Kim Hermanson's Blog, page 40

Seeing creative possibility in the underworld

Three separate clients came to me recently in very dark places. One had just lost her job and felt trapped—she described herself as being in a “coffin.” The second one was a single mother with a 2-month old baby who was living in a foreign country with no support system. I saw her life as she had known it disintegrating and an image appeared of her “melting” into the earth. And the image that showed up with the third client’s story was of being caught inside a black bag, desperately trying to get out. For all of them of course, the rational choice would be to get the heck out of that dark place, clawing oneself—by whatever means available—back into the “light.”

As humans, our normal mode is to be in the light—working, connecting, building things, and busily interacting with other humans. When life as we know it disintegrates, we may find ourselves being pulled down into darkness and despair. Some people might describe it as suffocating under an oppressive weight or being trapped in a place they can’t move. This is very frightening for the psyche and our rational minds do everything they can to try to “get out of the coffin,” “keep solid physical form,” “open the dark bag,” or “climb over the wall.” Despite popular teachings advising us to “embrace what is,” most of us do not surrender willingly when we find ourselves in those dark places. Our natural human response is to try valiantly to get out of this place…as quickly as possible.

In training, new therapists learn not to get emotionally wrapped up in a client’s story. If we do that, we lose our objectivity and ability to help. That’s what I like about following the images. Images are neutral—they’re not good or bad. It’s our interpretation that makes something good or bad. Darkness, for example, can be rich, fertile soil—the source of growth and new life or it can be empty and cold. A rope can be used to hang people or it can help us find our way out of dense fog. Our minds might want to interpret, but when we let that go and merely notice the qualities of the image, we can be curious. What movement wants to happen here? How is the creative process flowing? What seems to be the next fertile possibility? Tapping into the deeper, richer level of metaphoric images, we take ourselves out of desperation and into inquiry. From a metaphoric point of view, all images are equally interesting with wisdom to share.

The creative process is not linear and it rarely goes in the direction we think it should go. Therefore, we can’t understand the course of our life (the ultimate creative process) in a rational, linear way. Images lie at the heart of the creative and by seeing the images that lie under the surface, we have a deep and profound way to make sense of things that seem senseless to our logical minds. Images provide layers of rich wisdom that we would not receive in any other way. Many of my clients tell me that the images that come up feel like “sacred gifts.” Image is an ancient language, coming from “the old mind” as Michael Meade calls it. The old mind is what has survived in humans—the instinctive, intuitive inheritance of rich metaphoric ways of knowing.

With all three women mentioned above, the creative movement was taking them into the darkness. In the darkness, they would “melt” or “merge” into something new—some new life form. Unlike the rational world of human intellect, in the imag-inal realm we can shape-shift. We can melt and become black tar and spread over the earth to fertilize the soil, or merge into the earth and plant seeds for new possibilities. We can be the eagle that is flying to new heights, or be the dark oppressive structure that is weighing us down. Our creative process is always moving, always breaking down the old and finding new, more productive forms to express itself. No matter what place we are in, in the ancient realm of image we always have our creativity available to us. We can shape-shift into darkness, try on new forms and emerge in a new mode when we are ready. No problem.

Our culture has prized the intellect and it is a beautiful thing, but the truth is, logical, analytical thinking does not give us the tools to see under the surface of life, nor to work with what we find there. That type of seeing requires the old mind and its ability to feel its way and shape-shift…through darkness.

The Doorway To Your Genius

In a meeting in late December 2006, the President of a small university asked me what course I wanted to teach in their Ph.D. Psychology program. Instead of responding with the curricula that I was already prepared to teach, to my surprise I found myself blurting out… "metaphor." The topic was right there; there was no thinking involved. It seemingly came out of nowhere. At the time, I had no idea how metaphor related to Psychology, and I'm certainly not a linguist. Something was speaking through me. He replied, “Great! We’ll call it the Psychology of Metaphor” and I walked out of his office wondering what I had just gotten myself into.

That conversation initiated me on a journey, one where out-of-print books about the role of metaphor in human consciousness would appear out of nowhere on my study table at the local library. And while teaching the course, I had the strong sense that there was a realm of beauty that lies “under the surface” and we humans just don’t see it. I spent these months gazing at the world around me, trying to find the “way in” to this place.

Two months after the class ended, I had a visionary experience. For the sake of space, I will simply say that in this vision I saw and experienced that realm of pulsing beauty that I had been searching for. And as I experienced this breathtaking beauty, a voice said "THIRD SPACE" and I bolted awake.

