VISIONING IS LIKE GROWING A PLANT FROM SEED TO FLOWER

GROWING A VISION - We are Gardeners of our Soul Purpose

Visioning is a progressive deepening of imagination, using our subtle, intuitive sense of our life's purpose and developing it into actual reality.  We follow the cycle of growth demonstrated by Mother Nature. Here is a diagram following the growth of the seed (your heart inspiration) into a vision, then a plan, then an action with creative reverie, and finally another seed.  Each season brings a new development in nature, so we provide new climate of focus, emotional nurture and protection, clarification and testing for our Seed Vision:

VISIONING IS A PROGRESSIVE DEEPENING OF IMAGINATION

We start by grasping a heart-felt desire for change, for perhaps harmony and beauty in the world, for a world of fairness, compassion and enriching friendships.  We then look at how to incubate this imaginative, optimistic fantasy, because all life is a dream.  All dreams can become our reality if we give them the power of our attention and desire for good, true outcomes.

'If you can dream it you can do it.'  Walk Disney

 

PERSONAL AND PLANETARY TRANSFORMATION WORKSHOPS

Each workshop has clear guidelines of developing the tools for learning to 'love, understand and serve' through expressive arts activities.

The first workshop has been to journal our inner heart-felt vision and make a collage, journal to understand the images and direction of vision unfoldment in our lives. The workshops include mandala, meditation, vision collage, Creative Journal Expressive Arts and other playful activities.

BUILDING A VISION GUARDIAN  The second workshop is to build our 'promise' to that living vision in our hearts, to nurture and protect it - involves transforming the Inner Critic into a Vision Guardian image/animal totem or whatever we feel will help remind us; it is a special process that can involve maskwork, sandplay for family healing, and other activities. The important thing is that the 'critic voice' is essential as a tester for this next stage of creation or emotional focus of commitment.

BUILDING A DREAM TEAM  The third workshop (date of 28th Jan) is understanding how to communicate our vision in a 'dream team' or circle of friends, and this involves special skills of listening, mirroring with humour and love from our own self reflections, and understanding the role of the 'philosopher fool'. To do this, we need our personal Inner Visionary Child and its Guardian well grounded. This last stage of preparing a vision may last over two days of improvisation and creative journal, story skills, drum and movement: depends on how many people have already done the first two, so that we have enough participants to afford a venue for space.

THE INNER PHILOSOPHER FOOL In order to understand our role in bringing vision to our world, we look at communication skills that mirror and express our vision and wisdom. We build a persona which is a version of the Philosopher Fool (fool at heart) - fool for love, the sacred tradition of the transformed personal emotions into tools for the service of love.  Activities involve improvisation of personal responses to create humour and release.  Storytelling skills including including creative listening, are necessary for building a dream team of trusted non-judgemental friends who support your Visioning and forgiving love.

Our Inner 'Philosopher Fool' is that storyteller who is the observer of our own personality, and creates a mirror of truth of love through reflecting all it sees, inner and outer. We need to keep a private journal to encode our self reflection skills. We also need to know how to create a sacred space for spiritual insights to grow and be mirrored lovingly. The Wheel of Life model, and creative psychological terms referring to the progressive unfoldment of our human potential, and which are understandable and artistic/creative,terms, it looks possible to develop an expressive arts programme with the ‘subtle energy’ interpretations. 

Visioning as daily experience

VISIONING IS A DAILY EXPERIENCE

We are imaginative thinkers, with many layers of sensation, thinking and feeling. Many can only truly think and feel when they are doing something.  Others have to speak and interact. Others stay still and dream.

In the centre of our thinking, doing and feeling is our Soul, our true Self becoming clothed in deep, insightful experience.

 

'Ten Steps to Livining the LIfe of your Dreams'

by Lucia Capacchione, Ph.D.

"Since it is the creative self who works the magic and makes the dream a reality, the Visionary’s task is to turn the design over to this higher power within."

-- Lucia Capacchione

 

[FINDING your heart's desire, an inspiration or your life's purpose.

The winter time of deep searching in your soul, for what is most meaningful at this time.]

Step 1: Make a Wish

The Visionary begins by deciding to explore new possibilities in some area of life, choosing a theme on which to focus. This is like the designer’s first step of getting an idea. The first step of Visioning poses the question: What do I want? What is my true heart’s desire? It might be: "A new career direction," or "Finding a place to live," or Finding a mate," or "Making more money," or "Getting healthier," or "Making a film." Some Visionaries choose a broader playing field, such as, "A projection of the year ahead," or "What areas of my life need attention?" or "What does a balance between professional and personal life look life?" Other Visionaries want to resolve a specific problem or situation and do a "before" and "after" collage titled "How it looks now" and "How I’d like it to look."

