Kim Hermanson's Blog, page 36

My recent interview with the Women in Depth podcast

You can listen or download the podcast here: 

http://lourdesviado.com/29-the-power-of-metaphor-to-unlock-creativity-and-inspire-breakthroughs-with-kim-hermanson-phd/

On Inauguration Day in the US, I was interviewed on the Women in Depth podcast….during which I knew that what was really happening on that day…was the Inauguration of a new world.

IN·AU·GU·RA·TION (iˌnôɡ(y)əˈrāSH(ə)n) noun

1. the beginning or introduction of a system, policy, or period.

2. a ceremony to mark the beginning of something

As we each open our capacities for metaphoric ways of knowing that aren’t normally accessed in our culture, deep creative energies will be released. The feminine underworld has been inaugurated.

You can listen or download the podcast here: 

http://lourdesviado.com/29-the-power-of-metaphor-to-unlock-creativity-and-inspire-breakthroughs-with-kim-hermanson-phd/

 

The sacred energy of the square

When I’m scared or confused or thrown off by something, I open up metaphoric space and usually... see myself drawing a square. When I become third space--the 'space in which it happens' and allow sacred square energy to permeate my Being, I feel Square's amazing strength, clarity and boundaries. Square has no trouble being fully present. It is not wobbly. It holds up under stress. I leave this realm... shifted.

The sacred energy of the square

When I’m scared or confused or thrown off by something, I open up metaphoric space and usually… see myself drawing a square. When I become third space–the ‘space in which it happens’ and allow sacred square energy to permeate my Being, I feel Square’s amazing strength, clarity and boundaries. Square has no trouble being fully present. It is not wobbly. It holds up under stress. I leave this realm… shifted.

 

Holding Peaceful Expansiveness

Is there something in your life that’s a bit intense, overwhelming or challenging right now?

Stress often creates a feeling of being “boxed in” and having nowhere to move. But no matter what is happening in the external world, third space is always available to us. Metaphoric images are portals to another realm that is abundantly loving and nurturing. Its transformative energies will shift you.

Close your eyes and imagine a vast, very peaceful desert terrain, so expansive that you can’t see the edges of it. Then imagine yourself being the desert terrain. You’re not looking at it anymore more—you are the desert plain. Stay with it for a few moments, until your body is quite comfortable in this expansive place. As you hold this place of expansiveness within your body, what happens to the overwhelm? It disappears, doesn’t it? We can’t hold peaceful expansiveness and overwhelm together in our bodies at the same time.

A Message from the Other World

Despite my desire for zen-like calm, I've been affected by the deeply unpleasant US election and negative, hard-to-believe-this-is-the-US, stories in the news media. Sometimes I feel afraid…of nuclear war, climate change, and violence that I can't control. I worry about “what could happen.” And in addition to the national and international unrest, I have my own worries, as this past summer I had a serious health scare. I'm fine now, but it shook me.

Even though I’ve been working with the metaphoric realm for years and know without a doubt that this healing realm of other-worldly wisdom and transformative creative energies urgently wants to communicate with us… I need constant reminders.

There is something else other than this everyday world that we see with our ordinary eyesight. Something much bigger than us. And it sounds so simplistic to say that. "Well of course," one might say.

Yesterday I had a powerful session with a client. The ‘image’ that showed up was an azure blue field of energy. It was not diffuse energy…it was clearly a “thing” and it wanted to be known as a thing. Here was its message:

“I am a thing. I am not nothing. I need to be a thing. I need to be a thing for you. People don't see the 'something' in the middle realm. You think there is something to fear. There is nothing to fear. I came here to tell you that. When you feel afraid, remember me.”

There is another reality that I often describe as “under the surface,” but it’s not under the surface. It’s right here, but we don’t see it because it requires a different way of looking. 

The intense beauty of the metaphoric realm is dormant...until we give it our attention. Seeing it requires a shift of our perception...a shift to seeing the metaphoric space in which the creative unfolding happens. 

