GIVING ROOM TO CREATIVITY
Trilogos Monthly Impulse No 11
For a few moments, leave habits,
predictability and all that you cherish behind.
Dare to depart from the harbor of safety,
and from all your known thoughts and feelings.
Have trust in the new, in your own magic,
which you are now able to perceive.
The sea of life awaits you,
and shall again transform you
and bring you back to a place of safety.
Linda Vera
Dear course participants,
Creativity can express itself in many different ways. It may be the spark that inspires an entire generation of scientists to delve into a new area of research, or have a sweeping effect by manifesting spontaneously at precisely the right time. Creativity reaches its apogee when it touches other people and deepens and beautifies their lives.
Sometimes a single sentence is enough to make a difference ...
While creativity is with each of us at all times, it isn’t always in reach. However, if we give it space and nourish it, it will be sure to show its blossoms. Scientific research has long since determined that creativity follows a certain sequence, understood as the creative process.
No matter how long a creative process may take or which area of life it concerns, the process usually takes place in four phases.
1. Identifying the problem
2. Preparation
3. Creation
4. Evaluation
In the following, I will summarize each of these phases, which you too can engage in at anytime and anywhere.
IDENTIFYING THE PROBLEM
The initial trigger for most creative acts is an inner need to want to express oneself, for example, to create a work of art or build handcrafted items. This happens when our external or internal circumstances call for change, for a solution.
The need to want to express oneself can be accompanied by inner restlessness, vivid dreams or a feeling of emptiness that longs to be filled.
It is now crucial to identify the problem, meaning to recognize and name it. Indeed, only when we identify the problem can it rise to the surface of our daily consciousness.
PREPARATION
In the next phase, the preparation phase, our mind comes into play, providing us with an indispensable service. It is important, however, that you do NOT analyze or evaluate quite yet and instead engage in so-called lateral thinking.
Lateral thinking = refers to conscious lateral thinking, as applied, for example, to solve mental blockages. The typical tools for this are provocation through contradictions, exaggeration, leaps of thought, assumption of the exact opposites.
We begin by gathering knowledge around our question and pondering about it. This can take place externally, through research or conversations with other people and experts, as well as through intensive internal questioning and recollections of our own knowledge, situations and incidents— together allowing us, following a central theme, to become increasingly aware of the topic.
As you do this, your intuition sets a process into motion that becomes self-perpetuating and that will eventually present you with answers or solutions.
CREATION
In this creation phase—the crucial phase of the process—associations are being made as if on their own, without our interference. IT works inside us, and as if by magic new connections are formed. Things begin to fall into place, and answers or works of art crystallize, initially as ideas that implore us to be brought into the world through our work and creation. Hence, a musician may well perceive an entire orchestral work in his inner ear, or a painter may well see his painting before his inner eye, finished and in its entirety, before setting out to actually create it.
Goethe applied his “intuitive judgment” (anschauende Urteilskraft) again and again to place himself into the stream of the cosmos as a method to acquire the novel knowledge and fundamental realizations that his life’s work is known for. It isn’t much different with the Trilogos®Method.
EVALUATION
In the fourth and last phase, all the new ideas, suggestions and impulses are subjected to a “suitability test.”
For this purpose, we use our logical mind, which helps us to “play through” different scenarios in our head and to filter out that which is impossible to implement. This may even engender a whole new process loop that can trigger yet another creative process.
This process of selection and/or adaptation is necessary to clarify the goal and facilitate its implementation in the material world—your everyday life.
You can support the creative process in various ways. One of the main ways is, as always, relaxation and letting go.
FLASH-RELAXATION – a small exercise |
Sit comfortably on a chair and breathe deeply three or four times until you feel like you’re centered. Now focus your attention on any point a yard or two ahead of you; and it could well be something as banal as the wall or the floor. Your gaze will remain focused on this point throughout the exercise, although it may become softer and become a bit blurry. And as you continue to gaze at the point, you are also engaging your peripheral field of vision ... such that you have some sense of what is occurring to your left and right. While you continue to hold your eyes gazing straight ahead, you work on turning everything in your imagination, everything that you perceive coming from any and all directions, green ... Imagine yourself dipping a large, wide brush into a can of paint, and then gradually coloring the space in your peripheral field of vision green. Then close your eyes, breathe in and out deeply several times – and feel the relaxation in your spirit and mind as you slowly return to reality. Then close your eyes, take several deep breaths in and out—and feel the relaxation in your mind as you slowly return to the space you’re presently in. |
Source Trilogos Guidebook: CREATIVITY – Power of Change by Linda Vera Roethlisberger. Page 34. |
The universal Creative Power permeates, nourishes and feeds people. The individual human Creative Power (SQ = Spiritual Intelligence) is perceived as a divine spark from which the true and thus Higher Self strengthens its ego power in relation to the self, constantly fills the shadow sides with light, and thereby -thanks to our IQ+EQ- empowers the person to become the architect of his own fortune.
Especially in these days before Christmas time and with a lookout towards the NEW YEAR 2023: may your joy in active co-creation continue to grow and to bear fruit.
May you find many answers, solutions and creative ideas.
Yours,
Linda Roethlisberger
www.trilogos.com
PS: Those wishing to find out more about the creative process may want to read The Art of Thought, by Graham Wallas, in which the author outlines a four-phase process to developing one’s creativity.