Age of Intuition Suite
Poetic Reasoning
Inaugural cohort will be Sundays – January 19, 2025 through March 9, 2025 from 1 – 3pm Eastern Time.
$360 for the series. $270 Equity for BIPOC folks who choose it.
Poetic Reasoning
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.
More about Poetic Reasoning
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 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. Because that which is uncomfortable is destablizing, we naturally feel the need to grasp something so we don’t get sucked out the emergency exit at 30,000 feet. If we can hold off on that and let our brains do what brains do best: heal us through an ancient (and I mean Mesopotamia ancient) series of stages. Creative imagination is all we need to heal and to find ceaseless enjoyment in life even in the hard stuff.
The imaginal
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.
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.
Our experiences flood us, shut us down because living in a thin space is intense even for us. While the norm is to live in one world, attend to one or two sets of people, we live in multiverse without even being aware of having shifted from one to another. When we are in deep focus, we’re often someplace else, as though a giant bird has swept us away, leaving our skin-shell at our desk or any work surface. We don’t recall where we went upon return. We even rely on cues in the physical world to hint us back into this being, this body, this world. Every day dream is a return to the neural network that doesn’t abide by linearity. We need to visit this place. It renews us every time.
We need to be able to slip in and out of worlds. We need to be able to imaginatively stretch out across a universe or two between errands in the sensory world. We need to cruise among selves. Sometimes we need to get unstuck and engage creative imagination. This is our fuel. Stress is often the spark. After a creative trip, we feel better.
Our Emotions
We feel emotions differently from our normative counterparts. Bearing in mind that everyone’s experience with emotion is entirely one’s own, for us, it is very different. For us, emotion is far from a mere b-side to logic. For us, emotion is logic we steer our journeys by. Intuition in us is a force. It makes calls our body follows 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 kept in check with a rigid non-domination orientation of mind as well as a deep humility streak. We have what the bad guys in every James Bond movie wish they had, yet we are safely uninterested in taking over the world. 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.
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.
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’.
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.
