The Egyptian Plover gets its meals in the most precarious of places, picking juicing morsels from between the teeth of a crocodile. The plover is safe because the crocodile needs the bird to clean its teeth. The two creatures live in harmony, which is inherent in nature.
To thrive all living things must live congruently with their environment. This congruence is not just between different living things, it’s repeated within each entity. As an example of that, every human carries around trillions of symbiotic microbial cells that make up our microbiome. Each lives harmoniously within its own ecosystem. If that balance is lost so is the ability to function optimally. It’s the same when we don’t exist in harmony with society or the planet - problems arise.
Nature is the ultimate creative intelligence as evidenced by the evolutionary process. Nature is millions of years of refinement. Paul Stamets a brilliant mycologist has studied the miraculous world of mushrooms and Fungi. There is no better illustration of nature’s capacity to create solutions.
The role of fungi is to break down complex organic molecules and, after the 1989 Exxon Valdez ran aground spilling millions of tons of oil along the coast of Alaska, Stamets ingeniously found fungi capable of digesting the petrochemical waste[i].
Sometimes we forget that when we create, our creativity is nature’s intelligence in action. If we acknowledge this we open ourselves up to the truth that our creativity is derived collectively from a harmonious ensemble of body, mind, intuition, and spirit, but the problem is that our philosophy is against us.
We perceive the intellect as separate, at the top of the pile, with the body being there solely to service and transport the mind around. As a result, the body’s role in our creative dream team has largely become ignored, despite its potency. This same philosophy is responsible for a world where creativity is too often seen as a lesser capacity, a world where dance, music and the arts are looked down upon by the sciences, mathematics, languages and humanities.
This greatly underestimates the intelligence of both the body and nature and the need for harmony. We would do well to remember that the intelligence of our bodies was honed over millions of years whereas the intellect has developed over thousands of years. In comparison to the development of the body’s intelligence, the intellect is a mere infant.
Nature intended us to engage with our environment harmoniously, which means not just living sustainably but using all the elements of mind, body and spirit together. Unfortunately, we’ve lost many of the skills that allowed our ancestors to engage with nature and their environment through the innate wisdom of the body. Some wonderful discoveries were made in the Seventies that revealed some of that intelligence, with Kinesiology, Somatic therapies and Focusing to name just a few, but only recently have these been advanced to engage at the edges of the creative process. Embodied Creativity is an approach that specifically helps creatives to engage more completely in their creative process, by tapping into that innate wisdom of the body.
Embodied Creativity is particularly effective because the body is the doorway to the subconscious which is rocket fuel for the creative process and because it can operate free from interference from the intellect.
How does the wisdom of the body express itself?
The body’s intelligence is accessed through feelings. We tap into these every day and as creatives, we feel our response to what we create. However, by engaging in a more structured and focused way with our feelings we can elicit a far greater range of information than is currently harnessed. For example, we may instinctively know how we feel about a particular solution, but far more useful is to know why we feel this way, where we are holding back, why we are holding back and so on.
The role of the subconscious
New research has shown the importance of the subconscious in our ability to assess our ideas.[i] There is however a far greater role played by our unconscious mind in the creative processes[ii]. Our subconscious is constantly soaking up patterns without our conscious knowledge. Indeed the subconscious computes so many things that are outside of our conscious awareness, that if we don’t have access to this resource we limit our potential for powerful insight.
Creativity includes the ability to recognise and synthesize patterns a process which percolates up from our subconscious. It harbours our deepest desires and what drives us, which takes us back to nature and mushrooms.
For many years psychedelics have been used to access our creative imagination through the subconscious mind. Furthermore, there are those, like Terence McKenna, the renowned ethnobotanist, who believe that it was through the ingestion of magic mushrooms that mankind’s animal minds were opened to the possibility of articulated speech and imagination. If that is true then nature was the direct catalyst of all the creative skills we employ today.
The problem with the intellect
The intellect serves the ego and the ego is threatened by judgement, criticism and fear of failure. All these block creative flow. The intellect has learned to doubt itself, which again breaks the creative flow.
Our intellect is self-reassuring. It doesn’t like being undermined because implicit in that is the question: ‘If I got this wrong what else did I get wrong?’
The intellect enjoys certainty whereas creativity is about thinking out of the box and getting away from our comfort zones. Indeed it’s the intellect that builds the walls of the box and defines the comfort zone that constrains the creative process. It doesn’t like to make the leaps that are inherent in great creativity.
The intellect likes to stay in the safe zone, for fear of putting its logic at risk. The body has none of these problems. We shouldn’t be trying to think out of the box we should be feeling out of the box, or better still just feeling, where there is no box at all.
The aha moment
The aha moment is what creatives work for. The coming together of all the links in the chain of an idea. We feel it as one whole piece but it’s the subconscious that brings everything together and fills in the gaps. The aha moment is the feeling of completeness we get when the solution comes together. It’s a step in the right direction but must be rationalized and referenced against the creative brief and creative purpose. The body plays an important role in this assessment (why would you want to judge your creative baby from your intellect which has learned to doubt itself?).
I have been working with the body’s innate intelligence for ten years and it was my own aha moment that led to the realization of how valuable the body can be in the creative process. It is so much easier to work with than the intellect because it is not fearful. All we have to do is learn to tap into the resource that our ancestors took for granted and nature spent millions of years refining.
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