Age of Intuition Suite
Gifted Trauma Alchemy
This group will be held weekly on Sundays – February 8, 2026 through March 15, 2026 from 1 – 3pm Eastern Time. It is entirely online via Zoom. Maximum number of participants is nine.
$305 for the series. $228.75 Equity Rate option for BIPOC. (I’m still figuring out how to get both options displayed, so please reach out to me directly to receive the Equity Rate payment link)
Summary – The Alchemy – The Science – The imaginal realms – More Alchemy – The Curriculum – The Facilitators
Gifted Trauma Alchemy
Your giftedness is a neurotype, a way of being, a consciousness that encompasses all that you are. When that simple truth is negated again and again by people and systems, we gifted people can develop distorted self-concepts and internalized shame for being who we are. We can contort, camouflage, shrink, and desperately try to conform our expression in order to receive approval, acceptance, connection, and love. The aggregate of this rejection by a thousand cuts is at the heart of gifted trauma.
Enter Narrative Medicine and the wild reaches of creativity. Gifted Trauma Alchemy is a six-week experience designed to elevate and celebrate your creative consciousness. Through this process, you will see yourself with new eyes and begin to unwind all the damage done. If you’ve been writing for sixty years or you’ve never done any creative writing at all, Gifted Trauma Alchemy is an unconventional avenue to gifted personal development.
You will write from your center and find the incalculable number of narratives that emerge from it. Gifted Trauma Alchemy is an application of narrative medicine coupled with the older alchemical wisdom of ancient traditions. It will unlock deep truths and awake you to new possibilities inherent in living.
Together in community with other intense, complex outliers, you’ll have the opportunity to utilize your creativity to rewrite your perfectionism, loneliness, and chronic stress. On the other side is an iteration of you in fuller expression – more ease, more freedom to be seen and to feel safer doing so.
Participants will engage and practice Gifted Trauma Alchemy in a safe, supportive, decolonizing, and critique-free community. We will practice and open to the use of creative writing as a tool of exploration of all of the facets of who you are. Wider perspective, intuition, creativity, and freedom are available. Meaning, awe, wonder, and delight are there too.
You are welcome here.
The Alchemy
These gifted bodyminds in which we dwell seek a coherent experience of living – to have our internal experience harmonize with external experience. We are sensitive, intense, and complex. We’re outliers among our fellow humans. And, like everyone, we’re seeking secure, safe, loving attachments. We’re hungry for knowledge and experience. We long to express ourselves fully and in resonance with the ways we perceive.
When our ways of seeing and being are rejected and dismissed over and over and over again, when we don’t have the mirroring and encouragement we need to step into our gifted experience, then internalized fear and shame can take root. This internalization can lead to masking, shrinking, contorting ourselves in the pursuit of connection and acceptance.
Gifted Trauma Alchemy steps outside the conventional models into creative consciousness, where our imagination can open panoplies of perspectives. In a critique-free community we step together toward giving ourselves a place in the ecology of things.
Over the course of six weeks we’ll go through a process of transmutation. You’ll receive and give yourselves permission to explore and express without the inner censors and inner editors inhibiting you. The group is a safe place to test becoming amidst acceptance. You’ll be surprised at your creative mind’s vast subconscious operations. You’ll come to the understanding that there’s more of you, more of the world, more possibilities inherent in living. You may experience disintegrations of old identities, adaptations, self-concepts, and ways of knowing the world. You’ll feel the embodiment of new perspectives beginning to integrate. At the end, you may find a new wholeness, felt-sense integrity, and a bigger experience of living.
The imaginal realms
John O’Donahue, the Irish poet, writes of thin spaces. Thin spaces are places where the veil between the sensory and imaginal world is very thin. In such places, a person can experience epiphany. It can be a feeling of more-ness in the moment. It can be a wave of sorrow. The encounter can take limitless numbers of forms, changing us, often forever. Some thin spaces are quite pronounced and shared across a culture or two. Some are deeply personal only for us. We can return to such places and re-enter what world we opened. We can just as likely return and feel nothing extraordinary at all.