For years I had been using the term third space to describe the phenomenon in teaching when the polarity between teacher and student is bridged and the group reaches a palpable place of expanded knowing and intuitive wisdom. Of course, if third space is the place we come to when a polarity is bridged, metaphor is by definition a third space. Metaphor bridges two disparate things to create a third thing, or third space. And so, metaphor is also the creative process. The noted philosopher Martin Foss (whose books showed up on my study table) would say that metaphor is the “process of creation” itself.

Over a century ago, Rudolph Steiner said the greatest discovery of 20th century science would be that the heart is not a pump but vastly more, and that the great challenge of the coming age of humanity would be to allow the heart to teach us to think in a new way. And how does the heart speak? The heart speaks through metaphor.

This wisdom of the heart is not “new,” it is ancient. It’s just that we have long forgotten it. The earliest humans did not have words—they used their physical bodies through gesture, facial expression, sounds, and posture to convey messages to one another. They painted pictographs on cave walls, communicated through visual signs, and learned by sensing, seeing, and touching the world around them. Thunder, rain, wind, plants and animals were all sources of learning and knowing. As James Hillman writes, “Metaphor was then the primary mode of knowing and understanding the world. The world was interpreted animistically—thunder was a God, and reality was structured in accordance with myth. Metaphor wasn’t understood to be a figure of speech, it was a vital means for understanding the world.”

I believe it is our next evolution as humans to bridge this polarity—between the mind and the heart, between the “real” world and the “world behind this world”—by tapping into the transformative power of metaphoric image. It's the doorway to our genius.

If you're interested in exploring third space or metaphor in more depth, you might want to check out my book Getting Messy (I discuss metaphor in chapter 3 and third space in chapter 6). I'll soon be starting a group for therapists on the role of image and metaphor for transformative change. (CEU credit is available for MFTs and LCSWs.) I am also available for individual “Doorway” Sessions where you can experience third space through the simple power of metaphor operating in your own life.

What Image Shapes How You See The World?

The French writer Albert Camus wrote, "A man's life is nothing but a slow trek to rediscover through the detours…those one or two images in whose presence his heart first opened.” The poet Stanley Kunitz believed that writers have key images that captivated them as children, and they keep working these images over and over again in their writings. The mythologist Michael Meade says that at the core of each of our lives is an image that first “moved us” into the world. And Walt Whitman poetically wrote, “There was a child went forth, and the first thing he looked upon, that object he became.”

Is it possible, as the writers above suggest, that as children looking at the world with fresh eyes, certain key visual impressions make an impact on our hearts? Perhaps giving us a “ground” to stand on, and a lens or point of view through which we see the world? Psychologists report that the first five years of a child’s life are the most important for shaping our psychological health and functioning. While psychology tends to focus on dysfunctional impressions on children, it is not hard to believe that our hearts would remember images of beauty or things that captivate us as well. Perhaps each of us has a particular key image that we each in our own way, keep working throughout our lives. Perhaps those images that we loved as children stay with us, giving us ways of looking, ways of seeing the world. Here are some examples.

A friend of mine grew up near the sea in England. She’s a scientist of sorts, and woven through all her writings is the notion of oceanic waves. A somatic therapist friend of mine has a body of work that she’s developed called “clearing clouds.” The cosmologist Brian Swimme has devoted his life to telling the “creation” story. And one of my clients from Mexico holds a primary image of a bustling marketplace. Her early childhood years were spent accompanying her parents to the festive Mexican market where they sold their wares. My own key image is watching my father--an Iowa farmer--plant and grow things. Planting, growing, and digging my hands into rich soil are images that lie deep within my personal psychology, despite having spent most of my adult life living in the city.

What is the key image that lies in your own heart? How has it shaped how you see the world? How does it replenish you when times are difficult? What guidance does it offer for your future? How does your key image offer support and nourishment for other people, and for the larger world?

If these questions are interesting to you, you might be interested in having a Doorway Session. I'm offering new clients a free introductory Doorway Session through January 31, 2013. To find out more click here.

*NOTE: This article was reprinted from my Examiner column: http://www.examiner.com/article/what-key-image-shapes-how-you-see-the-world

Opening Doors

A new client whom I’ll call Alice came to me recently in a desperate financial situation. The work she'd been doing as a book editor had dried up over the past year, and she needed to find some other work quickly. She had decided to apply for a position as Project Manager at a non-profit. Her decision made rational sense—as a book editor she was already doing project management work, and the non-profit happened to be in the same field as the books she had edited. Rationally, it was a good way to transfer her skills and content expertise into a paid position.

