Creativity and Flow The Alchemy of Visionary Breakthroughs

 Creativity is not a luxury—it’s the lifeblood of the soul.

In this powerful conversation, depth psychologist Dr. Bonnie Bright and neuroscientist Dr. Christophe Morin explore imagination, flow states, and symbolic realities through the lenses of Neurospirituality and Soul-Centered Psychology.

 Grounded in Depth, Jungian, Archetypal, and Transpersonal traditions, they aim to awaken creative consciousness and inspire vision.

Somatic intelligence, symbolic imagery, and expanded awareness open gateways to soul-centered creativity and help you integrate body, mind, and spirit. This creates lasting change in your creative process.

A Reorientation to the Psyche’s Sacred Intelligence

This experience offers a renewed relationship with the sacred intelligence of the psyche by examining the neurology of inspiration and the archetypal process of shamanic descent required to access shamanic creativity and visionary breakthroughs.

You will gain insights into the symbolic patterns that shape your creative life and leave with tools to navigate creative blocks and access deeper inspiration.

What You Will Gain

• Understand the neurospiritual mechanisms of flow and creative breakthroughs.
• Unlock your deeper creative intelligence.
• Work symbolically and somatically with inner blocks.
• Access non-ordinary states that inspire you.
• Cultivate a soul-rooted relationship with the creative process.

Creativity is your birthright. It’s impact is universal. The world is waiting for the medicine only you can bring.

ABOUT THE HOSTS

Dr. Bonnie Bright

Founder of the Institute for Soul-Centered Psychology and Coaching™ and Depth Psychology Alliance™, Bonnie is a certified transpersonal coach, archetypal pattern analyst, and scholar in depth psychology. Her approach integrates Somatic, Symbolic, and Shamanic methodologies to help people work with symbolic messages, decode dreams, transform old stories, and manifest a life that they love. With a Ph.D. from Pacifica Graduate Institute, Bonnie has trained extensively in Holotropic Breathwork, the Enneagram, and indigenous wisdom traditions. She also founded Depth Psychology Alliance™, a global online community. She has conducted over 100 interviews with thought leaders in Jungian and depth psychologies.

Dr. Christophe Morin

A neurospirituality researcher, author, and expert in consciousness and neuroplasticity, Christophe explores how the brain, psyche, and soul shape human experience. His latest books, Open: A Neurospiritual Exploration of the Self-Healing Power of Your Brain (2025), and Open Up: The Neurospiritual Guide To Your Enneagram Type (2025), examine the science and spirituality of awakening, healing, and human potential. With a Ph.D. in Media Psychology, Christophe bridges neuroscience, psychology, and spiritual wisdom to foster deeper self-awareness and growth

Soul, Cosmos, and Consciousness™ is an illuminating “soul feed” to feed your soul! ENGAGE WITH US in deep reflection and self-discovery at the crossroads of ancient wisdom, cosmic mysteries, evolving consciousness, and the essence of being—via podcast, articles, webinars, online courses, and in-person retreats on the Big Island of Hawaii.

Transcript

BB: So once again, a warm welcome to everybody, as we launch here into our webinar today on creativity and flow, the Alchemy of Visionary Breakthroughs. I just want to welcome each one of you for being here and look forward to having some community conversation at the end of the presentation. I see a lot of names and faces that I know.

I assume that you're here because you are either a creative type and looking for more of the same, or perhaps you feel like you are stuck or have been stuck at times in your life and are just looking for new techniques and ways to actually be in relationship with that. So as we formally launch here, I'll just reintroduce myself. My name is Bonnie Bright and I am a depth psychologist.

I did my graduate work through Pacifica Graduate Institute and had a really amazing experience there. Of course, we are here to celebrate in many ways this webinar, which is called “Creativity and Flow,” and we're going to be looking at the science and soul of visionary breakthroughs. So how do we orchestrate those, or can we even orchestrate those? Where do those come from? 

So of course I am here with my partner in crime, Christophe Morin, and Dr. Christophe Morin is a neuroscientist and a consciousness researcher, as well as, something that I don't often mention, I think, in the literature that I put out, but also a media psychologist and, you know, that might have some surprising ways of bearing on all of this content. Christophe, would you like to just take a few moments and say more about yourself and what you're planning for today? 

CM: Yes. On top of having  researched the effect of media content, stories, advertising on our brain, I developed a, a strong interest in, , consciousness and specifically the study of the creative development as a byproduct of our neuroplasticity.

So today, while I wear the hat of the scientists, I want to share some of, of the research that has in a way helped us, , understand, , the more neurobiological level, what is a creative process, and more importantly, how can we, , make it easier on our brain and transcend the many hurdles that often make us think that we're not as creative as we can be. So I'm delighted to join this conversation. I, I will mention that also I do teach artificial intelligence for Johns Hopkins.

And of course, in the context of this very active, , sometimes very controversial discussion of what the role of AI is, is pretty obvious to me at least, that it can be, , recruited if not an ally in our process of creative development. So we'll talk about that. Wonderful, thank you Christophe.

So this actually probably sets the theme quite well because the first thing that I would like to talk about in fact is this idea of chaos and chaos and complexity theory some of you might be familiar with, are giving us really profound and powerful markers really to understand how creativity comes to bear and what the process of giving birth to creative states can actually be. The challenge is, is that when we fall into these states of so much complexity and we don't have a through line or we don't have an intention around things, it can sometimes really throw us into a sense that we don't have access to creativity, that we are so busy juggling things that we can't actually bring it to bear. Any kind of action that might come out of this or any kind of a thread or a narrative or an understanding of what it is that we are supposed to be doing or how we can find that creativity in our lives.

4:00

Well, for those of you who know anything about shamanism, shamans are really the, the medicine men or women of the tribe. And shamanism is a very unique but archetypal concept where, , around the world and across all eras, it looks very much the same. And part of the shamanic process is that someone has to become a shaman or it has to be known that they are going to be become a shaman.

What we usually say that happens and what the literature reveals from a lot of anthropological studies is that there is some kind of what we call in the western world, a shamanic illness that can happen, that can descend on people essentially. And often this shamanic illness is literally an illness, , physical illness. It can be very profoundly dangerous and, , distressing.

Often the people that experience this illness will fall into fevers and start having hallucinations. Sometimes they will be gone, if you will, or in a more of an unconscious state for several, , days or even weeks. And this doesn't always necessarily mean that someone who experiences this kind of illness will become a shaman, but it becomes very clear through the process that what's happening for them is they are actually being taken apart in many ways in order to be able to be put back together into a new configuration that makes them the shamanic being that they are meant to become.

So I assume that many of you are here because you are experiencing or have experienced some of these stages that we go through when it just feels like everything is really chaotic, but nothing is really happening for that. And I would just offer that then as a core tenant for us to understand that this kind of illness or this kind of chaos when we get into a, a difficult mental health state, for example, or we feel really fragmented or we can't make sense of anything, or we fall into depression or we go into addictions, any of these kinds of coping mechanisms that we take on in order to try to deal with this sense of dissolution that we can have can be very disturbing in our waking life or when we try to think about things rationally. But if there is a way in which we can understand this archetypal idea of how a shaman becomes initiated into becoming a shaman, we can begin to understand that this is a process that each one of us can sometimes identify and locate ourselves within.

And if we begin to understand that the, the complexity or the chaos or these difficult situations and thoughts that we might be having are actually a state that has to happen in order for us to be able to tap into that reorganizing factor, that will allow us to again, take on the gifts or identify the gifts and the calling that is ours to become this creative being. 

