Today marks my 45th birthday. Yesterday, 22 years ago, I found myself 3000 feet above Yosemite Valley, ascending the last 100 feet of El Capitan’s famous “big wall climb”, The Nose. My climbing partners, William Okin (my best friend from birth),Billy McCullough (well before he opened the famed Tahoe restaurant Dragonfly), and I had been living […]
[VIDEO] Creativity, Cosmology, and Communion: A Buddhist View of the Sacred Significance of Psychedelics
Austin Hill Shaw is interested in exploring the peculiar ability of psychedelics to root out both the karmic challenges and opportunities of the individual who ingests them, and their powerful way of delivering messages that, when seen in the appropriate light, allow an individual to move forward in life with a deeper sense of meaning, […]
Is it possible to marry the spiritual and the material?
At the 2014 Wisdom 2.0 Conference in San Francisco, a woman from England, Harpal Datt of Glow at Work, a business psychology consultancy specializing in unleashing talent and potential, came up to me and said, “Your friend says you’re a Buddhist hipster. What does that mean?” To be honest, I wasn’t quite sure either. But […]
Creativity and Psychedelics: Religious Scholar Huston Smith and the Good Friday Experiment
..listening to the angelic music from the choir being piped down into the basement room, and having his consciousness greatly expanded by the chemicals in the mushrooms, Huston experienced a homecoming he’d longed for all his life: a direct, personal encounter with God. Psychedelics: An important tool for creativity and innovation As a creativity expert, my […]
[ARTICLE] The Psychedelic Miracle
Apply now for this year’s Healing and Self-Expression Plant Medicine Retreat in The Sacred Valley and Machu Picchu, Peru. “[Ayahuasca users] have become better partners to their spouses, better parents to their children, better children to their parents, better employees, better employers, just more responsible overall, bringing a higher level of ethical integrity to everything […]
Creativity and Gender Equality: The Need for True Empowerment in Both Women and Men
Here’s an amazing TED talk from a new friend of mine, Joselyn DiPetta, whom I fortuitously met in the final moments of the 2015 Wisdom 2.0 Conference after party. Her above talk,”The Missing Piece in the Gender Equality Puzzle” is fantastic, and is a must see for anyone wanting to: transcend the limitations of stereotypes […]
Creativity and Self-Expression: What’s Love Got to Do with It?
In short: everything! In order to be a better creator, and in order to be fully Self-expressed, you must be a better lover. This sort of love has nothing to do with like, or romance, or heart-shaped chocolates (although they, too, are products of love). This love has everything to do with framing all of […]
Bay Area Creativity and Innovation: Lesson 9, The Creative Vortex
This video is part of a series on San Francisco Bay Area Creativity and Innovation by creativity expert, Austin Hill Shaw. In this edition, Austin unveils the unseen forces driving Bay Area creativity and innovation.
Creativity and Surfing: Creative Flow and the Seduction of the Tube
The allure of a barreling wave is an undeniable force. It resonates deep within us like the drone of a bagpipe—strong and steady, raw and primordial—allowing all other notes a point of origin, a point of origin from which to soar. But what can waves and surfing teach us about our own desires for creative […]
[VIDEO] Creativity and Healing: Re-Establishing Wholeness through Self-Expression
Shakespeare grieved the loss of his 11-year-old son while writing Hamlet. Picasso’s most impactful painting mourned the atrocities of Guernica, the first civilian bombing in the history of the world. Pearl Jam’s Ten, an album that has sold over ten million copies, was created as the founding members, Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament, mourned the loss of their […]