Ep 120: Patrick Williams ~ Creative Colonisation, Self-Discovery, and Restoring Our Innate Creativity

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Truth and Transcendence brought to you by being Space with Catherine Llewellyn.

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Truth and Transcendence, episode 120, with special guest Patrick Williams.

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Now, if you haven't come across Patrick, he is a passionate and inspiring public speaker, a consultant, writer, artist, independent scholar and visionary educator.

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Patrick has over four decades of experience teaching and facilitating deep learning to a wide range of audiences.

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He's a TEDx speaker and an award-winning artist.

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Patrick has exhibited throughout the USA, japan and China.

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His art is in public and private collections and he has been represented by galleries in Chicago, seattle, omaha and Albuquerque.

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On another note, patrick holds black belts in Karate Doe, if I pronounce that rightly, and Aikido, with decades of experience training and teaching Budo.

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Have I pronounced that right?

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Budo Correct Cool.

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Okay, patrick is the founder and president of Satori Innovation, a consulting and ideation accelerator.

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So obviously Patrick's fascinating and interesting person, but why did I invite him on and what are we going to talk about?

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So he really has an extraordinary comprehension of the synthesis of creativity and innovation and, of course, innovation is vitally important to us globally at the moment, locally and globally.

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Based on his own lived experience and, of course, that of his clients, he has much to teach us about our theme today, which is how to restore our innate creativity.

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So I love that theme.

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I think that's much more interesting than this idea that many of us have that creativity is something you have to go and get somewhere.

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This idea that we have innate creativity that we can restore is, to me, much more optimistic and accurate.

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So, patrick, thank you so much for coming on the show.

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I'm happy to be here, Catherine.

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Excellent, so let's dive right in.

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Have you always been really tuned in to the importance of creativity, or can you kind of remember a time when you first really connected to it and realized how important it was, how interesting it was to you?

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Good question.

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I really have had a connection ever since I can remember.

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I have little watercolor drawings that I did when I was super small, like maybe three for sure-ish my mom.

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When she would make bread she would spread some flour onto the table and I would draw in the flour and then spread it out again to kind of erase it.

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So those memories are really, really strong and I was really connected to nature.

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We had a woods next to our house and I was forever in the woods connecting.

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We had a small acreage.

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We had some hogs and steers and chickens at one time, so connected to nature.

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My dad did some planting of crops.

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So there is this.

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There's a creative energy all around our home.

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But I was super fascinated, doodled all the time before I really knew that I was an artist, and that happened around 10 years old.

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Fantastic Were other family members and your parents.

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Were they artistic and creative?

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Not at all.

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There was one painting in our home before I started painting and it was a paint by number of Jesus praying at a rock.

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Oh, I know those.

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Yeah, it was a really famous paint by number piece.

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I'm still attempting to find out who painted the original.

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I didn't know that, but that was the only piece of artwork really in the house.

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My grandfather and grandmother on my mom's side they did draw a little bit and grandpa was a photographer so he and he had his own darkroom.

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So he was very much into the creative quality.

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More so with most of his work was portraits, and not in any level of sophisticated, he just liked to basically record family and friends and things.

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But he did have a very inventive side to him.

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So I think that's where I got a lot of it.

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My mom she did crochet work and she could look at a pattern and then kind of come up.

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She would alter patterns and instructions to kind of suit her own creativity.

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Yeah.

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But I was the one in the family.

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Yeah, so you were the one doing painting.

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But there were a lot of creativity going on, definitely.

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Yeah.

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In different applications.

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Absolutely how interesting, and you mentioned the connection with nature in regard to creativity as well.

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Could you say a bit more about that connection for you?

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Yeah, I feel that nature is our first teacher in all respects and especially with respect to creativity, and that's a little, I guess, nuanced.

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Maybe it's not directly.

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I believe nature has a language that isn't directly communicated to us.

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It's always been communicated, but it takes a little bit more practice to actually hear and be aware of those teachings.

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So it takes time to sit in nature and listen.

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But also sit in nature and see and hear, smell, taste, feel all those things, the senses, and then the other senses above those will start to inform you of the teachings, I believe.

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So I learned a lot going out into the woods and I think it would take a bit of time for me to really articulate exactly what I learned.

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But I feel forever people have we lived in nature for millennia, tens of millennia, and harmonized with it.

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We had to listen, we had to tune into our environment and pick up that kind of communication, and it's a kind of communication that isn't.

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That's, some of it's based on our five senses, but I think most of it is based on our other senses, our intuition, our for better word psychic, our awarenesses, our dream world, which is most original cultures.

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You know, a hundred thousand years ago they all knew that naturally and connected that to their in their ways, their creativity.

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I believe Either it was singing, dancing, drumming, you know, the singing and dancing, I believe, came first.

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Storytelling probably came once language was kind of active and then, you know, I probably making jewelry and sculpting was soon after that, and then painting.

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They're a little bit more problematic.

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You know you have to find something that is liquid and then put it on a wall to have that idea, which they probably, you know, we know of 40,000 years ago, of paintings, but I'm sure that there are other paintings around that are older than that.

