BY AUSTIN HILL SHAW

“Wisdom hath builded her house. Come and enjoy my bread and wine which I have mixed for you.”

—Proverbs 9:1 and 5

My fourteen-month-old daughter loves to swing. I take her to the playground, slot her little legs into the safety seat, position her hands on the chain, give her a dramatic countdown as I lift the swing upward, then, her eyes wide in anticipation, Blastoff! I let the swing go and she squeals with delight.

When we first started I proceeded with caution, making sure she felt safe and that her large head atop her little neck wasn’t being jerked around. As the months wore on I began pushing her higher and higher, egged on by her obvious enjoyment. Sometimes it seemed like I might be pushing too hard. The swing would wobble, her eyes would roll back in her head, and she would go silent. As her father who wants nothing more than for her to thrive and feel loved and protected, I immediately slowed the pace and asked if she was okay. Startlingly enough, she would look me in the eye, remove her hands from the chain, and vigorously touch her fingertips together in front of her chest, sign language for “More!”

What is it that my daughter likes so much about the moments when the swing twists and jerks and things get a little out of control? Is it a break from her routine of being coddled? Is it a chance to feel the joy of motion months before she can walk on her own? Or is there something happening which is far more profound, something that points to more fundamental drives in all of us?

To understand my daughter’s experience, we must delve into a basic yet somewhat ill-reputed desire that affects us all—intoxication. The word intoxication has two distinct yet interrelated meanings. On one hand it implies inebriation: the impairment of motor skills and a compromised ability to think rationally, qualities that we disdainfully associate with drunkards and misfits. Intoxication is also associated with exhilaration, awe, the coveted experience of falling in love, even spiritual and religious transcendence. Intoxication in this latter sense isn’t reserved for the seemingly broken and maladjusted, but for the visionaries, innovators, poets, and mystics, those celebrated human catalysts stirring the pot of progress and innovation.

For humans, especially little ones like my daughter, with each new ability gained there is also the accompanying desire to test it, to engage it in different ways. For example, she recently started walking, which involved balance and coordination. But soon thereafter, she learned how to spin, a feat that compromised her ability to stand upright. The combination of her first balancing, then spinning and then falling down, gave her perspective. It allowed her in her playful way to appreciate the value of both. Experientially she learned what to avoid if she intended to stay upright and also what to do if standing upright for some reason became boring.

These cycles of first establishing one’s footing, then falling down for one reason or another have driven the progression of humankind since the beginning. But how does it work? How does intoxication serve creative innovation? As its two main definitions imply, intoxication compromises, or suspends, certain abilities that we rely on habitually so that shier insights and abilities can come to the foreground. Like well-placed stoplights along a busy street, intoxication can skillfully stop the prevalent flow of mental traffic so that other, quieter streets (of consciousness) can allow their passengers travel time.

With all this in mind, it is my belief that intoxication is the biological desire driving the plasticity of the brain itself. By its very nature, intoxication derails our ability to conduct business as usual, leaving us unable to do certain activities, but open to fresh ways of seeing the world. If we embrace intoxication as a natural part of our body-mind makeup, we can utilize those miraculous states as catalysts for our own growth, creativity, and full-person integration. In this way, we don’t look at intoxication as simply “checking out,” “taking a load off,” or “blowing off steam.” We celebrate it for what it is—our intelligent bodies, our expansive hearts, and our powerful yet habit-prone minds asking us to take a breather from our own tired world view.

So the next time you feel the urge to make your swing twist and shake, the next time you grow weary of walking a straight line from one pre-planned appointment to the next, honor that voice that desires to scramble you, that voice that desires to set things off-kilter. Cozy on up to your own well-to-do persona running aground on the rocky shores of the unknown. Feel your ship splinter. Allow your masthead to fall into the sea. Drown for a spell—and then resurface.

