As a follow up to my last two posts exploring both basic and more advanced practices for exploring consciousness as individuals, I’d like to shift our attention to our nature as intensely social creatures. With both consciousness and creativity, it’s important that we invite others to support, reflect, and help us in our explorations of consciousness and the cultivation of our creative capacities. One way of doing this is through a process called circling. The idea of circling is simple: you gathering a group of people around you, tell them what you’re up to, and ask for honest feedback. The feedback of the other participants is not to come from their heads in the form of advice, judgment, or criticism, but from their hearts and bodies, making present time observations such as, “when you said you were tired, what I felt was resentment” or “when you said you wanted to relax, I sensed you wanted to escape.”
All of us have shadows and blind spots, areas that are part of our consciousness, yet difficult for us to see, sometimes because they’re painful or because they don’t match the values of the prevailing culture. But these areas are often incredibly vital and rich with creative potential. Notes author, teacher, and transpersonal psychotherapist, Dave Richo, “To be creative requires that we be able and willing to visit the darkest corners of our psyche no matter how primitive or disturbing. That is what the great artists did. And this is what could explain our fear of it.”
The reflections we receive through circling, along with the insights gained from the other practices I’ve already mentioned, are a powerful way of gaining access to those hidden areas of our own consciousness. Circling also has the added benefit of building healthy relationships based on direct communication and honest reflection. Not only is this of benefit to each individual, such communication is vital when engaging larger scale creative projects, such as a musical, a community mural, or a large scale redevelopment, anything where a project is to be realized by a team of people.
Austin Hill Shaw is a creativity expert, author, writer, architectural designer, and mapmaker of creativity across art, science, and religion. He specializes in helping others tap into and utilize the creative life force in everything they do. He can be reached at austin@austinhillshaw.com.