Age of Intuition Suite
Magnum Opus
Sunday, June 22, 2025 from 1pm – 3pm Eastern Time
“At first, you won’t believe. Next you will be confused. And then you will be astonished.”
-Zohar, The Book of Splendor
Magnum Opus
The Magnum Opus is a creative consciousness exercise that centers imaginational and poetic reasoning. Comprised of seven states, the Opus symbolically moves you, revealing through poetry. You will create seven poems in one hour. You will return to this mundane realm astonished, mystified, expanded, and a little bit healed up. Creative consciousness renews us.
More than an event, creativity and growth are a process and a realm. They have a geography. They have texture. They have a gravitational field and magnetism. They have language and song. They have ancestors. They call us to transcend systems of oppression that we have lived within and acted within. Creativity and growth open their arms, nurture, and demand.
Magnum Opus invites us to discover, hear, engage, and integrate this vast, mysterious, frightening, impossible-to-ignore landscape that is at once inside and separate from our “real life.”
This exercise is a door to growth and a window into the scope and scale of what’s available when we open creatively to infinite resources. Read on for more.
How it works
Forget every colonial 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. Magnum Opus calls to develop skills of surrendering to safety and allowing for discovery.
Models requiring us to adhere to the paths of linear thinking, sensible emotion, and organized interpretation of sensations forget our creative minds and our evolutionary lineage. We’re meaning-making animals, and our ability to utilize this creativity to grow and transform is the under-exercised muscle of contemporary, conventional, pathology-based personal growth and development paradigms. Using a process as old as creative consciousness adn rooted in neurodiversity and collective freedom, the Magnum Opus exercise allows participants to step outside consensus reality by stepping into ourselves.
Magnum Opus is an active collaboration between Laura Hope-Gill and Gordon Smith
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.
“I get the impression that in the Western world it isn’t so easy to go to the other side; you have to go through some trials to get to the other world. But, in Japan, if you want to go there, you go there. So, in my stories, if you go down to the bottom of a well, there’s another world. And you can’t necessarily tell the difference between this side and the other side.” – Murakami
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. Blocks to becoming are ubiquitous – trauma from the micro to the catastrophic, genetic differences, 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 subordinate status by a Eurocentric mental health framework that pathologized emotion and imagination, are now proven by scientific method, confirming their place in our development journeys. Gordon intends to bring more of the expansive processes into the world of ‘mental health’.
