For gifted and otherwise neurodivergent adults, centering creative consciousness. Begins on January 19, 2025.
When we are children, our brains perceive the world as an extension of us, our dreams, our wishes, our wonder draw the world inside us. Perception is sensory and imaginal. We are not divided from it all. We’re a part of it. It shows us marvelous things like apples and a moon in the sky that is so beautiful we feel it belongs only to us. Until our neurology, motor skills, and education break us off from the imaginal world, we dwell in a realm of constant, unmitigated amazement. As we mature, we catch glimpses of this borderland. It even swallows us up in times of crises.
This form of knowing resonates with our spherical–as opposed to linear– experience of being. Our experiences hold three, four, and more layers of meaning. Words spin in us Dervish-style then break apart and reconstitute in the span of a second. If the topic isn’t interesting to us, listening in three or more dimensions wears us out. When the poet, Lawrence Ferlinghetti entitled this collection A Coney Island of the Mind, he wasn’t exaggerating. The phrase embodies our experience of the sensory world. Events unfold before us as they do to everybody. The difference lies in what happens next. For the normative person, they unfold into flatness, while for us, they unfold then launch into an Origami exhibit with cranes and ships and hang-gliders all emerging from a single piece of paper, and then whatever it makes comes to life. All of this happens to every sentence we hear, everything we see. It is why we find some things obvious when nobody else does.
The process of becoming ourselves and making room for all we are invites awareness and learning new ways of seeing and being. The process of unfolding is aided when we can lay down the restrictions we’ve internalized and clung to. This Poetic Reasoning group will move you into new ways of knowing yourself, your world, and your way. Eight weeks of coming unstuck from conventional paths to wholeness. This space is accepting, free, and built for beauty – that’s what the journey is all about. There’s room for all of your dimensions as we center imagination and development. Through this process you will see with new eyes and do so in a community of other outliers on journeys of their own.
This eight-week series elevates and centers the creative and imaginational dimensions of your gifted consciousness. Forget every rhyme scheme and iambic pentameter thumping your English teacher forced upon you. None of that is central to poetry’s curative properties now known and practiced in psychology and clinical medical practice. Poetic Reasoning invites you to develop skills of surrender and to open doors of self-discovery.
Participants will engage and practice Poetic Reasoning in a safe, supportive, and critique-free community. We will practice and open to the use of poetry as a tool of exploration. You will transcend your resistances and perfectionistic habits. Wider perspective, intuition, creativity, and freedom from the neuromajority’s constraints on thinking comprise just a few of the benefits. Meaning, awe, wonder, and delight are others.
The Facilitators
Laura Hope-Gill
Twenty years ago, Laura Hope-Gill deeply dove into Alchemy. Her methodology included dreams, scholarship, launching a poetry festival, writing 100 poems about trees in a weekend, reading sacred texts, Bible verses on random license plates, poems, things-strangers-said, websites, prodigious writing sessions, animals, colours, music, food, and eventually joy which has not subsided. She now distills all of it into a two-hour workshop. We have all heard by now that the universe is communicative. Alchemy is its language. Now the director of an MFA in Creative Writing, Storytelling, and Narrative Medicine program, she helps others engage in this direct experience with Nature wherein we learn to, in the words of Robert Frost, grab life by the throat.
Gordon Smith
Eclectic doesn’t begin to describe it. Gordon Smith’s counseling practice, now in its 25th year, has been an ongoing process of learning how best to help people become. Obstacles to development are ubiquitous – trauma from the micro to the catastrophic, circumstances of birth, limitations imposed by the world and internalized, and more. Since devoting the whole of his practice to intense, complex neurodivergents, Gordon has found that conventional tools are helpful to some degree. Beyond those he has learned that there are other, unconventional approaches that can move people from pathology paradigms to expansive, growth orientations. These creative approaches, long relegated to ‘unscientific’ status, are now being proven. Gordon intends to bring more of the expansive processes into the world of ‘mental health’.