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So nature is, nature is the teacher and nature is the teacher that I attempt to connect with as much as I can.

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Between in cities it's a little bit more challenging, but you know a little, a little section of grass and gives nature, so you can put your feet in that and connect and listen.

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Beautiful.

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I love that.

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I actually really liked the way you said it would take a bit of time for you to articulate exactly what the teachings have been for you from nature.

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Truly yeah, it's another language.

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Yeah, yeah, and it also underlines the scope of it as well.

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You're not saying you know, I spend a lot of time in nature and I learned this bumper sticker phrase, kind of thing.

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It's more that your whole relationship with nature led to a whole experience which, in your experience, was actually a whole set of teachings.

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Absolutely.

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Which fed you and contributed to your creativity in its evolving and even without knowing the details of that, just that idea on its own is a very exciting idea, I think.

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Totally, and that's one of the most challenging things to assist people with, especially in business, is that what you and I are talking about right now is completely inside the intangible.

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Yes.

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There's no item that you can point to and then you can recreate that item and then you'll have creativity.

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It doesn't work like that.

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It's completely from the inside and not it's beyond the material.

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Yeah, yes, and of course, probably most of what's really important is in the intangible and beyond the material.

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And yet we spend an awful lot of time and energy trying to lock everything into the material so we can understand it, don't we?

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Truly yeah.

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You know, I'm delighted when people talk in the way you've just been talking, because to me that is the bit that most people think is not reality.

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To me is more real than the bit that we think is reality.

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Yeah, very real you know, but you're the first person who I've heard talk about the connection between nature and creativity in quite the way that you have done.

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You know, I've heard people talk about nature as, let's say, a source of beauty that we might be inspired to paint or sing about, or dance about or whatever.

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And I've heard people talk about nature as a place we can go to resource ourselves.

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You know, breathe fresh air and resource ourselves.

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But you've described something different, something more esoteric than that.

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I think For sure.

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Yeah, absolutely.

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Like when you said the message that nature's giving that you've got to learn to hear it.

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Beautiful, yes, and I'm doing that at the age of 10, tuning into that.

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Yes, but not cognitively.

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It was pure as children.

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We're symbiotic with nature.

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We haven't experienced enough blockages yet to realize that it's just.

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Our natural state of being is having that easy communication.

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And I think for creatives and not when I say that I don't mean just people who identify as artists, and that's part of what I the challenge of what I'm assisting people with is to not get focused on the arts, because the arts are just one example of our creativity.

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So our ability to connect with that young aspect of ourselves is super important because it does have that natural fluency in language with nature that we tend to distance ourselves and kind of forget, misplace, like we talked about beforehand.

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Yes, yes, I love that.

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I love how you said that when you were a child, you weren't cognitively aware of this relationship with nature, because you hadn't yet been told that you were separate from nature.

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You know you totally found out that this notion of being separate from nature, which of course isn't true.

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So how did that evolve from there into?

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Because you've now developed a whole kind of body of work, haven't you around creativity.

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Could you tell me a bit more about how that's evolved across the years towards where you are now?

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Sure, my first experience of teaching happened in high school.

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I taught ice skating to children and of all the I was very young and all the other teachers were basically professional ice skaters and they.

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We had an opportunity to teach special ed kids and when that meeting happened all of the adults looked at me at the same time and said, oh, patrick will do it.

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And I was like sure I didn't know.

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So I had both regular ed kids and special ed kids and teaching them how to start ice skating.

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So that really exposed me to a kind of vertical learning curve of how to teach this very different group of children.

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And that and from there, after graduating, I went into.

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I was a majored in art.

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I chose art over physics, which I think was a wise decision.

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But in art school I started to notice how different some students and some instructors were in their approach to their creative process.

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I had a very interesting experience with one of my roommates who was also.

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He became an art major.

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He had a different painting instructor than I did.

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I had a very unusual painting instructor he was.

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He was a wild card in the art world to begin with, but certainly in Lincoln, nebraska, and our critiques were very different than the critique that I went to and that gave me a lot of information about how people approach creative processes.

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And then after school, I and each of these little vignettes have lots of stories inside of them.

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But then after college I was involved in lots of visiting art.

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I took this on myself to visit schools, talk about being an artist, doing, eventually doing artist and residency programs.

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So throughout that built, but also in college, I started taking martial arts or another a Japanese way to say.

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It is budo, which is martial ways.

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Bu is martial and do is is way.

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So it's the way of of, it's the way of martial arts, so to speak.

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Martial arts is more the military concept, but budo is what what the arts really are about, after like 1850s.

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So I started karate and then, a few years later, I started Aikido and, and as you progress, you then begin to teach.

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By the time I moved to Seattle, I was teaching full time in karate and and also learning Aikido.

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So, having experiences in in ice skating, in the arts and in in budo, I was seeing all these different ways that that both children and adults learn and and then starting to understand oh, the adults learn a very specific way, whereas children learn a completely other set of ways.

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And just maybe, maybe 10 years ago, I met some people that were inside the business world and and our conversations would touch on creativity and and the arts, and that's when these ideas started to really come into focus and then I started writing about it.