Gifted Trauma Alchemy
This course is called Gifted Trauma Alchemy because this process accepts all of who we are and through a process transforms us into a more refined, intentional, unencumbered iteration of ourselves. Our gifted meta-consciousness gives us the opportunity to dive into perspective-taking with an enormous complexity and depth. This course is made for gifted people, so there is space for all of who you are, all of the perspectives and complexities.
The imaginal world tends to evade prediction. If we could predict it and map it, we would analyze it and limit it by accident. It knows this about its counterpart in the analytical brain, here to help us navigate, logic, and stay safe.
The Curriculum
At the outset, you’ll receive information about how the group operates to create safety and freedom. There’s nothing you need to do to prepare other than bring your preferred pen and notebook. Laura and I are both Moleskine folks.
Each week, you’ll be invited into exercises designed to put perfectionism, self-censorship, self-editing, and self-criticism into the back seat of the car while creative consciousness take the wheel.
Sometimes in the large group (maximum 10 participants) and sometimes in smaller breakout rooms, we’ll all be journeying toward new perspectives together. You will be invited to share your creations if you so choose. There will be no pressure to share anything you’d rather keep more private.
The dynamic creative charge builds week after week. Past participants in our creative consciousness groups have said:
“The focus was on process not product, and the exercises were brilliantly devised to take the mind off “is it any good?”, and push towards “where did THAT come from?”. I cannot recommend this kind of writing highly enough – whether you want to write for others or just as an archaeology expedition into everything you hold inside you and beyond.” – Leonie R.
“I’ve learned that the page by itself has its own agenda. I’ve learned that the melting pot of other minds in other rooms can move my stories into other dimensions simply by sharing designated time and space to open to the creative. I’ve learned that the newest science is just catching up with ancient wisdom. I’ve learned why my younger self felt grounded with a pen in my hand, & why when I felt adrift as an adult pulled in complex directions, I put a heavy journal on my lap and felt the freedom of infinite space. I’ve felt the poignant brush with being met & understood by other souls in bodies that exist both inside and outside linear time.” – Chris M.
Our Emotions
As gifted/neurodivergent people, we feel our emotions differently – more intensely, more immersively. For us, emotion is far from a mere b-side to logic. For us, emotion is a way of knowing that acts as compass and guard. Intuition in us is a force. It makes assessments our bodies follow without first checking in with the brain. We do. What we do, we feel. What we feel, we do.
This power of suprasensory knowing is in the same consciousness with analysis, pattern recognition, systems awareness, and deep well of conscientiousness. Our emotions and bodies, when we have re-awakened this union, are one form of knowing that, once articulated and balanced, is capable of casting imagination upon the sensorily perceived world. The trade-off for this ability of projected creativity is that we feel profoundly. Our emotions, in other words, are what and how we are as well as who.
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 Gifted Trauma Alchemy group will move you into new ways of knowing yourself, your world, and your way. Six 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.
The Facilitators
Laura Hope-Gill
Laura Hope-Gill MFA is a Distinguished Associate Professor and Co-ordinator of the Thomas Wolfe MFA Program and Narrative Healthcare Certificate Program at Lenoir-Rhyne University. She is the Poet Laureate of the Blue Ridge Parkway, and North Carolina Arts Council Fellow for her writing about her deafness, and the North Carolina Arts Council Storyteller’s Apprentice to World-renowned Storyteller Connie Regan-Blake. She also paints and plays the piano. Her next book, due out in Fall of 2026 is an exploration of the creative imagination, storytelling, and narrative medicine. She facilitates non-toxic, appreciation-based creativity in classes and workshops. Read her world-weaving insights into science and creativity at www.laurahopegill.com.
Gordon Smith
Eclectic doesn’t begin to describe it. Gordon Smith’s counseling practice, now in its 25th year, has been a process of learning how best to help people become. 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 are increasingly supported by scientific research. Gordon intends to bring more of these expansive processes into the world of ‘mental health’.
If you’ve read this far down the page, I know you’re considering this. If you have questions for me, please ask. I’m happy to share anything that will aid you in making your decision. Gifted Trauma Alchemy takes place entirely online via Zoom.
This site is created without the use of Artificial Intelligence tools
