My friend, Kym, who has inspired this series of posts with her Flower Affirmation cards is the most creative person I know.
Correction: She’s one of the most creative people I know.
My mother is another with her paintings and sketches. One of my brothers and my father with their ability to make something, anything, out of wood or steel simply from a picture in their mind and a rudimentary sketch are creative.
The other brother, the first’s twin, is creative with food and his ability to make magic appear on a plate before you.
One of my elder sisters is creative in the garden and with her farm animals. Her way with animals, especially her horses and the equine therapy she provides traumatised horses and their ill-prepared owners, is the spirit of creativity in action.
The other elder sister is creative too. She is a scientist working to create animal vaccines.
I am creative too. I create by turning words on a page or a screen into reality in your mind. I create by using the words I speak to heal hidden traumas. I create by translating my knowledge into practical tools that enable me (& you) to be a better human.
Look around you.
We’re all creative.
You are creative. Everyone you know is creative. Elizabeth Gilbert’s book, Big Magic: Creative living beyond fear, taught me how to get out of my own way.
Her words were enough to shake me up, and yet, still, there is work to be done to continue the shaking because this morning I felt the doubts and darkness spread like a cloud, rumbling and tumbling through me. These clouds, they didn’t say anything, they just felt ominous and threatening.
And then I saw this card of Kym’s: I am a creative being. I create my reality.
I created the cloud so what’s to say I cannot also create a rainbow to pierce its darkness?
The more I learn, the more I discover how phenomenally powerful our brains — not a typo — and body are. According to research, we have three ‘brains.’
Recent Neuroscience findings have uncovered that we have complex and functional neural networks – or ‘brains’- in our heart and gut, giving scientific credence to the growing body of leadership literature showing how the world’s best companies are guided by leaders who can tap into the intelligence of their head, heart and guts (source).
In my capacity as Marketing Manager for CoCo, the Coaching Platform, I had the great pleasure of interviewing Dr Suzanne Henwood, who is continuing the research of the late Grant Soosalu and his work in what they’ve called, mBraining, to mean multiple brains.
The idea that we have more than one brain and that our entire body is synergistically connected ought to not come as a surprise to anyone. We know this much, the body is a powerful network of neurons. There is still so much we don’t know about what goes on inside our own bodies.
My family focuses their creativity on what their body can do and I find myself, especially at this time of renewal, birth and discovery, on what is going on inside.
From the mBraining research, we learn that there are three core Prime Functions for each of the three neural networks, or ‘brains’:
Head Brain Prime Functions
- Cognitive Perception: cognition, perception, pattern recognition, etc.
- Thinking: reasoning, abstraction, analysis, synthesis, meta-cognition etc.
- Making meaning: semantic processing, languaging, narrative, metaphor, etc.
Heart Brain Prime Functions
Emoting: emotional processing (e.g. anger, grief, hatred, joy, happiness etc.)- Values: processing what’s important to you and your priorities (and its relationship to the emotional strength of your aspirations, dreams, desires, etc.)
- Relational Affect: your felt connection with others (e.g. feelings of love/hate/indifference, compassion/uncaring, like/dislike, etc.)
Gut Brain Prime Functions
Core Identity: a deep and visceral sense of core self, and determining at the deepest levels what is ‘self’ versus ‘not-self’- Self-preservation: protection of self, safety, boundaries, hunger and aversions
- Mobilisation: motility, an impulse for action, gutsy courage and the will to act
As you can see, each brain has a different functional intelligence with different goals that operate with different criteria. This different way of processing the world with their different concerns and domains of competence was a tool I adapted to lift the cloud I awoke under.
With the use of my head brain, I applied logic and the writing of this post. With my heart brain I put on my favourite French soul singer, Madeleine Peyroux, and danced and sung along. And, for my gut brain I’ve made sure I feel safe, sated with good nourishing food and have set steps to action for what I need to achieve this afternoon with the continuation of my script-writing for the Practical Emotional Intelligence course I’m producing.
You can do this too when you feel your creativity is blocked. Check-in with each of your brains and make sure each is comforted in just the way they need.
To learn more about these beautiful cards that inspire so much deep thinking from me, you can visit Kym’s Insta @kym_creative or get your own deck at Kym Creative.
Blessed be,