[NURTURING your Vision, seeking to give it words and images.  Make it an obsession, focus on it carefully and create an image to represent your subtle intuitive sense.  MAKE a pile of draft images and words.]

 

Step 2: Search for Images and Words

This is the designer’s research phase. The task here is to gather pictures, captions, and phrases from magazines, newspapers, catalogues, or other visual sources. One’s personal collection of snapshots, postcards, or greeting cards can also be used. In this phase, the Visionary is tearing, cutting, amassing a heart’s-desire image bank. The emphasis is on what experience she wants to create in her life rather than simply picturing stuff to be acquired. It is a way of exploring quality of life, living by choice instead of default. The only rule during the research phase is to collect photos and phrases that depict one’s deepest wishes. The mantra is: Grab what grabs you. Dreaming is in, practicality is out. This is about going for it, the sky’s the limit. This is a time to be inclusive and expand one’s horizons, keeping an open mind while gathering as many relevant images and words as possible... If other great pictures surface that are unrelated to the theme, they are set aside in a separate file to be used in other collages.

 

[START A ROUGH DESIGN BY ASKING YOURSELF how true is it to my intuition?]

Step 3: Focus on the Vision

In the design process, this is when the research is connected more specifically to the designer’s idea or problem to be solved. Here the Visionary sorts through the mass of torn or cut-out raw material that has been gathered. The question is asked of each image, word, or phrase: Does this express my innermost wishes, my fondest dreams? If it relates to the theme it’s in. If not, it’s out or put in the "save" file for possible use in the future. This phase is about discrimination, selectivity, choice-making, but always from the heart.

[ALLOW THE DESIGN TO BUILD by intuitively arranging and changing the way the images lie on the page.]

Step 4: Compose the Design

Visioning collage-making is a new language, a language of symbols and images, of color and words blended together to form a unique montage of creative possibilities. Like any designer assembling the elements of a design, the Visionary starts building the visible expression of her dreams by putting the pieces together, almost as if assembling a jigsaw puzzle. Laying the pictures out on the art paper, she tentatively arranges them in relationships to each other. Mixing and matching, she tries ideas out for size and placement, using a sixth sense about how to accurately portray the dream. There is no right way to do it, only the particular Visionary’s way. This is the time to be completely authentic and original, true to oneself and one’s vision. It is at this point that a great deal of inner doubt often arises, leading us to the next step.

[GO BACK AND FORTH IN AND OUT OF CHAOS and ADDRESS THE INNER CRITIC, while the intuitive message of your heart gets clearer.]

Step 5: Explore and Find Order in Creative Chaos

Chaos is a natural part of any creative or design process. If it doesn’t happen, it usually means that nothing new is being learned, nothing original is being created. This step isn’t one that is done consciously or by choice. Something within the Visionary just starts questioning the whole enterprise. For designers, this often occurs during the mix-and-match phase when mock-ups are being created. For the Visionary, it’s getting closer to the time when pictures will be glued down, a commitment will be made, the collage will be made permanent. The self talk usually starts with questions like, "Why am I doing this? Or statements like, "I don’t know how to do this" (as if there were a set way such collages should look, which there isn’t). Perhaps an inner art critic starts in: "This is ugly and stupid. People will really laugh when they see this stuff." Worse yet, is the voice that says the entire activity is a waste of time. "This wish will never come true. This is all just pie-in-the-sky dreaming. You’re doomed to disappointment." This phase holds the biggest challenge but also the greatest learning. It is where the leap forward takes place and where the Visionary is tested for faith in the dream and courage to express it. This is the time for perseverance in the face of self-doubt. The warring factions in the mind are dealt with through journal work.

[COMMIT TO A DESIGN WITH THE WORDS, focusing your emotions to the emerging message of your heart and soul.]

Step 6: Create the Collage

After the mock-up stage, a designer must develop his design with an eye toward the end product. In Visioning, this is the step of integration, of putting all the pieces together on the paper to create a Vision collage. Gradually, the images and words that speak for the dream are being committed to paper and glued down for good. It is an experience of surrender to some inner knowing, to the creative self (which has a vision) and the creative conscience (which speaks from the heart). By combining photos and phrases in new ways, new connections are made and personal meaning is revealed.

[SURRENDER TO A HIGH GUIDANCE and journal your inituitive feelings about the collage.]

