose, its destination that is experiencing healing, embodiment, and incarnation—in ourselves, in our community, and the life we hope to see in the world.
11am | Creative Spirit and Dreams
Dreams are a source of wisdom. They provide clues about our calling in life, they guide us in relationship matters, connect us to what truly matters to us, and they can also help us to express ourselves in our own unique ways.
This summit session is about asking your dream for guidance to connect and engage with the Creative Spirit that is alive in all of us. We can do this through a technique called ‘dream incubation’. Dream Incubation is also found in many spiritual traditions; we ask our night time dreams for guidance. Machiel Klerk (Jung Platform Founder) wrote a book on this topic that is available now. He explains how this effective technique can help us to be close to our Creative Spirit and give expression to it.
Day 2 – April 8, 2022
9am | Find Your Own Lure of Becoming
This session with Jean Houston, a world-renowned global catalyst and one of the principal founders of the human potential movement, is about reaching for and touching into the creative genius. For this we need our imagination. Jean Houston talks about stuckness and how to break through (old) patterns of stuckness, as well as what imagination can do to create a breakthrough.
In this session, she also offers an exercise, in which she encourages us to dwell on an image of the future. This exercise helps to sense that life has a passion for each of us. This is what she calls ‘the lure of becoming’. By expanding our consciousness of our co-creative powers, and by allowing imagination to be part of life, we touch into our own creativity. It becomes clear that our lives are creative self-expressions; we don’t necessarily need artistic talents or creativity—“the recreation of yourself is the greatest form of creativity.”
10am | Soulful Creativity
Creativity can make life sacred, says Thomas Moore. In this session, he suggests ways to open the doors to a life rich in the blessings of everyday creativity. Moore talks about the old times when people saw creativity as a direct link to God, to the divine, to that which is greater than us. Taking inspiration from this period, he calls for a re-imagining of the creative process, into a way of living that nourishes the spirit, and promises to bring awe and beauty to the smallest details of everyday life. This creativity, born of the soul, Moore teaches, is a path to self-enrichment open to each one of us.
For Moore, soulful creativity is a craft, an ongoing process that requires work, love, and tending. This is different from the vertical flashes of inspiration, which while they are part of the creative process, do not encompass the whole creative journey.
11am | Inviting the Creative Genius into Your Life
The world today asks for creativity and creative expression of ourselves. However, more often than not, we are limited by our habitual consciousness and as a result, we end up recreating certain patterns of response. These patterns may have served us in the past but are no longer relevant in approaching the world in the present times.
This summit session is about cracking open routine consciousness so that the light of the Creative Genius can enter. Dutch Jungian Analyst Robert Bosnak will explain how this can be done with a therapeutic and creative form of working with dreams and memories that he has called Embodied Imagination®.
Day 3 – April 9, 2022
9am | Creativity as an Expression of the Soul
Creativity as an expression of the soul emanates from a soulful engagement with the psyche. This session with Stephen Aizenstat focuses on developing a practice that cultivates this soul-enriched creativity.
Aizenstat suggests that connecting to the Soul can be as simple as taking a step back. That is, we pause, we open our senses, and develop curiosity for what we encounter in nature, on a stroll through the city, in a mood, a song, a dream, or a fantasy figure. Our relationship with these ordinary experiences changes when we see them as ‘visitations’. When we develop a sensitivity, a responsiveness to these experiences, we start feeling more alive, more creative, and connected to our soul’s purpose.
10am | Expressing Spontaneous Creativity
Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche shares, from the Bon Buddhist tradition, his perspective on creativity. He says that everyone’s essential nature is creative. When we are connected to the source of being then joy, humor, playfulness, and creativity, naturally arise. When you express the creativity emanating from this space, it is sacred. This sacred creativity, when expressed, has deep meaning and purpose and benefits everyone.
However, we might often have blockages in our engagement with creativity. These blocks could be the lack of time, the mounting bills to pay, the fear of the process, the belief of ‘I can’t’, and so on. Rinpoche addresses how we can engage with these blockages by turning towards them with an open mind and attitude. In this session, Rinpoche will walk us through the different phases of creativity and teach us a meditation that we can practice to get in touch with our innate spontaneous creative nature.
11am | The Full Expression of Your Voice
Your voice is the primary way your ideas and inspirations find their way into the world. Nothing much can happen without it. Opening more sound and freedom in your voice is a powerful way to enliven your creative spirit.
In this interview, master voice coach and singer/songwriter Barbara McAfee will offer tools and insights for tapping the power of voice in your creative life. We’ll explore the role of voice in bringing the unconscious into consciousness, and how sacred play can awaken the unexpressed potential within us. Join this joyful conversation!
Day 4 – April 10, 2022
9am | Divine Creativity
Enhanced creativity flows out of a deepening realization of the divine and helps root the divine truth and joy in the human experience. No one exemplifies this more than Kabir, the great 15th-century Indian saint. Andrew Harvey has spent ten years translating his poetry and will share his excitement and initiation with the participants. Andrew is himself infused with the divine creativity and exuberance we aspire to; and, this session is an invitation to experience the transcendental and wild creative state infused with the energies of Andrew Harvey and the divinely-inspired Indian saint. Andrew will share his findings on how to open up to the glory of the divine, engage with this tremendous force, and be a vessel for it in the world.
10am | The Deep Source of Creativity
Creativity is an opportunity to take risks—risk-taking is myth-making, states Dennis P. Slattery.
But what do creative moments look like? Are they extraordinary, elusive, and rare or can they be part of our common and ordinary lives? In this session, Slattery states and shows that with an open, porous, and creative attitude, everything we do and experience, can be moments of creativity. That is, all of our daily life engagements have the potential to and can be creative.
The deep source of creativity innate within each of us, can be engaged through creative practices; Slattery also shows us their importance and their capacity to guide us in our yearnings to create. The session also delves into the dynamics of creativity and our limitations, imperfections, and boundaries.
11am | Virtual Identities and Creativity
In this interview, Alia Aizenstat, a licensed psychotherapist and digital responsibility educator, will explore one of the new frontiers—the digital world—where the creative spirit can be ignited, embodied, and pushed to the furthest edges of possibility.
The digital world has expanded the limits of reality and has become the boundless frontier of creative imagination. In this place, curiosity meets imagination and imagination meets embodied experiences. This session explores how creativity is played out online as a means of searching for and manifesting soul, spirit, and identity. It will look at the negative and positive effects of having virtual identities in our lives.
Alia will show how depth psychology can help us integrate our virtual identities that otherwise might remain fragmented and unacknowledged. How do we embody our virtual identities? We will conclude this session by exploring how creativity and embodying virtual identities can be the high play acting out the soul’s desire. That is, maybe we do not escape ourselves online, but we meet a deeper Me within the Metaverse.
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