By submitting to intoxicating experiences we allow them to push us forth in new, enlivening directions, and guide us deeper and deeper into the awesome mystery that surrounds us. In this light, intoxication, when seen for what it really is, can be a wise teacher and a valued friend during our life’s journey.

Austin Hill Shaw is a keynote speaker and founder of the Core Needs Design Method, a pioneering approach to architecture that seeks to connect design clients to both themselves and the land their project occupies. Check out his innovative offerings at 3LightsDesign.com

The Bay Area is the most creative and innovative region in the United States, if not the world. Home to such major players as Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Oracle, and numerous others, the Bay Area receives a whopping 32% of all the venture capital invested in the United States, according to a recent report by the Bay Area Regional Center. It also has the highest concentration of Fortune 500 companies after New York.

All the money and innovation aside, the Bay Area has either begun or fostered the growth of many influential cultural movements—the counterculture movement, free speech, gay rights, California cuisine and the local foods movement, the Internet, municipal recycling programs, beat poetry and literature, psychedelic experimentation, and the otherworldliness of Burning Man.

The question is why? What are some of the factors inherent in the Bay Area that foster such an outpouring of creativity and innovation? If we look at the Bay Area not so much as a place, but as a living being, three governing factors come to mind.

Body: The Grinding Geology

In the grand scheme of things, human beings came on the scene only a short time ago. Yet, there’s been an incredible outpouring of nonhuman-driven creativity that’s transformed our universe from the singularity of the Big Bang to the luminous display of such things as redwood trees, the Golden Gate, and the California poppy.

I call this force the Ground of Creativity, which, as best I can describe it, is driven by three components: dynamism, interdependence, and mystery. In a region prone to earthquakes, which are the result of forces playing themselves out on a global scale, there is a felt sense of the Ground of Creativity at work.

Geologically, the Bay Area lies inside the frayed boundary separating two tectonic behemoths—to the west, the Pacific Plate and to the east, the North American Plate. Between the prongs of the San Andreas Fault to the west and the Hayward and Calaveras Faults to the east, the music of the earth rings out as barely audible whispers, animated melodies, and the occasional cataclysmic cacophony.

Since creativity and destruction are two sides of the same coin (in order to create anything, something must be destroyed or transformed), those who get to feel the occasional shrugs of the earth also gain valued, experiential insight into the dynamic, interdependent, creative universe we inhabit.

Mind: The Great Cultural Mashup

Consider a coral reef sitting along the shoreline. In such places, the land and the sea are in an endless conversation on the subjects of movement and stability, moist and dry, light and dark, animate and inanimate—a conversation that produces a rich and teeming diversity of life. It’s no different with human creativity in places of cultural diversity. When different cultural mindsets rub shoulders with one another, new creative ideas naturally come to the surface.

Although the San Francisco Bay Area is technically part of the Western world, it is really something different altogether—a cultural coral reef of sorts where the importance of the individual (Western thought) meets the importance of the group (Eastern thought), which fosters the Bay Area’s particular style and grand outpouring of creativity and innovation. In essence, the collision of two very different worldviews, and many others, fosters Bay Area creativity and innovation through cross-pollination.

Spirit: The Feng Shui Factor

Here’s my favorite way of understanding the Bay Area’s vast creative outpouring, as told to me by one of the Bay Area’s most luminous and beloved feng shui teachers, Ming Liu.

In the same way that we can’t see the wind but can see its effects as it blows over a body of water, feng shui describes the play of energies, sometimes visible, sometimes not, on our experience of the world. Like the moon reflecting the sun’s brilliance in the dead of night, when it comes to feng shui, we often can’t see the source of energy directly, but we can see its effects on other objects.

According to Ming Liu, while no feng shui is inherently good or bad, the Bay Area has particularly unusual feng shui. The cold, low, shape-shifting Pacific Ocean is polarized against the hot, dry, highly cultivated land of the Central Valley. Between these air masses, a dynamic tension is set up, mitigated and sculpted by both the coastal ranges and East Bay Hills but also allowed to mix and swirl just east of the hallowed opening of the Golden Gate.

