Apply now for this year’s Healing and Self-Expression Retreat in the Sacred Valley and Machu Picchu, Peru. Each retreat limited to 10 participants only. The Bay Area is the single most creative and innovative region in the United States, if not the world. Home to such major players as Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter, You Tube, […]
[VIDEO] Creativity and Bay Area Innovation, Part I: The Feng Shui Factor
The Bay Area is hands down the single most creative and innovative region in the United States, receiving a whopping 32 percent of all the venture capital invested in the United States. Introduction to the “Creativity and Bay Area Innovation” series The Bay Area is hands down the single most creative and innovative region in the […]
It’s Official: Austin Hill Shaw Will Be Speaking on Creativity at the Science and Nonduality Conference in October
I am very excited to announce that this last weekend I received notice from the Science & Nonduality Conference (SAND). My talk, “Creativity and Nonduality: How The Tension Between Egoic Identity and the Absolute Self Shapes the Creative Process” will be part of this year’s line up. Here’s the official word: Thank you for your […]
How Does Being Bilingual Affect Creativity?
Not long ago I wrote a series of posts on how my own creativity was affected by learning Spanish, starting when I was 29. Today I stumbled upon a blog post by Jonah Lehrer entitled “The Benefits of Being Bilingual,” which gives the hard science behind my own subjective experience. I really enjoyed this article. Here’s an […]
Creativity and Neurology: The Way We Think About the Brain Can Determine Its Creative Potential
“Why do we persist in our belief that the brain is purely and simply a ‘machine,’ a program without promise? Why are we ignorant of our own plasticity?” That question is raised by Catherine Malabou in her book, What Should We Do With Our Brain?, which in part explores how the ways in which we think about our […]
Embrace the Spiraling Nature of Creativity
Do you ever find yourself circling back around to a familiar place every so often—a certain part of town, a grove in the woods, the home where you grew up? Do you keep coming back to landscape photography over other subjects you might explore with the precision of celestial bodies? Do you notice how that […]
Creativity and the Super Geek: A Look at the Amazingly Creative Life of Nikola Tesla
“Geeks stay up all night so that they can disassemble the world and put it back together with new features.” This is the opening line of a tongue in cheek biography of one of the greatest and least recognized inventors who ever lived: Serbian American, Nikola Tesla. Behind such inventions as alternating current, X-rays, and […]
Chipotle, Willie Nelson, & Coldplay: An Unexpected Creative Trio Gets to the Heart (and Horrors) of Factory Farming
In order to live a creative life, it is important to have a felt sense of our interdependence with the world around us. As living organisms we depend upon other living organisms to fuel our own metabolic functions and, by extension, our creativity. In this video from Chipotle restaurants, a chain that began in my […]
Wisdom and Creativity in Business: I’m Enjoying Being the Speaker Liaison at the Wisdom 2.0 Business Conference
Wisdom and Creativity in Business: I’m Enjoying Being the Speaker Liaison at the Wisdom 2.0 Business Conference Today I have the honor of being the Speaker Liaison at the first Wisdom 2.0 Business conference at the historic Palace Hotel in downtown San Francisco. The Wisdom 2.0 Tech Conference is well known in the region as […]
Understanding Creativity Across Art, Science, and Religion Part II
Last time we came up with a working definition of creativity as 1) connecting with the world and 2) affecting it in a meaningful way. We also looked at the various ways in which we engage the world through 1) our senses 2) our thoughts (including thoughts about how we perceive ourselves) and 3) our […]