Age of Intuition Suite
Turning the Jewel: Story and Self
This group will be held weekly on Sundays – July 27, 2025 through August 31, 2025 from 1 – 3pm Eastern Time. It is entirely online via Zoom. Maximum number of participants is ten.
$295 for the series. $220 Equity Rate option for BIPOC.
Turning the Jewel: Story & Self
This six-week series elevates and centers the creative and imaginational dimensions of your gifted consciousness. Forget every authoritarian English professor you’ve ever had. None of that is central to story’s curative properties now known and practiced in psychology and clinical medical practice. Turning the Jewel invites you to discover yourself in all of your facets and to develop skills of surrender and safety.
Participants will engage and practice Turning the Jewel in a safe, supportive, decolonizing, and critique-free community. We will practice and open to the use of story as a tool of exploration of all of the facets of who you are. 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.
You will write from your center and find the incalculable number of narratives that emerge from it. Turning the Jewel: Story and Self 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.
If you’ve been writing for sixty years or you’ve never written a story in your life, Turning the Jewel offers an unconventional avenue to gifted personal development.
You are welcome here.
More about Turning the Jewel: Story and Self
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, education, and colonized systems of control 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 swallowing-up is a migration from the familiar into the unfamiliar, from the practiced part of the self to the out-of-control part. From the everyday brain to the creative brain. We don’t recognize it, so it feels uncomfortable or dangerous. Because that which is uncomfortable is destabilizing, we naturally feel the need to grasp something so we don’t get sucked out the emergency exit at 30,000 feet. In Turning the Jewel: Story and Self we let our brains do what brains do best – heal us through an ancient (and I mean Mesopotamia ancient) series of stages. Creative imagination heals and can lead to new experiences of joy and connection in our lives.
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 magic. It can be a feeling of more-ness in the moment. It can be a wave of sorrow. The encounter can take a limitless number of form. Whatever form they take, they change 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.
Turning the Jewel
This course is called Turning the Jewel because through this process we will regard our consciousness from many perspectives, seeing the many facets of who we are, tracking the way the light changes when we look at ourselves (the jewel) in many different ways. 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 destroy it by accident. It knows this about its counterpart in the analytical brain. The analytical brain’s sole job is to not see, say, or hear anything about it. As ego’s emissary, the analytical brain defends itself against its own demise. Hence the attack on emotion it has sustained for three centuries at least. For us, the Gifted, the entire world is a thin space.
The Curriculum
The “curriculum” is a framework for our exploration. It is created to be flexible, and we may adapt it liberally to meet group members where you are. That said, here’s what you can expect:
Positive Writing: Opening up an examination/exploration of the positive in order to open your mind to the deep examinations to come.
Perception Writing: Move into three perceptive modes: literal, figurative, imaginal. This flexibility of perspective is a bit of magic for your future development.
Poetic Medicine: Tapping into your poetic reasoning and write outside the rules. The little hop from strategic to creative creates a new avenue for encountering the unconscious.
Reflective Writing: Encountering the page as a mirror that reflects your natural depth and insight. It’s where your wisdom self can meet your workaday self for sage counsel.
Oral Storytelling: Not performance – telling and being heard/seen. Transforming story through the telling.
Ekphrastic Writing: Deep perspective, layer upon layer upon layer.
Curriculum comes from a Modern Latin transferred use of classical Latin curriculum “a running, course, career” (also “a fast chariot, racing car”), from currere “to run” (from PIE root *kers- “to run”).
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 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 Turning the Jewel: Story and Self 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 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 proven by conventional research methods. Gordon intends to bring more of the 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. Turning the Jewel: Story and Self takes place entirely online via Zoom.