In other words, the yin of the ocean (feminine energy) is allowed to dance and play with the yang of the hot, dry land (masculine energy), producing the energy that fuels creativity and innovation in the region.

Walking about the Bay Area, especially around San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, Richmond, and parts of Marin, one notices that the air itself has a different quality. It is marine air—inundating the land, producing warmer temperatures in the winter, colder temperatures and signature fog in the summer, and at night, what a friend of mine used to call “the infinity haze,” a shimmering aura visible around streetlights.

What results is a felt sense of being smack in the middle of an unending courtship between a beautiful, emotive, life-giving woman and a powerful, steadfast, purposeful man. And when it comes to creativity and innovation, that’s a wild, wonderful, and extremely fortuitous place to be!

Austin Hill Shaw is the founder of Creativity Matters and author of The Shoreline of Wonder: On Being Creative. He works with individuals who want to unlock their full creative potential and organizations that want to build cultures of innovation. AustinHillShaw.com.

BY AUSTIN HILL SHAW

It’s true the wind blows terribly here
but moonlight also leaks between
the roof planks of this ruined house.
—Izumi Shikibu

What do the origins of Newton’s law of universal gravitation, the building of the Golden Gate Bridge, and the design of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial all have in common? All are both celebrated acts of creativity and acts of healing in times of tragedy and loss.

While creativity’s power can be seen in the way it transcends the boundaries between science and technology, art and business, and religion and spirituality, there’s one aspect that is often overlooked: creativity has the power to heal.

By examining the origins of creative insight, our drive to manifest those insights, and the celebrated space of creative flow, we’ll unveil how creativity and a creative approach to life returns us again and again to the very source of healing itself: to the primordial wisdom and wakefulness that underlies everything, to the “Self” in Self-expression.

The Relationship between
Creativity and Healing

Creativity is a defining trait of being human as well as a skill we can actively cultivate. As an experience, my definition of creativity is simple: creativity is connecting with the world and affecting it in a meaningful way. Connecting with the world, allowing its vibrant aliveness to come rushing in, provides us with insights. Affecting the world in a meaningful way allows us to give form to those insights and share them with others, which is what I call manifestation. Finally, passively connecting and actively affecting at the same time affords us the experience of creative flow—what I call Selfexpression.

And herein lie the reasons we’re so drawn to create: as my definition implies, traversing the multifaceted landscape of the creative process fulfills our uniquely human needs, including our need to feel connected, our need to make a difference, and our need to experience our lives as meaningful. And consciously or otherwise, all of us are driven to fulfill such needs.

As for healing, every one of us is fundamentally whole and complete, and also sometimes in need of healing in order to re-establish our felt sense of wholeness. This may seem contradictory, but it’s not. Like the ocean, our felt sense of wholeness—our ineffable sense of being part of a vast, interdependent, and luminous cosmos—is the foundation of our awareness, an awareness that is sometimes known as the Self. The Self connects us with wisdom, with the proverbial lightbulb beaming above our heads.

Like waves upon the ocean, a smaller, localized version of this awareness, an awareness sometimes known as ego, steps outside of the felt sense of wholeness so that it can interact with the world around it as a seemingly separate entity, which facilitates challenge, learning, and growth. The ego allows us to practice compassion, to carry things out for the benefit of others.

The paths of both creativity and healing, then, play themselves out in the tension between the Self’s orientation toward unity and the ego’s orientation toward separation.

Transcendence, Transformation,
and Transmutation

Let’s look at the three core components of creativity—insight, manifestation, and Self-expression—and see how each facilitates healing.