7:04

Now, I think as human beings, we are all creative beings. I really believe truly that that is the, in fact the requisite for the human being. That is our main purpose here in this life is to become creative, to create a life that we are longing for, a life that is led by our soul. In fact, a life that is led by our soul's blueprint, which many of you who have attended these before or follow my work will remember that I think that we are the soul self, that we develop an ego once we're born and we have to deal with things that are coming at us from our childhood experiences where our little psyches without the benefit of having a rational brain to be able to understand things, we just have to figure out the very best ways that we possibly can to take on these challenges that face us. And sometimes those coping mechanisms that we develop are not necessarily looking like they are the best way to go.

But in fact, our egos really are trying to help us feel safe and help us be seen and included and accepted in the ways that we need to be. And so we will take on whatever we need to do in order to be able to survive. And these kinds of coping mechanisms, while they can be difficult, they also are creating part of that chaotic experience that we need in order to give ourselves something to birth ourselves out of.

And this is very much what happens with the creative process. We have to be thrown into some kind of disarray in order for our ego selves, the one that is driving us through life and doing its best to protect us and promote us in the ways that it needs to, can actually be pushed into a kind of dissolution, into a state where we become more transparent to our soul self and the soul's blueprint. What we, and again, what I believe is something that we literally created for ourselves, that we chose the kinds of challenges we wanted to have in this lifetime, and that we are now living into those challenges.

And so here comes the thread, right? This is the process of us being able to understand and identify, okay, I'm in a process that is very difficult. I'm in a process of depression.

I have lost touch with reality in many ways. I can't seem to get myself to move forward. I longing to be creative.

Something's pushing at me and pushing at me, but I just can't identify what it is. Well, again, just to realize that this is actually the process of creativity. It's not a negative and it's not something you have to quote unquote get yourself out of.

It is in fact much better if we can identify and recognize what is happening as the archetypal process that it is. In other words, it's a pattern that all of us fall into at some point or another in our lives. And it is what allows us, again, to give birth to something new, but it has to come through this process of what the shamanic initiates often see as dismemberment.

In fact, often in their, when they have a fever or when they have hallucinations or dreams, they will have this experience or felt experience of being literally dismembered, torn limb from limb. Sometimes in these visions, they'll be torn apart by wild animals or they'll be torn apart in battle or you know, limbs are coming off right and left. And, and this is really an excruciating place to be.

And if you have ever experienced severe clinical depression, you might actually be able to identify with that in a very big way, although I think all of us can probably identify with that in, in many different ways throughout our daily lives. And Jung was no stranger to this either, because in the 1910s when he was really launching into the fullness of his career, of course so much more came after that. But this was really a threshold that he had to cross over.

11:11

He began having these really wild dreams and began to fall into a pretty massive depression. He had been Freud's protege for a while and was kind of designated as the heir apparent to Freud to take over the psychological association that Freud was the head of. And he was becoming very well known because he was with Freud a lot and they were friends and Freud was considerably older.

And so Jung was really learning and soaking up a lot of the psychology that Freud was coming up with. Of course, Jung had a lot of his own ideas and he had his own soul at work. Of course, his calling was, was very profound.

We can see that now in hindsight, he may not have known that at the time, but when he started to have these wild dreams and these experiences, he had had a break with Freud. He just couldn't accept everything that Freud was bringing in about the personal unconscious. And , he just found it too diminutive.

He found it too restrictive to look at everything the way that Freud looked at everything because of course, Jung's soul was speaking to him and bringing in all of these other really brilliant ideas that were not yet fully formed. But ideas about the collective unconscious versus the personal unconscious ideas that we are tapped into, absolutely everything that has ever existed, that ever can exist, that ever will exist. And this is what he called, of course, the collective unconscious.

And as these ideas began to erupt into his being, he really was thrown into this devastating place at where he felt like he actually might be experiencing, , break with reality, some kind of psychotic break or some insanity like many of the patients that he was working with in mental hospitals at the time. And so you can imagine he was supposed to be the doctor and the one who knows, and yet he was experiencing this massive breakdown of his own. And what happened, well, many of you know the story.

He actually turned inward and turned toward these experiences that he was having. And he began working almost every day or night with his dreams and the experiences that he was having that made him feel really crazy. And he developed at that time this process that he called active imagination.

And we've talked about that in past webinars. And most of you who have studied Jung in psychology at all will, will know that term. But it's basically the idea of entering into dialogue with what it is that is tormenting you.

, it can also be dialogue with other things, of course, positive things and good things. But in the context of our work here today, I really just want to suggest that this is a, a process by which we often will feel ourselves to be in a negative space. And yet if we can start to dialogue and to come into a new and different relationship with the things that are troubling us the most, then we can actually begin to get the wisdom that is coming from this.

We allow our ego self and our formal thoughts and beliefs and associations to be broken down or dismembered in a kind of ego dissolution. And through these dialogues or conversations with characters from our dreams or with depression itself or anything that might be troubling us, then we can begin to allow that creative force to take over because what is taken apart then can come back together again in a new way. 

14:37

There is a myth, which some of you may be familiar with. This is the oldest known myth that we have in history. It was written down, it's a Sumerian myth, and it was logged somewhere around 4,500 B.C. so it's almost 7,000 years old. And this is the myth of Inanna who was called the Queen of Heaven.

And in the story, Inanna, she hears a call one day. And I think many of you can relate to that. It's when something is pressing at you, something is pushing to be moved or to be responded to or to happen.

And yet sometimes we can't respond to that because we are sort of immobilized by all of these things that I've been referring to depression and such. And sometimes we hesitate or we just can't get ourselves to respond to it because maybe it makes us feel unsafe or maybe we will feel that we will be rejected and not accepted. Again, coming back to feeling safe and feeling seen, which the ego is always about.

And so in Anna, in this story, she hears the call, she actually does respond to the call, and this is a call to go to the underworld. Now her sister is living in the underworld, and so it makes sense that she would actually go there. And so she presents herself at the gates of the underworld and says, okay, I'm here.

I'm ready to go to the underworld. Let me go through, I'm the queen, so I should be able to go through. And of course there's a gatekeeper there.

And the gatekeeper says, well, yes, you can go through, but you have to give up something personal, something of your own before you can pass through the gate. So that means she had to give up her crown or some jewelry or a piece of clothing or something that she has with her. And so she does that and she moves on and she's relieved and she's like, okay, I am on my journey.

And then of course what happens is she comes to a second gate and the same story, she is asked to give up something that she owns, and of course she has to go through seven different gates and each one of those gates require her to give something up. And when we look at this symbolically, what we can see is that first of all, she is going on a dissent. Anytime that we fall into this feeling of stuckness or loss of creativity or the inability to move forward in some way or to tap into what is inspirational to us, anytime we feel suffocated or overwhelmed or fragmented, as I mentioned, it is up to us to really begin to identify “What is happening with my ego self right now?”

And so the symbolic piece about Inanna giving up something at each one of these gates is that our ego is completely identified with who we think we are. And of course, that is not who we really are. We are truly these immense, joyous, eternal beings that are caught up in something that we believe because we were raised with certain tenants.

The culture gives us certain tenants. Our family had certain values and beliefs that were often put on us. We go to school and our teachers have certain values and beliefs.