The rational mind acts like an efficient computer—it gathers all the facts and information that are in sight, piles them all together, and construes a solution from this information. Our rational minds make “binary” decisions—at a surface level they are logical and make sense. They are also simple—we can explain our reasoning to someone else or program into a computer. Ninety-five percent of career counselors would tell Alice she was making a wise decision.

But there is another level of wisdom and intelligence, a level that all of us have accessed at one point or another. Some might call it “heart wisdom” or a “felt sense”—those moments when we know something on a gut level, even though what this “knowing” is telling us does not make logical sense. From my experience studying how adults learn over the past 25 years, I believe the most direct way of accessing this other level of intelligence is through image and metaphor. Images are non-binary—they work on all levels at once. Depth psychologists say that images are how the heart perceives. This level of intelligence is dark, rich and messy. It might not make rational sense, but when we discover it, we feel it on all levels—we might feel a shiver, or a bolt of electricity, or simply a deep sense of peace. This deeper level of wisdom, what I call the metaphoric level, offers insights and “doors” that we cannot see with the rational mind.

On a metaphoric level, I saw Alice sitting inside of a drawstring bag, desperately trying to get the drawstring above her head to open. Again, this made rational sense. If we are—metaphorically speaking—“inside of a bag” (or any other tight situation) our instinct will be to try to open it. But what I saw was that the bag wasn’t ever going to open—the bag was shut tight and would stay that way. But that didn’t mean Alice would (again, metaphorically speaking) “suffocate and die.” Our creative process is always in movement, and it’s always in movement toward the place that holds the most growth and vitality. In Alice’s situation, the creative movement wasn’t in trying to open a bag that was never going to open, it was in the opposite direction: the creativity vitality was to be found in the foundation under her feet. The image that revealed itself showed that the rich, dark, messy, unknown place below her feet was where the creative possibilities lay; it was the creative solution. Her potential and future lay not in using logical decision-making to try to get out of the bag, but in a direction that seemed messy and non-rational, but was rich with possibility.

Research has shown that the most impactful and creative people are often those who have overcome severe limitation. Think of Ghandi, Martin Luther King, Helen Keller, Ludwig van Beethoven, and Winston Churchill to name a few. But all of us have limitations, and nearly all of us experience moments in life when we are “up against a wall” or trying to get out of hole or simply stuck. In those moments, our rational thinking does not help us, and for that reason, these are precisely the moments where creativity and creative thinking have an opportunity to show us a new way. Our growth lies in allowing this deeper, creative intelligence to show us possibilities that our rational minds would never come up with on their own.

Let me give you two other examples of how the metaphoric level demonstrates greater wisdom that is both non-rational and complex. Another client, whom I call Mary, spoke in our first session about the tension that she was experiencing in a personal relationship. The image was that of a rope—she was holding one end of the rope, and other person was holding the other end. I asked Mary what she thought her next action should be and she said, “I need to let go of the rope and not pick it back up again.” In her mind, she needed to give up the struggle. Of course, that’s the rational solution, isn’t it? Counselors and therapists are frequently instructing us to “let go”—forgive others, drop the power struggles, walk away from conflict. But in this situation, the metaphoric level revealed that Mary’s rope was her own power—the thing that she was holding onto belonged to her, not to anyone else. Letting go of it would literally be letting go of her own life force. What she needed to do instead was snap the rope and shake off the people who should not be holding onto it. She needed to claim the rope as her own.

A third client had frequently been told by health practitioners that she was “ungrounded” and she had spent years learning and practicing grounding techniques to try to resolve this aspect of her personality. But what the metaphoric layer revealed was that it was her nature to be “in the air.” The image at her core was that of a “weaver”—weaving and connecting diverse things, people, information, and relationships together. And the fact of the matter is, weaving does not happen in the earth—it happens above the ground. She was making connections between things that were all over the place—she needed to be in the air. While spiritual counselors and health practitioners often cite the importance of “being grounded,” the metaphoric level revealed deeper wisdom. The truth is, some of us need to be grounded, and some of us don’t.

Our natural tendency as humans is to make choices that are logical and rational, or that follow the dictates of experts, culture or community. So metaphorically speaking, we try to open up the drawstring bag, force our vehicle to move, push the rock up the mountain, let go of the rope, strive to be more grounded, and so on. But following the reasoning of our rational mind or even our wisest spiritual teachers, might actually diminish our life force and vitality. Again, our rational minds are built like computers—they are not designed to open up new creative options and possibilities, they are not designed to move outside of the box. Our rational minds are very adept at processing the information inside the box –whether that box is scientific research or spiritual principles—as efficiently as possible.