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I have a couple manuscripts that I've been working on forever and and that's basically the kind of the, in a way, the timeline.

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And also another element is my own creative process and how that has changed and my relationship to both art history and contemporary art history.

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So art history in the last 50 years and then art history before that.

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So all those things together have have kind of coalesced into my conceptions of of creativity, and I don't know how many points I'm on.

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The next point is that my wife is many things, but one of her degrees is in contemplative psychology, and so I have an entire realm of information we've discussed that has added to my understanding of, in some ways, just plain old human psychology, but then the psychology that we each go through with our challenges, with respect to ourselves, but also with, specifically with creativity.

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It's a very long answer to fascinating, I think, honestly, honestly good with when I'm having a conversation with somebody and I'm asking about their life.

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You know, it's like I'm saying, you know, in, in, in three minutes, could you just tell me your whole life.

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It's just not possible to do so.

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It's.

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I appreciate you going into it because that kind of fleshes it out, because I think a lot of people, when they think about creativity, they think of it as something which is separate from them, that only some people can have.

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Or that it's something where you've if you just press the right button you'll have it.

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But but you know, in your description there you've really kind of laid out that you went through a whole series of different phases, some of which were paralleling one another, and you've got a.

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You've got several things working together.

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You said the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the buddho, and the karate, and aikido, teaching, learning and teaching, and the art, learning and teaching, and the ice skating we presumably you had to learn at some point and teaching, and, and that you sort of saw things through the combination of all of those, about how people learn.

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So you, so you've.

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You've been interested in creativity for your whole life, but you've also been interested in how people learn for quite some time.

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Exactly.

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As well.

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Yes.

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I wonder how that is, that those two things sit together for you.

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Right.

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Part of it is and as you said that I was trying to remember the name of this description that are given children.

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I didn't speak until after I was three years old.

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I had two much older sisters, and my parents were older when I was born, so they were kind of like, oh here's another one, what are we going to do with this one?

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And my sisters basically doubted on me, right.

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So I think those were factors, but also I just feel like I was spending a tremendous amount of time absorbing the world and learning in a very, very unusual way.

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Possibly I don't know, because it's the only way I've known how to learn.

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Then, just I don't know when I really started getting into the literature of education and then pushing that into where I divided into.

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There's education and then there's learning.

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Those are absolutely two separate concepts.

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People do learn inside the educational system, but it is not designed for optimal learning.

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My concept of what all of us should be involved with is optimal learning, and that from both the literature and the history of human beings.

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Learning happens when we play, use our imagination and are creative.

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That is academically soundly established and that is the only time we learn.

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So the items that we have learned in our educational systems.

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We learn because we're having fun doing it and we know it forever, the things that weren't fun and we weren't playing or using our imagination or being creative.

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When we're in the educational system, we don't retain we can sometimes force ourselves to get to it in a kind of compartmentalized space in our psyche that holds that information because we by quote, unquote wrote, we kind of chiseled it into a memory space.

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But that's for me, that's not real learning.

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Real learning is about our passion and our love and we're playful about it, we're imaginative about it and we're creative about it.

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That is where true learning exists.

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And through my process of my own learning and how, how painful, to be honest, it was to try to learn how to spell, learn how to read, learn how to read music that was.

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That was insanely, unbelievably hard, which I kind of think it is actually hard to read music.

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I think it is Right.

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It's such a.

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I love the concept, it makes so much sense, but my God, putting those three things together the sheet music, the piano and then the sound, it's just not my will out.

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So so all those, all those challenges of learning for me inside the system of education were constantly being.

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It was a conflagration between my natural learning state and the educational system and I retain that until now.

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I still, I will always retain that, that challenge that I experienced and went through.

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So I look at people in a way that we've all experienced that Some people have a more natural affinity toward spelling or mathematics or whatever it might be in the educational system and they, it's playful for them and they love that and so they learn it really well.

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And then there are other things that they get caught up and blocked with.

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I feel like it's it's because of so many factors in our world that those challenges are on the blockages.

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I call them creative colonization, but the, the it also applies.

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There's an emotional colonization, there's a intellectual colonization, there's a communication colonization, so that the my terminology of creative colonization can can also be used in other domains and other areas of, of of being, of education or school.

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So could you clarify what you mean by colonization in that?

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context.

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Sure, so when, when I started to really know that I was going to attempt to communicate these ideas that I've, as you've been so kind to pull out of me, it's, it's really good for me to to go through this process.

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Yeah.

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So when I, when I sat down and I started asking myself, what is it about me and what is it about the people that I have been with, both children and adults, around creativity, that is different and I realized I don't remember the exact thought process that the light bulb came on but I realized that there's a connection within our greater culture, our, our world culture, with respect to education that we've all shared and, of course, it's very different what you went through as a young woman in the educational system and when I went through, or someone in in China or anywhere yeah, very, very different, but very, very similar in the last 200 years of how education has been designed or or executed.

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But when I, when I really tuned into it, I realized that that there is a kind of colonization that happens, and when I was doing this, I was thinking exclusively about, about creativity, but also connected to play and imagination and thus learning.