Our peers are accepting of us at one way or another because they have certain values and beliefs that they were raised with. And so our egos are so identified with these things that when we are asked to give something up that we believe in or that we believe ourselves to be, we can't move forward in our process. We lost our job and we can't move forward.

We have a lot of negative self-talk that can come up in these moments, right? We can say, oh, I'm such a loser, I can't even hold a job. And yet our dreams were to be wildly successful and the reality just does not match with that.

And so what's happening as we make the descent into whatever it is that we are really facing that is at the core of our depression or malaise, whenever we have to give something up, we are giving up something of the ego. So this is a process of ego dissolution and it has to happen or else we cannot ever tap into that newness or that creativity. 

18:48

And so in complexity theory—some of you may be familiar with that. It's also called chaos theory, by the way—there's this idea of what's called a perturbation. And a perturbation is when essentially the pattern or the flow of how we are currently living our lives gets interrupted in some way.

There's a ripple in the force. In other words, if we can put it in terms of star Wars. And what happens when there's a perturbation is a bifurcation point is presented and that bifurcation suggests that we can go this way or we can go this way, but something is going to have to change.

Now, if we choose not to accept that call to face our struggles and our challenges to go into our shadow, to really challenge our egos to see what it is that they believe that they're hanging onto so tightly, if we don't do that, then probably one of those bifurcation points is going to be, , ostensibly to stay in the same situation that we are in. Although that is never sustainable, it's always going to get much, much worse because I think the soul is kind of constantly knocking on our door. It's that call again, it's saying, you need to change, you need to change.

But how can we change if we're not willing to look at our values and beliefs and actually give up something that we believe ourselves to be? No. What we have to do is, and I say this so often, we have to really be able to allow our ego self to be co-opted into service of the soul, as I said earlier, to become transparent to the soul's blueprint to get out of the way enough with all of these beliefs and values and habits and patterns and coping mechanisms that we are really locked into and to let something bigger come through.

But the struggle that we each face, the challenge, the shamanic initiation that we each face in this moment is that letting go because we're so resistant to it, we just don't feel comfortable or safe being able to let go of some of those habits and patterns that are so deeply ingrained that our ego has put in place to help us stay safe. So you can see I'm kind of circumambulating, as you like to say, going around and around this topic of descent and initiation and going downward into our challenges, and then the surrender and the release and the letting go. If we can make this a formal process, an intentional process, a conscious process, you will be absolutely amazed at how things will begin to change.

And we can allow then that creative force to start to find some space, some cracks in our armor, if you will, that it can begin to come through. 

21:27

So these bifurcation points in chaos theory then, or complexity theory, what often happens is we start to identify some emergent properties. Things begin to change.

And if we look at it from the big picture, we can start to see that this is what was required from us all along. And the more we resist it, the more we're going to suffer. So if you find yourself suffering immensely right now, if you feel really blocked, if you just don't know where that creative juice is, if you just can't achieve anything that feels creative and fulfilling in your life, if you're lacking a sense of meaning in your life, it's because you have not yet been able to surrender and to allow yourself to be taken apart in the ways that you need to.

Now, it might feel like you're being totally taken apart and dismembered because of that, but again, I will just reiterate it and I can't say it enough times. What is happening is you are suffering because you are resisting the being taken apart. So what that looks like is if you're feeling depressed or if you feel like you have a lack of meaning in your life, it's to go more deeply into it and to accept it.

It's not to fight it and try to change it, it's actually to accept it. And that might sound really kind of counterintuitive, but the truth is, is when we can accept it, it allows us then to surrender and say, okay, I'm not the successful achiever that I hoped to be. I'm not producing all this amazing creative work.

I'm not even able to sometimes get through my day without addictions popping up. And you know, I, I really wish I could do more or different. But the truth is, is when we can accept that we are fully human, by the way, that this is a very natural and, , in fact critical part of being human, then we can find our way into relaxing, into it, accepting it.

And as soon as we start to accept that, that's when the ego is dissolving enough that sometimes, and especially the longer that we can go, but sometimes what will happen is that creative force will then enter, and once it can get in those cracks, it just starts to explode. So I think I will take a pause there. I have a few more things say about that.

But just to say as we move forward, I am looking at this process of creativity and vision and visionary breakthrough from three tenets or pillars of soul-centered psychology as I have developed it. And those three tenets, they are somatic, symbolic, and shamanic. So in this case, I'm starting with the last one first because this whole idea of shamanic initiation is so profound and so powerful, and that it is usually where we are starting when we enter into that creative process.

If you're already fully creative and feeling fulfilled, you're probably not on this webinar right now. If you are, congratulations, that's amazing, and it means you have been doing the work that you need to do in order to fall into that. But I will also say that this is always cyclical.

It's like nature. There's always going to be these cycles of death and decay, and then that always gives rise to a rebirth, to something new in order to take shape. So if you have been wildly creative and then you lost it, don't worry, you're just in this process of dissolution and decay.

And again, if you can really be intentional and conscious about what's happening, then you can help yourself to reinitiate that rebirth. The other two concepts, the somatic and symbolic, we will be looking at those next Christophe over to you. Thank you.

25:24

CM: I like that word perturbation because it's actually also the same word in French. , though in most cases we talk about that during a flight, which incidentally could suggest that the creative process can have, , bumps along the way. Introduce very briefly that I'm a neuroscientist.

I want to insist that I consider myself a non materialistic scientist. And what it means for me and for the perspective that I want to  bring to the subject of creativity is that I don't see the neurobiological process as explaining everything. And most neuroscientists today, sadly tend to think, for instance, of consciousness as arising from the brain activity that we can observe using a functional MRI or an NEG.

And we all, I think at this point can recognize that that definition of consciousness as neurobiology just doesn't embrace the full power and full mystery behind the phenomenon. Back to creativity, I truly believe having, , researched and also consulted in the space of creative development, whether it's for video production websites or other forms of communication, I truly believe that creativity is the sacred blood of consciousness. And what I mean by that is that it's not limited to artists, inventors.

I'm very blessed. I was born in a family of inventions. My father was always working on his next patent. It’s not limited to entrepreneurs, painters, musicians. I think it's the expression of our soul, , longing for a, a, a creative process, whether it's to change our character, evolve our capacity to embrace new experiences, it's part and parcel of who we are. The second point I want to  make is creativity is not just what we make.

It's really, , how we become. And when we look at it that way, certainly from a scientific standpoint, it's when we consider that there is no such thing as not being creative. It's like saying we're not wired for insight, of course we are. What is difficult and observable in many of the research that I've done is that they are specific filters, ways through which consciously or unconsciously, we limit our capacity to unleash creativity. , more importantly, it's not something we create.

It's much more something we can tune in to, , which is why this discussion around ego is so important and revealing of the challenges that people may have in feeling creative under stress or anxiety or being depressed. We actually can observe that this state of limitation created by you could say a mental disorder, is filtering and limiting our capacity to be creative. And so what we study is not just the capacity to be creative like an artist, but it's actually to recognize that if you are struggling with creativity, it is an invitation for using neuroplasticity.

This divine gift of actually rewiring our brain. It is using that gift to expand consciousness, which will then expand creativity, which will then begin the process of healing. So we can see that creativity is medicine, and under this protocol that I'm going to describe to you, we can measure the extent to which the gates of creative energy can be immediately widened.

Now, is it easy? No. Can it be accelerated?

Absolutely. And we'll discuss more towards the end, some of the rituals that we believe can bring an acceleration, if not an expansion of your creative potential. Now, back to what we understand the brain does when we are creative or not creative.