But below this level of efficient processing, there is a metaphoric level that is rich, deep and full of messy images that our rational minds cannot see. And this rich metaphoric level is not woo-woo, new-age fluff. Cognitive scientist George Lakoff has spent thirty-five years studying the foundational role that metaphor plays in our cognitive system. According to Lakoff and Johnson in their best-selling book Metaphors We Live By, “Metaphors structure our thinking, our understanding of events and consequently our behavior.” Metaphorical thought is “unavoidable, ubiquitous, and mostly unconscious.” It is our task to become conscious of it.

You may feel like you’re slapping a brick wall, trying to get it to move. Or you may feel like an iron wall is pressing down on you, squeezing and suffocating you. These images are not something to be avoided or pushed aside. They’re gold. If you stop and tap into them, they will show you creative solutions—the direction that will give you breathing room, new options, or a path of rich expansiveness.

How about you? Do you have something in your life that’s not working? Do you feel stuck? Are you yearning for movement? There is likely a door that lies under the surface and you just haven’t seen it. It’s a door that you can’t access with your rational mind, because your life is a creative work of art and you are one-of-a-kind.

To find out more about my Doorway Sessions, click here.


*NOTE: This article was reprinted from my Examiner column: http://www.examiner.com/article/is-there-a-door-you-d-like-to-open

There's lots of good stuff there, and I hope you will check it out.

Daring Greatly

When I was eight years old, my third grade class attended a musical at the local theater. I don't remember the name of the production, but I do remember watching actors and actresses, dressed in ordinary street clothes, singing their hearts out on a stage set up to look like an ordinary town. Gathered in front of make-shift houses and under temporary lamplights, they joined with one another in exuberant song. I enjoyed the performance, but what I really wanted to know was this: Why don’t we always sing on street corners? Where has the wild exuberance gone? Why am I watching this on a stage? This was the world I wanted to live in all the time.

Of course, music can be heard in the background of daily life—cafes, elevators, cars, television programs and commercials, health care practitioners, movies, and grocery stores play music almost non-stop to excite, elevate, calm or soothe us. And every city offers a wide variety of musical performances for our listening pleasure. But these are nearly always passive experiences. With the exception of the occasional rally or march, we do not sing as a public. The free, exuberant, spontaneous, joyful shared song that we witness in musicals does not happen in modern life. Music is kept under wraps. For most of us, the joy of self-expression in the musical realm is something we do privately in the shower. Why?

Perhaps one reason is because it’s not “OK” to express yourself musically unless you have a certain level of skill and proficiency. I’ll never forget a Christmas Eve church service I attended several years ago. The pastor (a woman) played Silent Night for the audience on her harp. Before she began, she spent a few moments preparing us—she was learning how to play the harp, she explained. She was not a skilled musician. And sure enough, as soon as she started playing, it was clear she was a beginner. I will never forget her profound vulnerability, risking our snooty judgment and ridicule. In my mind, that tender moment will be forever etched in my mind.

For whatever reason, when I hear someone put down a person’s singing or musical performance, it always feels like a dagger in my heart. I had a friend several years ago who regularly scorned Garrison Keillor’s voice on his NPR program A Prairie Home Companion. “He shouldn’t be singing,” he chided, “he can’t sing.” Perhaps I am not well-educated enough to make an accurate assessment, but what I experience when someone sings is beauty. I love the vulnerability--the willingness to put oneself on the line and share one's soul with us. The more timid the voice, the more captivated I am. I want to hear it.

The effect of this cultural ridicule toward inexperienced musicians and singers is to make sure that the rest of us stay quiet. We don’t dare share ourselves musically. Of course, any mode of creative work is subject to criticism and ridicule, but for whatever reason, the musical realm holds a much higher level of snootiness. A common reaction to someone singing in a ‘non-professional’ way is to put our hands over our ears as if we are in pain. Singing has become a performance for only a chosen few.

In her book Daring Greatly, Brene Brown writes, “To put our art, our writing, our photography, our ideas out into the world with no assurance of acceptance or appreciation—that’s vulnerability…..I define vulnerability as exposure, uncertainty, and emotional risk.”

Bravo.