I grew up in a middle-class, conservative Midwestern family and I was trained to be an academic at a rigorous and prestigious institution of higher education. I did not have new-age hippy parents. My family valued science and viewed creativity as “fluff.” I am not, by any means, a spiritual guru—talking about anything spiritual or “other worldly” is far outside of my comfort zone. My friends and family never spoke of experiences of non-ordinary reality and I certainly don’t want to attract any kind of negative attention toward myself. Given all this, I’m the last person I would have thought would ever speak about other “realms.”

I dismissed my own messages and experiences from the metaphoric realm for many years. I ignored mystical experiences of profound beauty and intuitive knowing—pushing them under the rug because I didn’t want to deal with anything that didn’t fit my own limited conception of reality. Even when I knew there was a disjuncture between what I was studying about human learning through years of research and high-level academic teaching positions, and how I learned in my own life, I still dismissed my own experiences.

It took a lot for the metaphoric realm to shake me out of my own dismissal. But the more I took these non-ordinary experiences of metaphoric knowing seriously, the more my life started changing dramatically.

It's time for us to look differently.

When we look through the eyes of metaphor, we experience the deep, profound creative energies of the Universe...unfolding. 

If you would like to align with the deep creative forces that want to express and move through your life, please join me for my upcoming tele-class The Power of Metaphor: Unlocking the Creative with the Depth Psychology Alliance.  

The creative arts gave me life

When I was in school, I loved the precision and tidiness of it—each class a container with a tidy list of assignments by week. All these fascinating subjects, like chests full of jewels, and if we only sign up and listen, we might uncover some of those jewels. Looking at new syllabi at the beginning of a semester, going out and purchasing new books at the bookstore. The whole process was exciting and full of fresh adrenaline—like gifts would lie behind that door, for sure. But often, the sense of excitement turned into a bit of drudgery, as we slogged through the material and assignments…until finally at the end of a term, I just wanted the whole thing to be over.

After I finished my Ph.D. at the University of Chicago, I was so burnt out on reading that the sight of a book or words on a page made me physically sick to my stomach. Even the words on the back of a cereal box swam in front of my face and made me nauseas. So that summer I gathered together stacks of dissertation notes and literature, and dumped them all into the massive recycling container at the corner of Ashby and MLK in Berkeley.

I stood on top of the ladder and watched as seven years of academic research dropped away in front of me, never to be seen again. Throwing away all scraps of information related to a PhD dissertation that I spent years working on gave me nightmares. “Surely I must have just thrown away something that I would need someday?”

The only thing, the only direction, that felt right was the creative arts. I took pottery and creative writing classes, bought paints and started painting. The creative arts made me feel spacious and free—they gave me life. 

So when I started teaching, I found myself split—on one hand was art, image, beauty and creative process that I loved so much; and on the other hand, teaching and learning which I also loved. They seemed hopelessly separated. Over the years, as I’ve continued to pursue the question of human learning, those two hands have come together.

Decades of research has clearly demonstrated that creative process and metaphoric images are our native language. “Men sang before they spoke… they learned the language of water, fire and clouds before they produced more formal and sophisticated language systems,” writes Harry S. Broudy in Reflections from the Heart of Educational Inquiry.

At a deep level, we learn through metaphoric image.

When I discarded my books and academic papers, what I really wanted was to learn at this deeper level.

Might you be ready…to tap into your own depths?  Join me for a Doorway session.

Being Profoundly Moved by the Creative

Many years ago I sat on a stool in the Art barn at Esalen Institute painting a paper mache mask. I'd originally signed up for some sort of contemplative workshop, but found it too cerebral and ended up here.

I painted the mask magenta and then decided to paint a vine of flowers on the side. As I slowly drew a long vine down the side of my mask—getting into the feeling sense of the vine's graceful, elegant beauty—I found my hand being moved by something Greater than myself. 

I was no longer directing my hand, something else was. Something was moving me, stroking the paint on this mask.

We humans set goals for our lives and make all kinds of plans, schedules and commitments. We trudge along, continuing to believe we're solely in charge of our destinies.

While all the while... something else urgently wants to move and express through us.

We access that Something Else through metaphor. Metaphor gives us direct access to the powers of creation. 