00:29:29.027 --> 00:30:07.145
But I felt like, just as people have gone into other countries and removed their traditions, removed their mother tongues, their language, removed their holidays, removed their, their ways of expressing themselves, in the process of colonization, literally, I realized that, that our cultures, our educational systems have done the same thing to children.

00:30:07.866 --> 00:30:21.565
They've gone in and taken away our what I call our first language or I'm contradicting myself a little bit, because I said nature is our first language, but, but there's but.

00:30:21.565 --> 00:30:23.269
Nature and creativity are so linked.

00:30:23.269 --> 00:30:33.109
Nature is always creating so first language with a little dash next to it or a little letter, a.

00:30:33.109 --> 00:30:54.679
So when, when our language is taken, when our, when our way of learning basically is, is hijacked or pushed to the side, then I believe not only is our creativity altered, but then also our learning is altered.

00:30:54.679 --> 00:31:35.154
So in school, children are forced to learn another language, which is, for better term called education, and we're separated from our natural learning style and so we have to learn another way of learning that isn't natural to us, and that's why I think either some subjects, or all subjects, or some variation of all and some, are difficult for children, because we're all trying to learn another language and it happens in different age levels.

00:31:36.657 --> 00:31:37.140
Brilliant.

00:31:37.140 --> 00:31:37.740
I love it.

00:31:37.740 --> 00:31:41.229
Now I understand how you're using that word.

00:31:41.229 --> 00:32:04.205
I'm just reading a Ursula Le Guin book and in this particular book she's talking about a society that's been colonised, based, occupied by an adjoining culture and the adjoining culture won't have anything to do with books or the original gods of this particular community.

00:32:04.205 --> 00:32:12.511
So they suppress it and try and force them to actually worship and live in the way they think they ought to worship and live.

00:32:12.511 --> 00:32:24.862
And just describing the damage that is done to the hearts of these people with this oppressive no, you've got to do it this way now.

00:32:25.544 --> 00:32:25.904
Right.

00:32:25.904 --> 00:32:29.994
Is it the one on their two planets and Tari's?

00:32:31.881 --> 00:32:36.515
Well, I've just recently read that one as well, which is called the Dispossessed.

00:32:36.976 --> 00:32:37.739
The Dispossessed.

00:32:37.739 --> 00:32:40.205
I just read that like four months ago.

00:32:40.616 --> 00:32:41.944
Phenomenal, phenomenal.

00:32:42.025 --> 00:32:43.714
Yeah, I read it years ago.

00:32:44.096 --> 00:32:50.596
This is one of her actually written for children, but honestly I mean it's pretty demanding, even as an adult.

00:32:50.596 --> 00:33:04.686
It's called Voices and it's exactly what you're talking about, and, of course, she, as she often does, has put it on another planet so that we can think about it with some distance on it.

00:33:07.230 --> 00:33:08.310
Right for sure.

00:33:08.691 --> 00:33:09.632
She does beautifully.

00:33:09.632 --> 00:33:14.499
So I love the use of the word colonisation in that context.

00:33:14.499 --> 00:33:22.281
It's like the psyche of the child has been colonised by an external invading force.

00:33:23.705 --> 00:33:23.926
Yes.

00:33:24.615 --> 00:33:37.259
That is, insisting that the child learns Well, like if an invading force comes in and says right now, you've got to learn this language, you can't speak English anymore, you don't have to speak, is a good, good, good, or whatever.

00:33:37.259 --> 00:33:41.796
It is that the exact way, and then you just can't so many.

00:33:41.796 --> 00:33:43.882
You just can't relate in the way you used to be.

00:33:43.882 --> 00:33:52.487
So I love that, but that's also quite a dramatic way of looking at it isn't it, it is very dramatic.

00:33:53.875 --> 00:33:54.477
Some people do.

00:33:54.477 --> 00:33:57.025
Some people find that quite disturbing as a way of looking at it.

00:33:58.095 --> 00:34:02.403
People have found it disturbing, but they also relate to it.

00:34:02.403 --> 00:34:10.027
They have personal experience with these processes of creative colonisation for sure.

00:34:10.027 --> 00:34:24.293
And what I believe is that because we as children have a deep and natural connection to our creative selves, we all share that.

00:34:24.293 --> 00:34:38.295
And then we have all shared, at different levels, of it being taken away or pushed down or seemingly lost.

00:34:38.295 --> 00:34:40.090
So that is dramatic.

00:34:40.518 --> 00:34:49.443
I think we all have a kind of creative pain of having lost that.

00:34:49.443 --> 00:34:55.802
Because it is so, it is innate.

00:34:55.802 --> 00:35:04.677
It is totally who we are as a physical, intellectual, emotional and spiritual being.

00:35:04.677 --> 00:35:12.208
It is in each one of those aspects of ourselves in a big way.

00:35:12.208 --> 00:35:35.365
So I chose that phrasing because it is intense and I'm unapologetic about it, because I feel so strongly about the wrong that it is and how it is possible to get it back.

00:35:35.365 --> 00:35:45.934
And I think it is a reflection of the state of the world right now, and the world has been sort of a mess for quite a while.