Step 7: Articulate the Vision

As visual as the design process is, eventually the designer must translate his design and communicate it in words to others. Drawings, blueprints, diagrams must be explained to production specialists, manufacturers, and builders. In Visioning, it isn’t quite enough to simply make a collage. It is the act of gaining deeper insight. Looking at these picture/word collages after they are completed is like reading poetry or deciphering symbols. We see all kinds of things we didn’t notice while we were in the heat of creative chaos. The first part of articulation is to quietly sit and contemplate the collage. What does it say? What surprises does it hold? What is the resistance, if any, to taking this Vision collage seriously and believing that it will come true? One question to be avoided is, "How am I going to make this dream happen?" Visionaries are asked to relax and surrender to a higher order of creativity and allow the dream to materialize rather than force it. Anxiety and fear only block energy. Following the guided contemplation, journal-writing activities are used for more deeply exploring meaning in the pictures and phrases. As the visual right brain has its say (in art) and the verbal left brain gets to talk (through the written word), both hemispheres of the brain are activated and integrated.

[LET YOUR IMAGES SPEAK and tell you what lessons they have for you. Ask how you can help their message become clear.]

Step 8: Reinforce the Dream

It is now time for the production process. Since it is the creative self who works the magic and makes the dream a reality, the Visionary’s task is to turn the design over to this higher power within. The artwork that results from collage-making is a visual affirmation. As with verbal affirmations, which are positive self-talk messages, the Vision collage establishes and reinforces a desired goal or experience. The Visionary exercises her visual right brain (which sees the pictures) by using the visual affirmations on a daily basis. By looking at the collage repeatedly, the images are reinforced in the imagination and memory. Practicing the art and science of building wishes and dreams in the world of physical reality develops "practical imagination." 
 

The clearer the collage image, the more receptive we can be when it shows up in real life. The very concreteness of the photo collage makes it the perfect vehicle for reinforcing—through the eyes—the inner vision of the heart. We take it out of the realm of imagination and bring it down to earth. Before long, as if by magic, the Visionary’s dream appears in three dimensions. There may still be some final hurdles, however, and that’s where we enter the next step.

CREATING SACRED SPACE

CREATING SACRED SPACE FOR VISIONING for 2014

The most sacred space is that of your inner self, the Creative Self, watching and mediating all experiences, and it is possible to allow its dreams and visions of a life you would love to live.     Following Lucia Capacchione's Ten Steps to Living the Life of your Dreams, CLIA Coaching offers workshops where we make pictures of our heartfelt wishes for the future around a central mandala with candles.  This way a sacred space is created in which we project our dream images and offer our goals to the good of the whole.  Here are some pictures of small groups making photo montage vision collages, bringing into focus their individual Creative Self, and celebrating a Rebirth of their hope and commitments for their personal future.

SEE MY VIDEO introducing Visioning(R): http://youtu.be/oNj3pRANCHII.

THE MANDALA
This is an ancient design around which early cultures created systems of spiritual teaching such as the zodiac, the Alchemical Wheel and the Celtic Wheel of Life around which the seasons were symbolised and the growth of the seed plant depicted as a guide for inner creative initiation.

VISIONING ROUND THE WHEEL OF LIFE

Making collages for visioning can follow the creative stages of materialisation of your dream as the ancient wisdom tradition taught:
 
North/conception and rebirth; NE/ nurture and dedication;  East/challenge and promise; SE/support and consolidation; South/planning and protection; SW/pruning and fine tuning; West/decision, action; NW/surrender and dissolving the old plan ready to plant a new seed vision.

Here is an image of the collages I did last summer.  Notice that each direction has a large collage representing the solstices and equinox visioning, in between the small images represent the moon festivals of reflection and transition.  See the candle at the centre representing my Inner Sage.

Spiritual expressive arts follow the seasons, working with the Inner Parent (facets are Nurturing, Protection and Challenge) and the Inner Child (facets are Magical Child, Loving Child, Assertive Child).

The Inner Sage is created by taking conscious creative responsibility for these personae.  One of the most playful and effective ways of creating the Sage is through the Visioning(R) process and creating the Sacred Mandala/Wheel of Life with candles and symbols of the seasons, elements (earth, air, fire and water) and nature.

Find me on Facebook, or email: creativeliteracy@gmail.com for more information about making soul collages, sacred site art or Visioning(R).

We create poetry and mandala in Dartmoor's sacred centre: Wistmans Wood. Here is a sacred site collage with stone balancing sculptures from Michael Loxton:

Sacred Site collage of the Isle of Man - green lanes of Man were ritual processional routes across the whole island, linking and energising the communities, burial mounds, hermit cells and stone circles. [sculpture by a local artist represents the spirit of Man, Manannan, benevolently watching over the creative evolution of life on the island].