In my research, I talk about the fact that we don't have one brain, but two, Bonnie mentioned the part that brings logic, that brings rationality. That is indeed the part that is under the guidance or the command and control of our ego, which means that below that brain of rational, we have another more unconscious part of our brain. A lot of it is primal.

A lot of it is coded at birth, presumably with traits and characters that can be inherited through our genes, our ancestors. And it is in that part of the brain that we see a lot of potential for creative development. The ego, unfortunately, by activating judgment, by activating what's called self-referential processes, essentially our ability, which for most of us is somewhat of an obsession to constantly think about ourselves, is a huge filter.

31:20

Why? Well think about it. How easy is it to be creative if indeed the part of the brain that is constantly guarding the way maybe people perceive you or judge you, or the moral guardian of the super ego?

How can we fully unleash our ideas, our capacity to change, our capacity to invite others? Suggestion, all of it becomes extremely difficult when the ego is controlling the process. Now, from a brain perspective, we measure that specifically in the activity of our frontal lobe.

I won't bore you with anatomical considerations, but most of you probably know that the most sophisticated, shall we say, of our computational power, , our capacity to pay attention, to concentrate, to predict what's going to happen tomorrow based on information that we're able to collect based on a review of past information. All of that is in fact happening in our frontal lobe. It's the last part of the brain to mature typically when we are around 25 old, which by the way explains why younger people tend to be more creative.

They don't have the breaks that we put as adults through the ego to filter that creativity. So it's really interesting to know that research specifically using functional MRI and other modalities does demonstrate that the more people are activating their frontal lobe. This is called hypo-frontality, the less creative they become.

Likewise, when we are, whether it's through meditation, whether it's through engaging in altered states of consciousness such as psychedelics, when we are on a mission to reduce hypo-frontality, not only do we accelerate the process of creative experiences, but we also transform and heal a lot of mental states that are actually limiting our capacity to be creative. So it's really, really important to recognize that these states of low creative potential, high creative potentials can in fact be measured through the activity of the frontal lobe. But there is more.

I've been a researcher of personality system for a very long time, namely two systems we have in fact, , discussed in these webinars. One is called the Enneagram, a very powerful typology system of nine numbers. And if you know just enough about the Enneagram, you must recognize that the coping mechanisms that Bonnie was talking about tend to either augment our capacity for creative potential or limit our capacity for creative potential.

So it's a really interesting tool, so to speak. For any of you who are not happy with your capacity to be creative or cannot fully appreciate and understand where it's coming from, the Enneagram can provide some very, very important insights. And while you may think, oh, these personality systems are teaching us that I'm stuck in that personality for the rest of my life, I assure you that the research on personality traits today confirm that we can rewire anything we want.

It is about intention, it's about rituals, it's about understanding through consciousness, what are the role of certain coping mechanisms, patterns of adaptation, and where do they come from. Often from a very, very long time, we were programmed to adapt and respond in a particular way. And that way became habit.

And that habit became a pattern that we look as a permanent trait. Now, the second system that I do want to  talk about is big five. It is less known as a system of personality, but as a scientist, I've come to appreciate this system because it is in fact the most used by researchers around the world to investigate processes like creative potential, for instance. Now, the way you understand Big Five is simply by remembering that they are five traits according to the systems that can in fact explain both our emotional resilience and our capacity to be plastic, to engage in a process of creative change. Those traits can be remembered by the acronym ocean O means openness.

Clearly, if you are considered according to this system open, that's good for your capacity to be naturally creative. C is conscientiousness. Now, conscientiousness speaks to the degree to which you are dependable in the way you show up When you are saying you're going to finish a job or meet someone for an appointment, there's a certain rigor, which often I certainly thought about myself as being very, very conscientious.

And it was a very good thing until I realized that it makes us the conscientious people somewhat more rigid, and in fact, less neuroplastic, e extroversion versus introversion. Often we recognize that some of us are not enjoying social interaction as much as we want an introversion, not that it's a bad thing, actually limit our capacity to be more open and more creative to more agreeableness, which is the extent to which we can settle and be able to understand not just others' opinion, but get along. So that is also a good trait to cultivate in order to be more plastic.

And the last one, and probably the most difficult one to overcome is the anxiety and stands in fact for neuroticism. And so anytime we see anxiety, whether it comes from a, an illness or whether it's deeply anchored into your coping mechanisms or the profile under big five, we see that that energy of seeing and predicting the doom and gloom is probably the biggest enemy of our creative potential. So I, I'm going to close with that because I like these tools, not just the measurement of brain activity, but these personality system really can participate in diagnosing the extent to which you want to  do that, your potential, the potential that is often hidden in those characters and or mental challenges.

Bonnie, thank you. So fascinating. Well, since we're looking at systems and definitely personality systems are a huge piece of that, I just want to  come back for a moment to this idea of alchemy.

Alchemy was probably Jung's greatest love, and he really came to it only in the middle of his career. And so he didn't really have the opportunity to work with it or talk about it for the first half of his career, but once he discovered it, he really adopted it because he saw it as this profound system that it was to truly be able to help us to identify what goes on in our psyche that allows us to individuate, that allows us to become more whole, to become who we really are, which is that soul self, which is guiding us all the time. And so alchemy is a, a tremendous system that uses symbols to show us what process we are in, in this overall cycle of life that we are in, and what are these smaller cycles that we are in at any given moment.

If you are familiar with Alchemy at all, it's the idea of course, literally of turning lead into gold. But as Jung saw it, he saw it as our opportunity to turn our own selves into gold, to access the gold that is what I consider our soul self, our divinity, our wholeness. And so this processes that we were talking about a few minutes ago when we were talking about the descent of Anana and how we can fall into these really difficult places, these dark places where it doesn't feel like we have any access to creativity or to emergence or to something new coming in that in alchemy is called the nigredo stage.

Negredo is basically a Latin term that talks about the blackness. It's when we're in the dark, it's what we would consider a dark night of the soul often. And it is a descent.

There's an alchemical image actually that says it very well. It's, it shows a man who's kind of right behind a carriage that was drawn by a horse, and this man is laying in the street. And of course, back in the day when we had horses and carriages as our only means of transportation, often the streets were just covered in muck because those horses had to do their business somewhere, right?

And so this alchemical images of this man who's laying in the muck and he can't get up, and these horses and carts are going all around him and he's just stuck there. And you might relate to that in many ways. Sometimes we can feel very much that way, like we've fallen and we can't get up.

But the truth is, the nigredo is actually a critical piece of what it takes for us to be able, again, to have that breakdown or dissolution of our ego so that something new can emerge. And Jung, his thing really was working with symbols. He believed that images or the language of the soul and that our soul is always guiding us and helping us to find our way.

And so one of the best ways that we can access that blueprint, access the information, download the codes that we need to have in order to be able to move forward, is in fact to be able to use a symbol to get at that information. So a symbol according to Jung, was a living symbol. It's something that he considered a placeholder for, something that is unknown within us, something in our unconscious that we need to know, but we don't know what it is and we can't find out unless we can identify and adopt and work with a symbol that can actually divulge what that is.

He often said that nature itself is what offers up a lot of the symbols. And also our dreams will offer up a lot of symbols when we can identify something that has a lot of magnetism for us, it has some kind of pull for us, a symbol is something that is calling to us because it holds some kind of inherent meaning and we find ourselves thinking about it, or, , maybe we're doodling it sometimes, or maybe it shows up in our dreams any number of times or maybe one dream, and we just can't let go of that dream. We just keep thinking about it and coming back to it.