00:35:45.934 --> 00:36:02.018
So we are slowly making steps toward transcendence, I believe, and part of it is having a reconnection to our creativity.

00:36:03.101 --> 00:37:03.461
I actually agree with you on that point and just to say, as I'm the human being who happens to be in this conversation with you at the moment, just to say what the feeling is like on this side of engaging in that word in that way, and it feels like I'm being called to wake up more, like I'm being called to pay more attention to the possibility that some of my innate creativity may be currently not as accessible to me as it might be, and that it could be accessible, which is interesting, because what you're talking about, the notions you're talking about, are, in a way, familiar to me in the sense of I can really resonate to what you're talking about and I'm very interested in creativity and I've done a lot of work with creativity with myself and with clients as well.

00:37:03.461 --> 00:37:20.264
But something about the way that you're talking about it is inviting a new and additional piece of awareness in me, so I just felt it's quite good just to feed that back.

00:37:20.525 --> 00:37:22.791
You're welcome Because, as you say, it is intense.

00:37:22.791 --> 00:37:25.717
As long as we need it to be intense, don't we?

00:37:26.318 --> 00:37:26.679
We do.

00:37:27.320 --> 00:37:30.827
So sometimes that's helpful for us Right for sure, absolutely.

00:37:31.315 --> 00:38:04.161
And I really emphasize with people that to put it as a process to open up to, rather than thinking I'm going to buy a bunch of paint and I'm going to call up the Vatican and I'm going to say, do you got a ceiling, a new ceiling that I can paint, that's going way too far out of scale.

00:38:04.161 --> 00:38:12.487
So, because lots of people when I speak with them, they say, well, I don't want to start painting because I really love painting.

00:38:12.487 --> 00:38:21.889
I don't want to start painting because I don't want to think about getting into a gallery or selling or any of that.

00:38:21.889 --> 00:38:28.762
So that's way out of scale.

00:38:28.762 --> 00:38:38.804
So if you think back to when you're four or five years old and you love to paint, awesome, get a few paints, get a few watercolors.

00:38:38.804 --> 00:38:48.884
You can get just a little container of watercolors, get a couple brushes and some paper and play with it.

00:38:48.884 --> 00:39:40.284
But while you're playing, you may then remember oh, but I love poetry so much, and that may be the direction for dancing, and it may not be only in the arts, so to speak, but I believe the arts are where we experience the colonization the most intensely, and the term right after creative colonization is creative collapse, and that's the day or the series of events that people finally said whatever, forget about this, I'm never going to pick up a paintbrush, or I'm never going to open my mouth to sing, or I'm not going to dance anymore, and they stop.

00:39:40.364 --> 00:39:56.369
There may be one day, one experience, or it's just kind of like attrition Suddenly, when you're eight years old, I just don't have any time left in the day to play my guitar, so I'm not going to play it anymore.

00:39:56.369 --> 00:40:00.579
Eight year olds are that busy, it's insane.

00:40:00.579 --> 00:40:11.626
So people experience creative collapse and they don't get back to their creative selves until a series of things happen.

00:40:11.626 --> 00:40:24.248
A conversation like we're having, like people will hear, will spark that reconnection and after their creative void, I call it from the time they stop until the time they restart.

00:40:24.248 --> 00:40:32.661
Then they're restarting something and it needs to be gentle, just like nature.

00:40:33.465 --> 00:40:36.092
Nature most of the time is gentle and then sometimes nature is intense.

00:40:36.092 --> 00:40:41.391
You know there are hurricanes or tornadoes or earthquakes or volcanoes.

00:40:41.391 --> 00:40:56.835
Those are intense experiences, but most of the time nature is very, very gentle in the teaching and that again is the way to approach the creative and using that term in the big picture that covers everything.

00:40:56.835 --> 00:41:01.023
Nature is inside the creative.

00:41:01.023 --> 00:41:04.590
The cosmos is inside the creative.

00:41:04.590 --> 00:41:06.534
We are inside the creative.

00:41:06.534 --> 00:41:08.322
When we do art, we're inside the creative.

00:41:08.322 --> 00:41:10.311
When we do business, we're inside the creative.

00:41:10.311 --> 00:41:17.070
The creative encompasses everything and we're always here.

00:41:17.070 --> 00:41:22.780
We can't be outside of it and it can't be not inside of us.

00:41:22.780 --> 00:41:28.929
It's innate, it's everywhere.

00:41:30.351 --> 00:41:47.025
It's everywhere and what's interesting is that there's a term in physics, in quantum mechanics, that refers to this part of what they speculate exists.

00:41:47.025 --> 00:41:50.114
It doesn't have a very sexy name, but it's called the quantum foam.

00:41:50.114 --> 00:42:09.980
It's also called zero point energy, but it is think of the tiniest thing, think of something that is extremely tinier than an electron or a proton, and the quantum foam makes those look like our solar system.

00:42:09.980 --> 00:42:26.974
So quantum foam is astronomically tiny and they say that at that level there are particles that come into existence and out of existence trillions and trillions and trillions and trillions of times a second.

00:42:29.309 --> 00:42:29.469
Now.