One of my clients, who was tired and worn out from writing a PhD dissertation and in desperate need of fresh creative energy, received an image of seeing herself dancing.

But when she metaphorically stepped into it, she was no longer looking at it.  She was BEING danced...by something far greater than herself.

Another client, going through a traumatizing divorce, received an image of a deep, still pool of water. But then he realized he wasn't resting in it...

He was BEING rested in a profoundly deep way.

Can you see how allowing yourself to be moved by something greater is a much different kind of experience? 

Being viscerally moved by otherworldly creative energies is transformative and exquisitely beautiful... 

like nothing else that I have ever experienced.

No one has ever walked the path that you are walking. No one else has the particular gifts that you have. 

By allowing yourself to feel and express profound, deep metaphoric energy, you participate in the unfolding of a new world. 

What might YOU produce, if you allowed yourself to be moved by deep creative energies?

Are you curious what might want to be birthed?

 

If you're ready to uncover your own deeply profound creative energies or you need a significant shift,  I'm offering an end-of-summer Doorway session special if booked and paid before Wednesday August 1st. $100 for a one hour session (a $165 value). Contact me at kim.hermanson [at] gmail.com.

P.S. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, author of Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience and many other books, just sent this to me, reviewing my upcoming book, A Portal to the Creative: Using Metaphor to Unlock Creative Genius and Inspire Breakthroughs:  "Not since Carlos Castenada's books 40 years ago, have I had such a strong reaction to anything written. You are dealing with very powerful stuff." 

 

Imbued with Answers

I’ve always loved simplicity, and… my mind does a great job of complicating things.

I’ve been planning a local community singing event, and I got hung up (for weeks…) thinking I needed a full band for it. And I complicate other parts of my life too—believing I need to do certain things that I really don’t need to do. It’s summer and I want simple. Simple takes me back to my roots, back to the things that are most important to me.

In Doorway work, people will get simple images—a tree or a waterfall or a cloud—and think they’re not doing it right or that it’s too elementary to be useful. But the image is a portal into another dimension. We’re not analyzing the image, as one might do in Jungian analysis or dream groups. This work is shamanic—seemingly unsophisticated metaphoric images allow us to enter a dimension that is not of this world…where we are directly touched by powerful creative energies of the Universe.

As one of my clients, a therapist and coach, said, “This didn’t just give me answers, it imbued me with answers.”

Metaphor allows us to feel Truth in a whole-bodied, visceral way.

 

I love what the artist Jean Dubuffet wrote about the power of simplicity in art:

“…the work of art is much less than what many people imagine it to be in the sense that it is neither necessary nor even useful that it should involve a broad orchestration. Take dance for example, I consider it absolutely pointless to put fifty sumptuous decked out dancers on the stage; for what I am looking for a single dancer will do, and I don’t need him to be dressed in silk for his dance to charm me. Neither does it appear to me any more useful that he should execute perilous jumps or do extremely acrobatic movements; these do not in my opinion add anything. In my experience they may even spoil the whole effect. Similarly, the effect produced by music never seems to me to be improved by the use of large orchestras, and the Bedouin in the desert seems to me to obtain as much or more playing alone on his little flute. It is in this spirit that I have contemplated the idea of doing very simple paintings using very meager means which work just as well as those that have recourse to grand orchestrations and prestigious mastery of manual skill.”

Jean Dubuffet, "The Cow with the Subtle Nose"  1954

Why do we need art?

Painting by Betsy Lewis Napangardi

I grew up in a hard working Norwegian farming family in the Midwest and not surprisingly, Midwestern practicality is etched into my cells. When I walk into an art gallery, I often marvel at the amount of time someone spent gluing hundreds or thousands of tiny pieces of glass into a sculpture or creating a fine painting. Thousands of hours in many cases, with no practical benefit other than to be looked at and admired. We can look at and admire a tree or a mountain, why do we need art?