So symbols are really powerful ways for us to be able to download and decode what it is that we need to know, that we need to be working on. And symbols in that way are very powerful ways or doorways to be able to tap into the creativity that we are seeking, because a symbol is actually the language of emergence. So we've talked a lot about the dissent and having to go down into that darkness and the dismemberment and the, the suffering that we can experience a symbol is what is going to allow us to be able to find the light, to find those cracks in, in the defenses that we've set up for ourselves that we really need to have.

And nature is such a powerful way of offering this. , for example, we, we know if we look at it symbolically, the seed doesn't sprout until it can be in the dark long enough in order to split open and start to take root and to grow. We've had so many of these devastating wildfires lately, but the truth is, is the forest only can renew itself once that fire has cleared away the old growth that has been gathering or collecting for all this time.

And you know, there's even a story, I think it's the pinon tree. Some of you might know better, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, but there are certain seeds that will not even be able to grow until they reach a temperature that is so high created by fire wildfire, usually that will cause the seed pod to burst open and give access to the seed that's inside so that that seed can grow. So again, you can see the symbolism here and how that can work on you, and you can begin to understand, yes, you have to be under an enormous amount of pressure sometimes in order for this break, breakthrough to happen.

So again, I I say this, I feel like I'm repeating myself quite a lot, but it's really to say that if you are in a place where you cannot access the creativity and you're feeling really down, this is the place that you need to be only you need to be there intentionally, and you need to be there with an understanding of what is happening, and symbols can allow us to do that. So there's another concept in nature that I think is really powerful, and this is the concept of imaginal selves. And we usually talk about these in relationship with a butterfly or a caterpillar, as the case may be.

And many of you know, , butterfly is kind of the ultimate symbol of transformation. If you see a butterfly outside your window, man, let yourself really have a relationship with that butterfly. Really acknowledge there's something going on there because we know that that butterfly has come from the most lowly creature that can only move across the earth in a kind of a one-dimensional experience, maybe two dimensional, I guess, but it has no idea what is in store for it once it begins to dissolve.

And that's, this is what happens. The process of becoming a butterfly is not a pleasant one by any means. In fact, many of you will understand that the caterpillar literally has to turn into goo, literally has to be melted into an undifferentiated nothing kind of state in order for something new to start to emerge from that.

And that cannot be pleasant. Many of us have had those kinds of experiences where we just feel like we've become completely or dissolved into something that is not fun to experience. It's not unlike being dismembered right there.

These are different alchemical processes, different ways to work on the, what's called the prima material in alchemy. The, the stuff that we're starting with our situation, whatever that is, we can be under a lot of pressure and be forced into a situation where the temperature of the, the stress and the pressure that we're under allows us to finally burst. We can be in a process of surrender and really allowing ourselves to be dissolved, be dismembered.

But these imaginal cells are what actually create the butterfly. So even though the caterpillar is dissolved into this goo and it's just becomes this kind of mushy soup within the chrysalis or within the cocoon, there are certain cells that persist. They are not destroyed.

And these are what are called the imaginal cells. And these cells eventually, because they are encoded with the creative process, these cells begin to seek each other out. There is some intelligence there, there's some awareness there that this process happens as a product of nature.

It's not something that you have to do for yourself. It's not something the caterpillar does for itself. It's a, it's a state of goo.

It can't. And so what these, , imaginal cells, as they begin to band it together, they begin to use what is encoded within them to create certain parts of the butterfly, which is the new being that is coming out of the cocoon. So some of those cells will band together and become the antennas.

Some of them will band together and become the body of the butterfly. Some of them will become the wings. So you get the idea.

This is something that is part of a natural process. In other words, nature that is already encoded that will allow us, if we can get out of our own way, if we can surrender, if we can let ourselves be in the goo. And if we can trust that there is a blueprint, that there is something so much bigger than us that is at work in this process, then we can allow ourselves to let that process happen, to let something new emerge.

And you can call this the transcendent function. This is when we just have to stay in that state long enough where we hold whatever it is that's troubling us, where we're holding these choices or these difficulties long enough for something new to emerge and let the big picture take shape. So in nature, I, I just want to  share this metaphor because, , I did a lot of research for my doctoral dissertation on ecos psychological topics.

That was really my focus. And I learned about these pine beetles that are extremely destructive and have been taking hold more and more of many of our forests in, especially in North America over the last few decades. And these pine beetles are just devastating.

They kill trees and they kill lots of trees. And so entire forests can really be almost brought down by these pine beetles because as they eat the the trees, the trees become desiccated and then the trees die. And so, however, if we can look at this again from this metaphor that we have been talking about, about dismemberment and the value of it, about dissent, about dissolution, what we can understand is that as the trees, as the beetles proliferate, then lots of birds will be able to eat them.

And the birds can then feed their own young. And those birds and lots of other small mammals and other kinds of animals will benefit by making their nests in the cavities of these desiccated trees. And also, as the trees begin to die in mass and forests become less dense, I mean, we might look at that as a bad thing, but more sunlight can come through and filter into these newly opened areas.

And then this allows more small plants to grow in what was formerly the shadow of all of these trees. And then other animals like elk or deer or rabbits and hares have easier access to the fodder and the new greens that are growing there. And they get new nutrients that were not available to them formerly.

And then other kinds of ground nesting birds will come around and they become themselves abundant meals for some of the hawks and the birds that are higher up on the food chain, you know, so we can look at this as just understanding that from a small thing that might look really negative, entirely new life can emerge. And again, this is the promise of the creativity that is encoded within us. We have our own, so to speak, imaginal cells that allow our process of creativity to take shape.

Again, we have to get out of the way and allow that to happen. And we can do that very much by working with symbols, understanding what they have to say to us when we see something outside our window, when something pops up in a dream, to be able to have a dialogue with that, to draw it, to move in a way that makes you feel like that object or that being might move to let ourselves really get embodied. And we're going to talk about that in just a few moments in thematic piece.

But really to understand that we have those imaginal codes, if we can work with symbols, we become open to that creative force. And I will just say a word about imagination. We have not been taught to value imagination much in our western world.

You know, it's something that kids often have. And then as we grow up and get older, sometimes we feel like we lose access to that. Sometimes we forget that we ever even had access to that.

Sometimes we don't think that we can visualize things very well. Sometimes we don't think that there's a value in actually spending time in reverie or daydreaming or talking to plants or any of these kinds of things that are actually a pastime that will allow that creative spirit to break through into us. And so Jung talked about what he called living the symbolic life.

And literally that means to make a commitment to yourself through your soul self, to always be looking for symbols, to always be believing the symbols, to always be working with symbols. You know, native peoples have known this for thousands and thousands and thousands of years. And that is they would see a, a crow flying in a certain direction, and that would mean something to them that would open up a whole new idea about what might be happening or what might be available to them.

Or they would see a caterpillar crawling on a leaf of a certain flower, and that would mean something was coming or something was changing so they could understand through these symbols so much more than just seeing an object in motion somewhere. So it's really important that we really commit ourselves to living that symbolic life. If you want to be creative, you want to have that access.

Let yourself wonder about these things that you see. Like if you're taking a walk and you see a dead bird right on your path, what does that mean? Let yourself wonder about it.