Learn more about Sacred Journeys at the Gatekeeper Trust website: www.gatekeeper.org.uk go to the events page.

VISIONING

VISIONING

Visioning is a fun way of recreating your life's dreams and plans. It uses verbal and nonverbal self expression: collage, journal, clay, sandplay, meditation, mandala, rhythm and bodywork. IF YOU HAVE A DREAM BEGIN IT NOW, BOLDNESS HAS GENIUS ....

You get to give your life's dream its first draft, using photo montage and Creative Journal activities which activate your brain's spiritual centres. Rewiring your grey matter is now officially of scientific interest, with many publications explaining how mindfulness - creative reveries - actually activates, reconnects and refurbishes the network of cells between your two ears. A whole new synthesised world view emerges, full of personal insights into your own life's journey.

We are all creative, scientists tell us, constructing our world view, and bringing our life into being through consensus and re-invention. Nothing stays still, we are dreamers making the best out of a challenging set of circumstances, but people have come through before us. Walt Disney said: 'If you can dream it, you can do it.' Based on this simple creative philosophy, we can overcome all the negativity in the universe, it is just a matter of starting somewhere.

So start here, for workshops: http://www.creativeliteracy.co.uk/

Science of Visioning

THE SCIENCE OF VISIONING
http://www.creativeliteracy.co.uk/

BRAIN NEUROSCIENCE tells us that the brain is infinitely plastic, and that the mind can be instrumental in activating neural circuitry which makes new connections between brain functions. With increased efficiency, the immune system is strengthened to overcome disease, and the ‘hard wiring’ for happiness is more readily available. Our next evolutionary leap is consciously to manage the inner circuitry of positive emotion and live up to our potential by creating a fuller, richer life style.

VISION JOURNAL provides all the support and practice you need to train your two hemispheres to interconnect more efficiently. In order to ‘re-wire’ the brain in an integral way, many materials can be used for Visioning, according to your interests and ideas. Dr Lucia Capacchione’s unique Visioning® approach uses Creative Journal involving both the dominant and non dominant hands, which completes the activation process for the WHOLE BRAIN.

CLIA COACHING offers improvisational activities integrated with poetry, rhythm, song, improvisation and dance, which help bring neural integration to the energy systems of the body.

www.creativeliteracy.co.uk

e: creativeliteracy@gmail.com

BRAIN TRAINING

BRAIN TRAINING -

EXPANDED CONSCIOUSNESS and all that…

We are moving into a new era where the mystic, Buddhist, and others paths of self development are being fully explained in current neurochemistry research. Paying attention, mindfulness, compassion and creative reverie are all experiences we have had. Now brain research suggests that if we could use these skills more often, our lives might change out of all recognition. We might be capable of anything: self healing, super powers of concentration and performance, heightened awareness, intuitive processing, effective clarity of vision, and unbounded optimism.

The following skills have been identified as what we should be able to do. Since the 1980’s I have been training people on evening courses on Parapsychology, Skills of Storytelling and Improvisation, and workshops on Healing Drum, Play and Creative Journal, how to develop attention, body awareness, and energy management. It is my view that once two or three can use them collaboratively, mutually reinforcing each other, there will be nothing that cannot be sorted in this world…. The world WILL be our oyster!

Now, PAY ATTENTION carefully to these, which I know from my own experience is what is possible:

(adapted from Living the Field teleseminar on Brain Training)

By following the link at the end of the blog, you could begin discovering…

• How to begin to see like a native, up close and in greater detail - and to observe hidden connections so that it is viewed as unity of interlocking parts.
• How to allow into our consciousness, the flow of all information coming from our environment, paying greater attention to detail and subtle connection.

or help you:
• To know the difference between being a 'lumper' (‘knee jerk’ thinker) and a 'splitter' (analytical thinker), how to learn to perceive 'pieces' of information, and to access lower levels of raw somatic/intuitive information.
• To consciously tune into information received intuitively. With the need for greater introspection and problem-solving, the modern brain has developed a dominant frontal lobe, thus marginalising intuitive, ‘holistic’ ways of thinking.
• You avoid ‘cognitive overlay’, where you see a portion of something and, in a sense, 'fill in' the conceptual details to produce a whole and become blind to the details of it.