Metaphor Lies Under the Surface

Years ago I worked briefly as a professional psychic, but my readings were different from what normally constitutes a “psychic” reading. What I did was not prediction or fortune telling—I merely read the images that were there “under the surface” of whatever situation the client was addressing. Although people loved my readings and my friends were always asking me for them, I never felt comfortable with the word ‘psychic’ and reading images did not seem to fit with academia, so I pushed it under the rug. Wouldn’t you know, at my first academic job interview when I was asked what I wanted to teach, I found myself blurting out “metaphor.”

The field of depth psychology provided me with the foundation to understand this metaphoric level that I could see so easily. Thirty-five years of outstanding research by George Lakoff and others has demonstrated how metaphors form the basis of our cognition, shaping how we think, speak and act in everyday life. We cannot think or speak without using metaphor. According to Lakoff and Johnson in their book Metaphors We Live By, metaphorical thought is “unavoidable, ubiquitous, and mostly unconscious.” No matter what the situation, there is an underlying metaphor that is providing a perspective or frame. This is obviously important for understanding how we navigate through life, because how we frame a problem determines how the problem will be solved and the next steps we will take.

William Blake said, "In the universe, there are things that are known, and things that are unknown, and in between, there are doors."
 Metaphor is the doorway, it’s the way in to other realms, other ways of knowing. Metaphor is an amazing, ancient intelligence that we all possess. Whether we are conscious of it or not, our guidance and clarity always comes to us first as a metaphor. Metaphor lies at the center of all forms of art and creative process, including the creative process of our own life. When we honor and acknowledge the metaphoric images that lie under the surface of our consciousness, we open up new creative channels.

To find out more about my individual sessions, click on Doorways Sessions.

Not Being Afraid of Fullness

"You must not fear, hold back, count or be a miser with your thoughts and feelings...creation comes from an overflow, so you have to learn to intake, to imbibe, to nourish yourself and not be afraid of fullness. The fullness is like a tidal wave which then carries you, sweeps you into experience and into writing...Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them."

The Diary of Anais Nin, Vol. 4: 1944-1947

TeachNow: Embracing Your Deep Roots

Jennifer Louden and Michele Lisenbury Christensen are beginning a new TeachNow program this week. I highly recommend it for anyone who is beginning to teach for the first time and seeking support and ideas; or maybe you’re an experienced teacher and could use some refueling and a fresh approach. What they’ve put together is terrific. It includes all kinds of great ideas and inspiration around the knotty issues of teaching—especially those things that we may feel but have a hard time verbalizing—like the pressure to perform, be perfect, or be someone other than who you are at heart. TeachNow helps you find, explore, and own your own style of teaching.

I wish such an innovative program had been around when I first started teaching. Teaching for me has always been a path of personal growth, and every challenge that I encountered was an opportunity to learn about myself, learn how to be in better relationship with other people, and learn how to better serve whatever situation I found myself in. When you approach teaching in this way, as a path of growth, having a “container” where you can process and reflect on what happened in your class is vital.

Jennifer interviewed me for TeachNow last spring. The last question she asked me was, “If you could go back and say something to the teacher you were as a young person just starting out, what would you tell her?” My response was this: “You have a gift and you can trust yourself. You don’t have to be so scared.”

What I see now when I reflect on her question, are deep roots. I believe all who are called to teach have something deep that's calling out to be taught. Your roots will look different from mine, but it's the task for each of us to embrace our own uniqueness, our own depths. What our deep roots want is nourishing soil, and TeachNow provides that kind of nourishment.

You can find out more about TeachNow here: http://www.theteacherspath.com

Creativity is not a talent. It's a way of operating.

Wildly Inspired

"We’re living in times that it’s not safe to play it safe anymore. Conventional life is changing and we need to take risks. We need to listen to that original impulse. If you’re creative, if you have an idea, if you have something unparalleled within you that you have to give this world, it doesn’t work to deny it. It doesn’t work to sit on it. When you have a creative idea, when you have an inspiration—it’s never been here before. We try to plan from our linear minds. We’re trying to look at what’s worked in the past and 'figuring it out.' It’s really about

letting it out."

This is an excerpt from a talk by Tama Kieves and my computer is packed with these little quotes of hers. The big news is that yesterday her highly acclaimed second book was released (it’s #1 on Amazon for career books), titled Inspired & Unstoppable: Wildly Succeeding in Your Life's Work! I can’t recommend it highly enough (nor recommend Tama highly enough). In my humble opinion, she’s a genius and in her own way, transforming the world. I hope you check out her book.