Let yourself think about it. Let yourself feel about it. Let yourself have a conversation, , an imaginary conversation with the dead bird and ask it, what are you doing here?

What happened to you? Why, why are you here? You know, what were you doing when you, when you got killed?

And all of these things can really start to become a metaphor for what's going on in our own lives, because we are all part of the big self. Nature is the big self. Nature is our soul.

The soul is not in us, we are in the soul. So anything that we see happening in the outer world is actually happening within us. It's that alchemical saying, as above, so below in the outer also is in the inner and vice versa.

And so using our imagination, where do you think imagination comes from? It comes from our soul self, right? That is exactly the gift and the tool that we have been given in order to be able to be creative.

But we have to allow ourselves to be in the dissolution process, in the stillness, in the laying down, in the muck, in the middle of the road long enough and paying attention to the symbols, something will begin to shift. So, , I just want to say briefly a couple of things about the somatic process. First, we have the descent, then we have the emergence of something new that is coming out.

And then the somatic piece of it is actually the embodiment or the action that can happen. And so we understand that the body is not just a container for our soul. It's not just a vehicle, but it's actually a co-creator of our consciousness.

Our bodies are what empower us to be able to do something with the creativity that is encoded within us. And we can understand also that flow, the state of being in flow, where everything just seems to be easy and coming to you when you're in that altered state where you can just move through things without judgments, without roadblocks, without obstacles. We can understand that it's a rhythmic coherence that is actually occurring between our body, our psyche, and the world.

So we're looking for this coherence. And there's an idea that has been studied quite a lot in recent called embodied cognition. And I really love this idea because it's the idea that we don't just think and understand things with our heads, with our brains.

In fact, our entire being is learning and noticing all the time. And it's not just one part of our body, and it's not even just our body, but it's also the field that's around us that is perceiving and understanding that is analyzing those codes that are created within us. So in embodied cognition, one example, one way to look at it is, again, with a symbol from nature.

And that is like a spider that is sitting on her web. And the spider can know what's going on around her because her web is like an extension of her body. When she's in the center of this big web and something flies in and moves the web, she feels it.

The web is actually one of her perceptive capacities. In the same way our bodies have those same perceptive capacities, if we can get out of our heads, if we can get out of our suffering, if we can get out of trying to fix whatever our problem is, quote unquote, and allow ourselves to be in this descent, to be in this nigredo, to be in the soup, those imaginal cells, that that intelligence that is encoded within us can come through and change us. But we have to be in that state of perception.

That means we have to be in our bodies. We have to be in tune with our bodies. If you are not doing something in an embodied way every single day, and hopefully a lot of your day, you are missing the enormous codes that have been given to you to be able to be the creative being that you are.

And so what does that mean? It means exercising if you can, or it means meditating, but feeling yourself somatically and really letting your attention rest on your body. , I had the really, the extreme honor of being able to work with Marian Woodman just once in a workshop.

Those of you who don't know who Marion Woodman is, she's a Jungian analyst who was just so profound. She died, , just a few years ago actually, and she was really extremely into somatic psychology. She understood the value of it, and she talked about it a lot.

And what she had us do in that workshop, the very first thing that she had us do was she turned on some music. It was one of her favorites. She always liked to listen to the No Turns by Chopin.

And then she had the entire class down on the floor rolling around and just being with that music and feeling the music in our bodies and letting it move us in whatever way it wanted to. And we probably did that for 15, 20 minutes. She said she would often do it for 30, 40 minutes before she would sit down to write, because it put her in that state of perceptivity that she could not get by trying to manifest something with her brain by trying to capture something with her brain.

We have to be in our bodies. Now, if you're somebody who's experienced a lot of trauma, this may not be very easy for you because often we associate physical pain with danger. It's a threat to us, and we don't want to be in our bodies.

So many of us who have experienced a physical kind of trauma, whatever that might be, often aren't even aware that we don't live in our bodies. So that becomes our work to really, truly be able to sit down and feel your body. And it's simple.

It's as simple as that. You just sit down and you, you feel your hands, you use your senses. You, you feel your skin underneath your fingertips.

You let yourself notice, you know, do I have any kind of a vibrational sense in my body? Is there something that's burning? Do I have pain somewhere in my body?

And the more that we are able to notice, the more that we are able to be in a relationship with our body, the more our bodies become that cognitive vehicle that allows us to perceive in new ways, it can become so intuitive. It's almost like having second sight because we, we can see and feel and experience things with our body just like the spider can with her web. There's just a lot of really cool metaphors in nature.

Moss can do this, , lichen, all kinds of different things that our networks can, can experience something at the outer edges of that network. And it's still known and transmitted immediately to the whole. So it's really critical that we get into our bodies, that we activate our creativity through being in our bodies.

And so if you have a block in your body somewhere, if you sit down and feel into that, I'm just thinking about our senses and how we, you know, we drink things in with our eyes. We notice things. We have to be present in order to ascertain what is being given to us, what lives within us, what those imaginal cells are doing for us.

And it's a, animals are a really, really amazing way for us to be present in that way. And paying attention to the tactile senses that we have as well. So just as a wrap up on those, we've talked about the dissent which is the shamanic perspective.

We have to be dismembered. We have to be willing to be dismembered or dissolved in order to get to where we need to be so that something new can take shape. The symbolic piece, we have to work with symbols because they are what reveal what it is that we need to know in order to access the creativity.

They are the creative force. They are what initiates that. So that is the emergent property that we are longing for.

We have to really allow ourselves to feel into that longing of the longing to be free of the darkness of the stuckness, of the obstacles that we're facing and yet to be present with them. And so the embodiment is really the capacity then to let that creativity take shape, to let it emerge into form, to let it work us enough that then something begins to move in us again, so that we can experience those kinds of visionary breakthroughs. And I'll tell you something, , when we get into the somatic, when we get into the symbolic, those kinds of visionary breakthroughs can happen just like that.

All it takes is just in a moment we somehow reach the configuration that our soul needs in order to breakthrough. And those breakthroughs just come, we just get this flood of insight in a moment, and all of a sudden, our creativity is just off and exploding once again. And if you have been in a period of a dark night of the soul, this can just feel like, you know, it can feel like the divine.

It is the divine coming through you in every way. So, , let the shamanic teach you how to descend. Let the symbolic teach you how to see and then let the somatic teach you how to move.

All of these become gateways that can just lead us into the kind of flow that's not just inspired because that is a big part of it, but also that is initiated. We have to go through this entire process in order to be initiated, in order to access that or unlock that next level of creativity.

Christophe, back to you.

Amazing. I love the three chapters of your presentation. So I'll finish with three layers or systems in our brain.

I of course introduce the critical importance of the primal brain as well as the rational brain, often being hijacked by our ego. But through my research and particularly looking at ways to expand our consciousness and improving our neuroplasticity and reach what you call flow, which is in many ways a state of permanence, hypo-frontality. And so how do we achieve the reduction of dominance of the activity in the frontal lobe?

Well, a lot of it is through transcendence, and you introduced that earlier in neuroscience. We see transcendence as, , an altered state. , an emerging state often puzzling many scientists because it's unusual.

It's part of what we describe as the hard problem of consciousness. If we can't really fully understand how the collective power of 86 billion neurons is not really explaining what we call consciousness, where is it coming from? So transcendence can be achieved through many practices.

In, in my last book Open, I identify 26 rituals that are many of them the usual suspects that you're aware of, whether it's practicing yoga, working out, , being in nature, fully being in nature. But, , Japanese talk about in so many of their tradition as forest bathing, for instance. And the power of essentially receiving calmness and connections to nature through, through that process.