…how to learn:
• Ways of attending to each tiny, separate piece of sound, sight and smell in order to develop extreme perception.
• Techniques that 'turn off' the overly analytical neocortex and bolster our own innate ability to consciously become aware of this intuitive raw data information flow. The two types of information flow -- 'low-road' unconscious information to the amygdala, and conscious 'high road' cognitive information to the neo-cortex, and how to begin to tap into this constant latent information flow.
• How to avoid 'verbal overshadowing' in the inner voice, which mimics ‘best models’ or ‘right answers’, and to encourage yourself to think in pictures, rather than words, so as to get more of the nuances of meaning and insights.
• The power of the 'seeking' mode of your brain and why a 'love of the hunt' heightens your perception and intuitive awareness.
• What to practice in order to develop your ability to receive information from many levels.
• How to become aware of -- and focus on -- the information that you are constantly and unconsciously sending out to the world.
• How and when to listen to gut hunches, no matter how irrational.

These are all skills that we train our brain to use naturally through mindfulness, relaxation, and expressive arts, particularly when integrated with Creative Journal. Once we know how to train our Inner Voice to play with images as well as words, we consolidate our ever attebtuve and creative ‘overviewing self’. The techniques taught in Lucia Capacchione’s CJEA – Creative Journal Expressive Arts – aim to balance the two predominant brain functions: rationality and intuition. Using both right and left hands, a dialogue is set up between different personae in the psyche, as if writing a script in the journal. The result is electric, filling a participant with a sense of wonder, joy and release: ‘I didn’t know it was possible, but now I have much more energy than before. This is amazing work, I have made so many new insights.’ writes a sufferer of ME.

The Facts: The explanation is simple: brain research has now confirmed that with extended awareness, focus and attention, the brain regenerates its cells to become richly interconnected and highly efficient. My experience is that CJEA generates a ‘creative reverie’ that channels information from the intuitive sixth sense so that I find solutions for problems popping up out of nowhere. Activities used in coaching sessions involve both right and left hands, accessing the right and left hemispheres, thus rewiring and thickening the neural bridge between (the corpus callosum). This balances our thinking and feeling, and integrates information from the somatic body.

Never need we be in such conflict with our inner selves that it makes us ill, because that’s OK, research (Candace Pert ‘Molecules of Emotion’) indicates that resolving emotional distress makes us well again. By strengthening our ‘inner witness’ or aware self this way, the brain releases beneficial chemicals into the immune system, thus reconditioning our body and brain from inside out. Our potential for self healing may be limitless – just think, pay attention to that thought. There is nothing complicated about the solution: by simply reflecting on and paying attention to our thoughts and feelings, we begin to change our brains, learn new habits that reduces stress, increase our resourcefulness, ease emotional distress, and spontaneously bring about an effortless, flexible, creative lifestyle on a daily basis. Happiness takes on a new meaning, as creative fulfilment becomes the norm.

My question is: Does it take just a teleseminar to teach you how to train your brain? Maybe you can’t be bothered with journaling, bu how do you keep brain training going so that you get its benefit every day of your life, and what support do you need to make the changes you wish to make in your life?

June 14, 2010
Charlotte Yonge, PhD, Certified CJEA Facilitator and Coach
Workshops in Expressive Arts and Journaling; Coaching through Expressive Arts
www.creativeliteracy.co.uk

Our Quantum Brain

In my last blog I talked about the 'knowing field' and the subject makes me buz with excitement. It is tapping that field which connects us to distant memories and information from the environment and the 'heart brain'. So now we have a head brain and a heart brain, both capable of synchronising to produce super performance, super health, super human endurance, etc.

As our bodies are full of nerve cells and neuropeptides they are constantly creating memory traces throughout the bodymind. We are one big holographic memory bank. Not only that, the brain can focus the 'knowing field' in the space around us and 'collapse' the waves of light and information into focused form - thought forms - literally capturing the world about us and simulating it.

Scienitists discovered an area in the brain where the 'mirror' neurone's are active recreating our experience into replicas, so that we develop empathic imagination for life outside our body (including people's actions, thoughts and feelings)and and internal model of all the information coming from inside the body.

HOW DO WE BUILD UP THIS POWERFUL TOOL?
Focusing the brain is simply concentration, or paying attention on one thing at a time. In Buddhist tradition this is called 'mindfulness' and exercises are now being offered to psychotherpeutic patients who are anxious and depressed. Scientists can now measure how neurones develop thicker myelin sheaths when concentration skills are developed. Not only that, neuron stem cells are triggered to differentiate into nerve cells, existing nerves begin to make branches to connect with other nerves, and overall the brain connections thicken. This results in better communication between different parts of our inner experience, especially the left hemisphere rational skills and the right hemisphere emotions.

VISIT MY WEBSITE FOR MORE INFORMATION ABOUT EXPRESSIVE ARTS AND MINDFULNESS, SIMPLE FUN TOOLS FOR BUILDING BRAIN POWER.

To your superhuman emergence!

Charlotte

www.creativeliteracy.co.uk