00:42:30.797 --> 00:42:32.923
So literally, and that's everywhere.

00:42:32.923 --> 00:42:39.846
It's in our bodies, it's in the earth, it's in every piece of art, it's in empty space.

00:42:39.846 --> 00:42:55.637
Out in space you find a chunk of you know, one meter by one meter or one centimeter by one centimeter, and inside of that is the quantum foam coming into existence and going out of existence all the time.

00:42:55.637 --> 00:43:00.005
And to me that's raw, pure, creative creativity.

00:43:00.005 --> 00:43:18.666
It's the creative or whatever we else, and we can call it part of God, part of Goddess, whatever we speculate, part of spirit, whatever it's literally the fabric of our universe, is the creative.

00:43:20.014 --> 00:43:20.396
Wonderful.

00:43:20.396 --> 00:43:25.005
So our theme is how to restore our innate creativity.

00:43:25.005 --> 00:43:44.485
So someone's had the colonization and the collapse and the void, and you said a bit about kind of gently, you know, remembering to be gentle and remembering not to go and apply to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel right off the bat and so forth.

00:43:44.485 --> 00:43:52.355
Could you tell us a bit about how you help people to restore their innate creativity and get back to that?

00:43:52.655 --> 00:43:54.561
Sure, exactly, certainly.

00:43:54.561 --> 00:44:24.389
I think one of the largest parts of our process just being human is starting to know yourself, and for me and I didn't start until I was 40, so it was a long time coming I jotted down ideas on pieces of paper randomly in notebooks, and they weren't consistent, to say the least.

00:44:24.389 --> 00:44:32.842
Journaling is, I believe, one of the most remarkable ways to one get to know yourself.

00:44:32.842 --> 00:44:51.387
It's a place to be 100% honest, express everything that you can about who you are, who you think you are, who you want to be, putting that down on paper and not using a device.

00:44:51.387 --> 00:44:56.425
This is the device to use a pen and paper.

00:44:56.425 --> 00:44:58.742
I have my journal right here.

00:44:58.742 --> 00:45:19.445
So it is essential to, from my point of view, for someone to start to understand who they are, and also, if one of your objectives is to restore your creativity or to augment it, if you're already connected to it.

00:45:19.445 --> 00:45:28.206
Because I think, no matter who you are, there is something more that can be expressed.

00:45:29.835 --> 00:45:47.057
Michelangelo in my book, the greatest sculptor and painter, architect ever architect maybe not so much, but certainly painting, and certainly sculptor and painting, but he could.

00:45:47.057 --> 00:45:57.543
That's what he was striving to do is to touch on that energy and that space of going deeper, so to speak.

00:45:57.543 --> 00:46:00.842
In journaling you can do that.

00:46:00.842 --> 00:46:14.885
You can do that with yourself and you can do that with respect to reaching back into your inner self and touching the creative space that you knew as a child.

00:46:14.885 --> 00:46:28.344
And that takes time and it takes a quality of being gentle with yourself and you will know times when you're resisting and putting things off and you can journal about that.

00:46:28.344 --> 00:46:31.202
But then maybe push yourself a little bit more.

00:46:31.202 --> 00:46:35.965
I believe all of us know how to push ourselves.

00:46:35.965 --> 00:46:54.603
That's one of the things that Budo teaches you how to push yourself physically, of course, but there's a mental push and an emotional push and a spiritual push that someone who's inside that framework begins to understand if they stay with it.

00:46:54.603 --> 00:46:56.699
As it is with art.

00:46:56.699 --> 00:46:58.445
It's physically.

00:46:58.445 --> 00:47:06.838
You can physically push yourself intellectually, emotionally and spiritually in all of those things.

00:47:06.838 --> 00:47:14.608
You can do that with your journaling, and journaling is a fabulous teacher.

00:47:14.608 --> 00:47:26.862
That is, in a way, you communicating with yourself, but also, in a way, it's what I refer to the challenge of communicating with nature.

00:47:26.862 --> 00:47:32.119
There's that similar quality of the challenge of communicating with yourself.

00:47:32.119 --> 00:47:56.945
But journaling can be a way to begin to restore that creative connection, begin to reconnect with the person that you were when you were a child and totally natural in your process of play, using your imagination and using your creativity.

00:47:56.945 --> 00:47:58.981
So journaling is super important.

00:48:01.518 --> 00:48:13.487
Also, a practice of breathing is immensely important as a way to start to understand your physical body.

00:48:13.487 --> 00:48:21.454
And all of us breathe every day and often we don't give it much thought.

00:48:21.454 --> 00:48:27.780
But when you start to give it thought, it is, it can be.

00:48:27.780 --> 00:48:31.621
It doesn't necessarily have to be a meditation, but it is a sort of a meditation.

00:48:31.621 --> 00:48:36.001
So, doing some breathing exercises, you can come up with them yourself.

00:48:36.001 --> 00:48:43.965
There's thousands of videos out there of people teaching breathing techniques and exercises.

00:48:43.965 --> 00:48:47.603
Just stay simple, tune into breathing.

00:48:49.295 --> 00:48:52.764
Another part of beginning again back to nature.