But also, , ways to go much beyond primal activity or rational activity, what I call spiritual activity, which is a call for seeing more than the small self and tapping into, , the collective and tapping into the we instead of the me. And of course, in that category of rituals, , we look at meditation, we look at working with antigens especially. So the good news is, in closing, while we can recognize and in fact quite well identify some of the causes of not being able to tap into the power of your inner creative, we can also identify a lot of tools such as personality systems, but also practices that can reclaim your power to be creative, which ties directly to the power of neuroplasticity, which then ties directly to your ability to heal.

So we see, I think Bonnie and I, in different lenses, tremendous opportunity to use creativity as medicine and to do so daily and to of course connect through these embodiment in ways that speak not in the language of rationality, but the symbolic language of our own body. So having said that, I think we have given you enough raw material, hopefully to stimulate some questions. So, so let's, , hear, , either comments or, or questions.

You can certainly share them in the chat if you prefer to do that. Yes, we do have a couple of comments at least in the chat. And I do just want to read Tivo’s because it seems quite relevant.

He said, love this work. There's the work of the flow genome project, generative change work, and embodied mythic work that maps and aligns with what you're creating. Thanks for doing this impactful work.

I look forward to listening to the recording. I don't know if you're still on, I don't have everybody up on my screen where I can see, but if you come on and say anything more about that, that would be great. Please.

I just, , so I was coached by one of your trained coaches, and I just really love the process and the discovery, and I feel like there's these other bodies of work. Generative change work uses the embodied mind, the field, and the cognitive mind to find that integrative creative space. And then Dr.

Gio uses identity and modeling the neuromuscular pattern and then the cognitive pattern. And I just love that. , it feels to me like your approach and the work that you both are doing, it brings in the soul, the poetic, this piece that's beyond sort of the literal language, but more the poetic language.

Yeah. And so I, I was, , excited to see what you guys were creating and what is coming forward, but just I know in my body and my spirit, , our world needs us so much right now and probably has always needed it. So I'm, I know I'm going to transition, but I just wanted to appreciate the work that you continue to do.

, that's cutting edge and that really serves humanity and that really serves us going beyond our rational minds and our limited left brain perspective. So thank you. Yeah, thank you so much.

Really appreciate your comments. And it is, it's exciting to do this work to be on this side of doing this work. As you say, the world just needs it so much right now.

And of course, that is what is motivating us completely from the heart. You know, , I, I have heard of the flow genome project, but I did not, or still do not know a lot about it. So I really appreciate you bringing it up here.

That is definitely something I'd like to look more into. And this is one beautiful thing that happens in community when we show up like this together, you know, we are able to share this knowledge and this information. , a lot of my doctoral work was done on colony collapse disorder, which is the mass vanishing of honeybees.

And of course a lot of that was a systems theory that I looked at that, , helps us understand like what's going on with the hive. Because the hive is not just all these individual bees. The hive is itself a super organism.

And I think that when we gather together in small groups like this and be able to really just share ideas with each other, turn on each other to different ideas and thoughts, you know, that this can truly change the world. And like you said, maybe the world has always needed it probably. It always has.

We've always been human. We've always had the same challenges. I believe that we are here in order to go through a journey where we can birth ourselves into something greater than our everyday ego selves.

But this kind of interaction and cross pollination is just such a critical piece of it. If we can come to greater consciousness in our little circle here, then I believe truly that that consciousness will be transmitted and will be made available to other people that we all come into contact with. And that can just, and evolve in the most beautiful ways, particularly now we have so much in the way of technology.

Technology can be a blessing and a curse. It's probably also amplifying the troubles in the world because we see it everywhere and there's a lot of burnout on that as well. But if we can also just hold these concepts that we're talking about, you know, connect with other people who are doing this, , this good work, just like each of you are, that, that's just for me magical.

So thank you. Yes. There we go.

Between 2008 and 2015, I directed the flow project, which was did research with artists who worked in different mediums to identify principles and practices of art making that could be applied in leadership. And the parallels are very strong, but where I particularly find fertility in what you've been discussing is the sort of disillusion on the, on our, on the collective level and how the ideas that you've been presenting actually can help get a handle on how we might respond and access creativity on a, on a broader level in the collective psyche. Yeah, thank you.

In that process of making art, did you, I assume, work with groups or is that something that can be done in larger groups that allows people to actually make this transition into understanding something bigger about this? , no, it was grounded theory and action research with groups of artists in different locations. We started them with the same question, what is important for humanity to know about the art making process?

And they recorded that first conversation and we analyzed the recording using e vivo and then sent back a further question. So from the different groups we began to co coalesce and the, the six principles that we surfaced were that artists create space for the work and that they connect with source. Mm-hmm.

And they recognize that the work has a life of its own and an intelligence of its own, and they surrender or let go and they respect and honor the creative value of conflict and resistance and they rely on somatic knowing. Beautiful. So there's a, a great deal of crossover.

Was there a publish paper? Yeah, well many articles I pub I did a lot of presenting internationally and nationally in the field of leadership education and also the flow project research, primarily our mission statement, , figured in the formation of the UNESCO Sewell agreement for the development of arts education worldwide. Beautiful.

Wow, that's amazing work. I do see a lot of the crossover and of course, you know, a lot of our conversation here is naturally going to be about the collective and what needs to happen in the collective. It's so wonderful to know that people like you are working on things like this and bringing that information out.

It needs more notice, more publication, more talking about it. So thank you so much for bringing it on here. You know, we are going through a collective dark night of the soul in our society right now on so, so many levels.

We are in a, a massive descent. There is going to be a dismemberment. It's already happening, obviously, but again, we can hold when we look at it from these perspectives that hope and that knowing if you can trust enough that there will be a rebirth of some kind, that our culture as we know it is going to be reborn into some new form.

Now we don’t know what's going to happen between here and there, but if we can ourselves hold this knowing and understanding these very archetypal ideas, everything that you talked about, such archetypal ideas, if, if we can hold this ourselves and keep ourselves from kind of flying off and spiraling off into panic and despair, then we can also help the culture to hold it. We can help people to identify and understand the archetypal place they're in, please. Also with the understanding of the archetypal progression on the symbolic level.

But instead of merely resisting what is occurring, to actually identify what is trying to emerge and find language to give it a basis. Totally. Yeah.

So important. And that goes along with the other thing I really wanted to mention that you said or acknowledge, and that is the making space for this. We have to make space for this if we're so busy and our society is moving at such an incredibly fast pace, and it's not getting less with artificial intelligence and technology and everything that's going on in that level.

And also now we have to be so reactive all the time. We, we are reactive all the time because of climate change and some of the really difficult things that are going on in the world around us. We still have to be able to make that space.

So to identify the descent that we're in, but then that surrender that you talked about, that, okay, here's where I am. I'm lying in the muck in the depths of despair. This is where I am.

That is also a making of space. If we're not desperately trying to get ourselves out of it or fix something, we can allow the process to just take over and do what it needs to do. We trust the process to do that process.

Yeah, absolutely. A quick note on this notion of, of space, because of course you can think of space as what's around you and, and the relationship that we can have to nature is, is very, very essential in that process, but also space in your brain and creative processes when they happen do need a lot of mental space, which is why the ego has to be at least suspended in order to release literally glucose and oxygen that needs to feed the neurons or the mechanisms upon which we can actually invite creativity. So it's been really interesting for me to go at that level of granularity at at the neurobiological level to confirm what I think you're saying.