We tend to evaluate the success of artists by whether they can make a living from their art. This is not an easy path and for many artists I know, it’s a struggle. But perhaps there are other reasons why artists labor against the odds to produce art. Perhaps underneath it all, it’s not so much about making pretty things for people to look at and buy. Perhaps what they’re really doing—consciously or not—is engaging in a process that allows them to touch something that’s alive. And perhaps their creative efforts help the rest of us touch this place as well. Maybe… on some subconscious level, the creative process teaches us how to be better humans. Maybe it shows us how to step into something more expansive than ourselves.

The artistic process is not valued in our culture as a deeply profound way of knowing. That is clear when school districts make budget-cutting decisions…and arts programs are the first to go. And although corporations pay lip service to the need for creativity and innovation in order to stay competitive, most of them are too focused on their bottom line to explore a dimension of wisdom that bypasses our cognitive minds.

In my classes and individual Doorway sessions, I work with metaphor, which is a powerful—and untapped—way of knowing. Artists, consciously or not, have been connecting with the metaphoric realm for eons. Metaphor lies at the heart of the creative process.

The physicist Arthur Zajonc wrote:

I believe that artists are the harbingers of the future mentality required both by science and by the imperatives of living in our precarious times . . . we now truly stand in need, not only as scientists but as a civilization, of the artist’s cognitive capacities.

Sigmund Freud once said that no matter where his research led, a poet had already been there ahead of him. The question is: why? What is it that the poet does…that takes him or her beyond ordinary reasoning capacities?

Capacities such as the artist’s willingness to dwell in perplexity and confusion, welcoming any unlikely connection that shows up, and his or her sensitivity to nuance and qualities of beauty that others miss, provide us with important directional pointers. Unfortunately however, our culture separates off the artistic realm from normal everyday human activity. Whether artists are viewed as weird or genius does not matter, because in either case they are considered different from the rest of us.

Tribal cultures didn’t make artistic products that they set aside and looked at. In fact, they didn’t have the concept of “art” as something separate from life. To them, the process of creating art was a way to commune with the Gods. They made art because they needed to connect with something greater than themselves. I believe we all have that fundamental need. To live we need to grow—we need to reach beyond ourselves into something greater. We are meant to be learners in this world; we are meant to reach beyond.

When we step into a potent metaphor, we step into another dimension, a place I often call the Feeling Dimension. In this metaphoric Dimension, we connect with and feel...the profound creative energies of the Universe. 

NOTE: This is an excerpt from my upcoming book, "A Portal to the Creative: Using Metaphor to Unlock Creative Genius and Inspire Breakthroughs"

Tapping Third Space When You Teach, Train, Coach or Facilitate: Teleclass December 8th!

When groups of any size come together for a shared purpose, there is a "third space" of larger wisdom available to draw upon, a wisdom that lies within the center of the group itself. Third space is a place of intuitive knowing, a realm that lies just beyond our ordinary, everyday rational intellectual capacities. In his book Stillness Speaks, Eckhart Tolle writes, “Most people confuse the Now with what happens in the Now, but that’s not what it is. The Now is deeper than what happens in it. It is the space in which it happens.”

Tolle is referring to third space, and we can tap into it when we teach, train, coach or facilitate.

If you are a teacher, trainer, coach or mentor, I would love to have you join me for this upcoming teleclass on Tuesday December 8th. (I know this is a busy time of year for all of us.... if you can't attend the event you can still sign up to receive the recording!)

In this experiential teleclass, we will go underneath the tools, mechanics and content of what you teach or facilitate, to uncover the realm of profound wisdom that lies below it.

Discover expanded possibilities for your teaching, coaching, facilitating

Honor & draw upon the sacred wisdom in a room, conversation or group

Move through blocks and teaching challenges more quickly

Be present with others from a place of your own deep integrity

I’ve always been fascinated by the magic of group spaces—those times when the group enters spaces of deep wisdom and deep beauty. There's something that happens in group energy that couldn't happen any other way. Those magical moments give us a deep sense of meaning and connection, and are what we remember for the rest of our lives.

Join us for this introductory class and get a taste of what’s possible.

To register: http://events.r20.constantcontact.com/register/event?oeidk=a07ebppwiqr6ef1ea9d&llr=67r4iomab