00:48:52.764 --> 00:48:56.385
We started there get into nature.

00:48:56.385 --> 00:49:00.905
If you live in New York City, central Park is nature.

00:49:00.905 --> 00:49:08.045
It's surrounded by a metropolis but it is still a chunk of nature and get there.

00:49:08.045 --> 00:49:16.177
If you live in any city, there's always a park somewhere to get into nature.

00:49:16.177 --> 00:49:24.222
Spend, get out of town sometimes and get into some kind of nature and that will assist you.

00:49:24.876 --> 00:49:35.686
And what I teach is that there's an aspect I'll give you an example from, let's say, I'm working with a team of designers.

00:49:35.686 --> 00:49:38.302
They're working on a new widget.

00:49:38.302 --> 00:49:53.063
So I'll give them an assignment to get back into their creative qualities of being to go as a group with their journals to a jazz lounge.

00:49:53.063 --> 00:49:59.423
Listen to get together all 10 of you sit around a couple tables with your journals.

00:49:59.423 --> 00:50:01.179
Listen to the music chat.

00:50:01.179 --> 00:50:04.500
If you want, that's fine libations, whatever you want.

00:50:04.500 --> 00:50:28.039
But also have in mind the widget project and just let the two of them bump into each other and see what starts to happen in that intangible realm that music is coming to you at, with or in, and see what happens with the widget.

00:50:28.039 --> 00:50:32.481
Then the next month, go to a museum and the next month go to the one.

00:50:32.521 --> 00:50:53.025
I really like to give people is go and visit 10, not 10, four, that's a lot four buildings in your community that are architecturally significant or meaningful, at least important.

00:50:53.025 --> 00:51:06.605
Spend time outside, walk around the building, spend time inside, walk around as much as you can inside the building, but notice why it is significant and then jot that down.

00:51:06.605 --> 00:51:14.523
You know, meet for beers afterwards or lunch or whatever you might want to do, coffee and talk about that.

00:51:14.523 --> 00:51:15.827
Talk about what you noticed.

00:51:15.827 --> 00:51:25.525
Talk about the windows, the window structures, what each floor looked like, why did what was on the outside of the building and how was that used on the inside at all?

00:51:26.086 --> 00:51:32.349
All of these things about architecture that were usually not, unless you're an architect, you're not really paying attention to.

00:51:32.349 --> 00:51:37.396
But push yourself to pay attention to these other aspects of the experience.

00:51:37.396 --> 00:51:43.677
But also keep in mind the widget, because there's communication that's going to happen.

00:51:43.677 --> 00:51:57.349
Just like I said right off the bat, there's a communication from nature that we get all the time, that we may not know cognitively, but it is still.

00:51:57.349 --> 00:51:59.117
We're still receiving it.

00:51:59.117 --> 00:52:15.099
So, and the another part of the one of the months, like when I give this assignment, is to go out in nature to walk around and allow yourself, take your journal, have the communication, stroll.

00:52:15.099 --> 00:52:29.128
So those are the kind of some of the ways in which people can restart their creative relationship with themselves.

00:52:29.914 --> 00:52:41.961
It sounds very doable, absolutely it sounds like you're really holding that it it also sounds a bit like a rehabilitation.

00:52:41.961 --> 00:52:43.284
People have been traumatized.

00:52:43.284 --> 00:52:45.509
Yeah, level of creativity.

00:52:45.509 --> 00:53:00.862
Absolutely Before we started recording, I told you I've got this cat, I'm rehabilitating at the moment who who was fine as a kitten but was then, you know, abandoned and neglected and everyone was convinced this was a vicious, feral cat.

00:53:00.862 --> 00:53:10.217
You know, when you then you very, very gently give it, you know, the right kind of cat treats and so on it turns into a squishy bun of love.

00:53:10.719 --> 00:53:17.619
Yes, and that's that you basically describe the inner process of connecting to your creativity.

00:53:17.639 --> 00:53:18.260
Fantastic.

00:53:18.260 --> 00:53:19.864
So it's that easy so.

00:53:21.695 --> 00:53:25.023
Well, well, yes, it on, on part, it's easy.

00:53:25.023 --> 00:53:39.119
And then there's there's going to be challenges and bumps, and and when you're, when you're approaching it with your journal, you can, you can write about those bumps.

00:53:39.119 --> 00:53:41.536
Yes, why was that?

00:53:41.536 --> 00:53:46.186
Why was I so triggered by X, y and Z?

00:53:46.186 --> 00:53:47.597
Yeah, what was it?

00:53:47.597 --> 00:53:48.278
What was I?

00:53:48.278 --> 00:53:49.322
What was I feeling?

00:53:49.322 --> 00:53:51.572
What was I feeling right before?

00:53:51.773 --> 00:53:53.177
And not that this is easy.

00:53:53.177 --> 00:54:12.831
This is, this is part of the part of the most remarkable human both challenges and gifts is figuring out who we are and and and why we are, and what we're doing and where we want to go, all those things, and that in and of itself, is a creative process.

00:54:12.831 --> 00:54:13.755
Beautiful.