And that is, without that capacity to create mental space, the creative process can't unleash. Mm-hmm. Totally.

Thank you so much for your presentation. Oh, thank you for joining us for sharing a few more questions or comments. My question today to you is, have you heard of the research by was featured in the, and I believe that they have initiated research, my and, and their effects on human.

So given that now, , cannabis is largely legalized to a certain in Canada states you as well. The second part is a very, how do you see your in the transition from a cannabis oriented, , what cultural synergy to something that is a, let's say higher order and less frequency of use related, , substance use culture? That make sense?

Great question. I don't know if everybody could hear that. It might have been hard.

I actually have the words on my screen. So you're asking about psychedelics and if particularly psilocybin is playing a part in this process of creativity. If this is going to take us to new levels of complexity in our society, I want to  at least pick up on the role of psilocybin specifically because it's been quite extensively now researched by both neuroscientists, medical doctors, , academics and so on.

And this known effect of psilocybin is that it can in fact increase or reopen the moments of neuroplasticity. So plasticity is in a way a transient state. It can open at particular time.

For instance, when you have a heart attack, it opens a critical period of neuroplasticity because the brain realizes I'm going to have to do my best to re repair the damage. Right? And the same is true with consciousness in many ways, in our ability to rewire thoughts or traumas does need the, , period of neuroplasticity to be as extended as they can be.

And it's been verified and confirmed that psilocybin has the ability to reopen critical periods of neuroplasticity. Now, most of that research has been done on rat's brains, , and is now going to be expanded as we, as we go. So yes, I do think that psychedelics in general, not just psilocybin, have been documented to have a, , positive though complicated and not for everybody, let's be clear capacity to contribute to greater, , creativity.

And you were asking about cannabis as well. And I would say, you know, all of these, what we consider to be psychedelics, and I guess cannabis is maybe kind of on the fringe of what most scientists would consider a psychedelic, but it can also be used in very similar ways. And one thing that these, all of these substances can do is to put us into that state of surrender.

That state where something new can come in to our brains, where we are enabled or empowered to be able to see and feel things that we cannot necessarily do when the ego is so vigilant and on board with trying to help us feel safe and feel seen when we work with these kinds of powerful substances, it allows that ego to just kind of step aside and for us to be in more full contact with that divinity, with our soul self, with that part of us that knows no bounds and that has the capacity to truly lean into whatever these opportunities are, to be creative and to create a life that we really live and love. , Christophe she was also asking about ai, and I think maybe in the same kind of context, would you like to say a few words about that and how it can possibly also enhance our plasticity? I'm not sure that was the question exactly, but the, it, there is a thread there that I can see, I'll just share my own belief.

And that is that it is in fact possible to bring in artificial intelligence, but I think in a very, very different way than most people use it. , this whole idea of chatting with large language model, , without kind of guardrails or boundaries can lead to I think, , a lot of confusing collaboration. But there are ways to create, we call them knowledge vaults, where you can in fact, , say for instance, you want to unpack teachings of Jung and maybe collaborate in a better understanding of these concepts of soul centered psychology or neurospirituality.

And, and at, at the same time, by having this ability to dialogue with a machine that has the ability to identify patterns, it can in fact suggest patterns that you may have never, , noticed before. So I, I think it's a, it's a very emerging topic. Some people are completely freaked out at the idea of working with AI on consciousness research or creativity, but I think there are promising venues to do so.

And that really speaks to your book

Christophe, , which is called open, I think you mentioned that earlier. But we really have to be in these open states of awareness or we cannot progress. Of course, we're going to be stuck forever if we're closed down and not open to things that we have never thought about before or things that may challenge our assumptions or things that, , maybe, you know, were considered crazy by our family, but as we grow up and begin to learn more about the outer world, we can begin to understand that, oh wow, maybe there is actually something here for me that I was not able to see or feel into before.

So I think all of these are really critical. , I just want to  ask Judy, , if you wanted to say anything, I noticed your last question was kind of left hanging there and I wasn't sure if you wanted to leave it rhetorical or if we could actually have some conversation about it, but your question was where can we go from here? Well, I guess I'm asking you for some sort of feedback to that.

I just feel like yes, yes, yes, yes. Right. Yes.

, , and I have been doing a lot of these things, so I guess maybe just more support, right? More, I don't know, more inspiration, whatever that might look like. Yeah.

Thank you. Well, I think you're absolutely right. You know, you are already doing all that.

That doesn't surprise me at all because this is what we're here doing, right? We are here navigating these cycles and these difficulties and these blockages and also appreciating when that insight comes and when we feel the most creative, we're able to just really live into that with our presence and with our understanding of the journey that we are on the very human journey that we're on. So I would just say, if we're looking at it logistically, obviously you're already doing all the right things.

You're in it, you're being present with it, you're paying attention to it. You have consciousness around it, awareness around it. The logistical pieces of it, I would say comes back to the three things that I was talking about.

And of course, , the things that Christophe interspersed also support those. And that is to say, you know, thinking about your journey, feeling into whatever dissent processes you've had in your life, even if you don't feel like you're in one now, can be really fruitful to look back into that darkness and the journey that you have been on and to really let that work you. But to do that symbolically.

So the main work that I would really encourage, and I think that Jung would, would say is we have to do the symbolic work. So wherever you are finding that symbols are showing up in your life, the first thing to do is to engage with those. And by the way, you can engage with symbols in all three of these ways that I've talked about as well.

You can engage with a symbol somatically so you can feel it in your body. You can move and see if you can get some essence of what that symbol is. That's when you get it through the embodied cognition.

You'll begin to understand something about that. You start to get insights about that. You can do active imagination, make it a daily practice.

You know, just spend 15 minutes every day and sit down and work with a symbol. What did you see in your day to day that is kind of sticking with you? Just have a conversation with it or spend some time drawing it or write a haiku about it or something that will allow more information to come through in that way.

And of course, the shamanic piece is we have to be in some kind of a non-ordinary state of consciousness per our ego, as opposed to being in our regular everyday ego self, which has all of those barriers and boundaries and doesn't really allow itself to be as open as it needs to be. So I don't know if that's helpful at all. It, in some ways it's, it's kind of a prescription, you know, it doesn't get us into that.

But I have been longing to do a process group of some kind where we could actually each take on a symbol and where participants can work with that on a, on an ongoing basis and really let it divulge its secrets to you. So that's something that you can do with a partner or a friend or a group of friends or find a course. There's certainly more and more Jungian oriented, soul-centered depth psychological kinds of courses and process groups that, that allow us to do that kind of thing.

And it's amazing what will come to you. I worked with the symbol of the honeybee for years and years and years. I still do because it has become absolutely a fundamental metaphor for my own life and everything that I understand about honeybees and the way they work and what's happening to them now through colony collapse disorder.

In fact, I parlayed that into my doctoral dissertation, which is called Culture Collapse Disorder. And you can see where I'm going with that. This is what we are talking about, how our entire culture is headed into this descent.

So it can be very powerful. So I just really encourage you, if nothing else, make that a daily practice to work with those symbols and you will be amazed with what comes through. Well, I think we've reached that point of closure.

Thank you so much for joining us. It's really, quite special to see your level of interest and engagement, and that's the beginning of where we want to see this work unfold. So thank you so much, and until next time.