First is the aha moment of creative insight. When we find ourselves in such moments, we experience our awareness rising above the confines of limiting beliefs, habitual patterns, and cul-de-sac reasoning. In other words, we transcend, and in transcending we experience the world in new and enlivening ways, ways that are often beyond words but which are accompanied by a deep, felt sense of truth. In this way, transcendence isn’t really an escape from the realities of the world, but a return to them, a return to the vibrant wholeness that is always, already available—a return, in essence, to the awareness of the Self.

When Newton’s legendary apple fell to the ground, for example, it wasn’t just the moon hanging in the background. The Black Plague was sweeping over London, and Cambridge had closed its doors, leaving the young scholar a castaway from his beloved world of academia. In his contemplative, perhaps melancholy state (a state, by the way, clinically proven to increase creativity) he experienced that whatever was drawing the apple toward the earth and whatever was holding the moon in place was the same, thereby transcending the reigning view of the church that the laws governing heaven and those governing earth had to be fundamentally different.

Transcendence satisfies our need for connection, enabling us to quilt together the seemingly separate and disjointed.

Next is manifestation, the work of taking our creative insights and giving them form. When manifesting, our ego does most of the heavy lifting, enabling us to evaluate, to delegate, and to plan and carry out those plans. Manifestation allows us to heal through transformation. Through our willingness to engage, we feel the impact of our actions transforming the world as well as the push back from the world transforming us.

The Golden Gate Bridge, for example, with its lavish art deco embellishments, was erected in the wake of the Great Depression, the grandeur and aesthetic themselves counter balancing the prevailing sense of poverty and lack. Furthermore, the challenge of building it, funded in part by the New Deal, provided joy, satisfaction, and wages to the previously unemployed.

Some manifestations are very personal and involve us transforming the world in very localized ways. The journal on your nightstand, for example, becomes filled with words as you work to make sense of your dreams. When transformation has a larger sphere of influence, it becomes known as innovation. Truly innovative products, services, and ways of being always have a healing component to them too; they create new possibilities for us to engage the world around us, thus re-establishing wholeness by delighting us, reducing drudgery, or by actively tackling one of our planet’s pressing challenges.

Regardless of scale, transformation satisfies our need to make a difference, as well as our desire to grow and learn through challenge and effort.

Finally, there’s Self-expression, which provides the highest form of healing, a healing known as transmutation. Self-expression combines the passive experience of insight with the work of manifesting those insights at the same time. Furthermore, as opposed to simply rising above or reshaping something, transmutation faces the darkness head on, converting it into fuel for ardent creative expression. Like a magnifying glass gathering the rays of the sun, when Self-expressing, the primordial awareness of the Self is channeled through the ego, through discrete words, thoughts, and actions. Such is seen in the power underlying a great speaker or performer, or the presence of a skilled and caring physician.

Self-expression can also be felt in projects such as the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, which sought not to glorify war but to put visitors into the tragedy of the experience itself. The names of over 58,000 American soldiers who died in the conflict are etched in a stark wall of polished black granite, which reflects your own image as you read through the names, providing both an opportunity to heal and a visceral reminder not to repeat such things. In the words of the memorial’s designer, Maya Lin, “I wanted to cut the earth and polish the scar.”

Like a bolt of lightning joining heaven and earth, transmuting through Self-expression fulfills our uniquely human need to experience our lives as meaningful, even in the face of tragedy and loss, the meaning itself residing not in any idea or concept, but in the fullness of the experience itself, including the fullness of joy and grief alike.

We Are Meant to Create

As fish are meant to swim, and birds are meant to fly, we humans are meant to create, and in doing so, by connecting with the world and affecting it in a meaningful way, to re-establish our felt sense of being part of a dynamic, inter-dependent, deeply mysterious universe.

No matter what it is that you choose to do with your life, when you do it creatively, when you bring the awareness of both your finite ego and your absolute Self into everything you do, you bring profundity, purpose, and healing.

And that is a gift to us all.

Austin Hill Shaw works with individuals who want to unlock their full creative potential and with organizations that want to build cultures of innovation. AustinHillShaw.com