00:54:13.755 --> 00:54:15.458
Our life is our first art.

00:54:15.458 --> 00:54:18.063
It is, it is, it is our masterpiece.

00:54:18.063 --> 00:54:21.217
Our life is our masterpiece of creativity.

00:54:21.217 --> 00:54:44.516
And and once you, once you get, once you get that totally internalized in a way, for me it's it's re remembering that, it's rehabilitating it, yes, that that natural state of being, and not that that the things are going to be just like a snap of your finger, completely easy.

00:54:44.516 --> 00:54:46.355
I dislike that.

00:54:46.355 --> 00:54:52.137
If things are going that easily, then there's something fishy.

00:54:52.137 --> 00:54:54.943
Yeah, then you're not really doing very much, yeah, right.

00:54:55.105 --> 00:55:13.353
And I also love in the way you described it you're, you're sort of weaving together the person dipping within to connect with their own creativity and the person drinking in the nourishment of others, creativity like the jazz, music, the beautiful architecture, the beauty of nature.

00:55:13.353 --> 00:55:30.693
You're incorporating the two together Absolutely, to woven it together artfully, by the sounds of it, which, yes, I love, because otherwise there couldn't be a danger of somebody just journaling, you know, in a room, never going out, you know what creativity.

00:55:30.693 --> 00:55:31.757
Why is it not coming through?

00:55:32.117 --> 00:55:35.646
I'm not journaling enough I need to do for more hours, you know, or?

00:55:36.335 --> 00:55:42.097
just going to the jazz and just looking at the architecture and then just copy other people's creativity.

00:55:42.378 --> 00:55:44.764
Right, I think you're doing a wonderful service.

00:55:44.764 --> 00:55:45.907
Oh, thank you.

00:55:45.907 --> 00:55:48.920
Thank you, catherine, oh, thank you.

00:55:49.701 --> 00:56:24.768
So just to kind of shift the emphasis slightly, we, you know, we've mentioned that the world is in interesting times, say interesting times, and obviously there's a lot of people in leadership positions at the moment, and I'm including people who are simply trying to be better leaders in their own lives, as well as all the you know, the political and the spiritual and the Aikido teachers and all of the other people, and I like to think that most of these people are trying to be part of the solution and, if you imagine, some of those people are listening to us right now.

00:56:25.434 --> 00:56:29.971
So what would you like to say to those people right now?

00:56:29.971 --> 00:56:33.177
If you could just say whatever you want to say to those people?

00:56:35.280 --> 00:56:38.146
Great question, for whatever reason.

00:56:38.146 --> 00:57:01.659
The first thing I stopped taking yourself so seriously and in a way, reconnect with that, that quality of ourselves when we were young and connected to our play and our imagination and our creativity, and not to be not to, not to, not to.

00:57:01.659 --> 00:57:03.083
I don't want to.

00:57:03.083 --> 00:57:03.605
I don't.

00:57:03.605 --> 00:57:26.110
I don't want people to think that I'm I'm saying this frivolously, but I believe that there's a lot that gets in the way of how our world works that is wrapped up in in trauma.

00:57:26.110 --> 00:57:55.936
You know, decisions are made for from both individuals and their traumatic experiences, but also groups of people and their traumatic experiences, and it just gets and gender, within generations, within family dynamics of and I'm not saying giant traumas, but all the little traumas add up to kind of a big trauma.

00:57:55.936 --> 00:58:20.507
So so all of these traumas are are pushed out into our world in a way that that happens first, rather than us actually seeing the person or seeing how the person is thinking and feeling about a concept or a, an issue.

00:58:22.130 --> 00:58:45.438
I believe that often the traumas are out in front of a person we have plenty of people in our lives and at times we do that when we were inside some really challenging time and and that that precedes us, in this psychic envelope that is surrounding us.

00:58:45.438 --> 00:58:57.442
That trauma is often prickly, or or harsh, or scary, or aggressive or whatever it might be.

00:58:57.442 --> 00:59:03.996
I want the way the reason I said it for them not to take them.

00:59:03.996 --> 00:59:15.983
Maybe this is a better way to say it Stop taking your traumas so seriously and and strive to be who you actually are.

00:59:15.983 --> 00:59:35.606
Yeah, and then if people are are able to communicate better, able to know themselves better than it just follows that the world, a lot of the issues that are going on in the world, will simply evaporate.

00:59:35.967 --> 00:59:38.833
Yeah, yeah, beautiful.

00:59:38.833 --> 00:59:40.983
Thank you, wonderful, oh, you're welcome.

00:59:40.983 --> 00:59:41.806
You're welcome.

00:59:41.806 --> 00:59:44.376
So we're about to start running out of time.

00:59:44.376 --> 00:59:53.018
Has there been in this conversation that we've had today, has there been a favorite part of our conversation today, patrick?

00:59:54.380 --> 01:00:09.280
Well, I really liked how when you asked about that, how all this came together, Because I've thought of it, I've journaled about it.

01:00:09.280 --> 01:00:24.617

Ep 120: Patrick Williams ~ Creative Colonisation, Self-Discovery, and Restoring Our Innate Creativity

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