10 Facets of the Creative Mind

We are ‘in relationship’ all the time: connected to other living beings, to our environments, to space and time, and most of all, to ourselves. Picture yourself on a grid of strings that stretch across the room, the city, the country, the world, the universe. When you move or change, you reverberate your own string, changing everything else on the grid. 

A creative encounter is an immersive, dynamic relationship between you and your subject.

A relationship can be fleeting or deeply entangled. The more entangled you are with your subject, the deeper you immerse into your research or creative project.

Relationship Facet Training begins with a deep dive into self, so that you are primed to truly connect with others and the environment. 

Relationship is connectivity. We practice the art and science of connectivity in all its many forms.

Receptivity is the ability to receive information both from within and without. 

We treat the body as a sentient instrument, the goal of which is to feel and express wonder and complication alike.

Receptivity Facet Training helps us to empty our instruments of preconceived constructs and judgments. 

 The Training reawakens our ability to receive vital information and experience that inform our research and creative work

We train to develop an extended mind and heart, fine-tuning and sensitizing our sensory systems so we are capable of receiving our interior and exterior world with pure curiosity and awe.

Life can be well described as the pursuit of balance. We live in continuous cycles, traveling between stability and instability, planting and harvesting, activity and hibernation. 

Similarly, in creative thinking we often understand something by contrasting it with its opposite: contraction and expansion, intuition and reason, light and dark, inner and outer, chaos and form. 

Equilibrium Facet Training hones our ability to hold the tension of the most extreme opposites with grace and firmness. If we remain in the friction, all the while flowing with cycles of increase and decay, something new can be sparked.

Mirroring is the practice of empathy in motion: experiencing and witnessing the experience at the same time. 

Mirroring involves an activation of mirror neurons in the brain, which enhances our ability to see ourselves reflected in another and the other reflected in ourselves. The neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran calls these “Gandhi neurons”– we can feel and actively relive another’s experience in our own body’s imagination as if it is happening to us.

Mirroring involves deeply engaging our keenest powers of reception to receive ourselves and the other with empathy. 

In Mirroring Facet Training, we practice deep listening and nuanced observation to expand our capacity to understand, empathize, and even anticipate the needs and behaviors of others, thereby deepening our experience of ourselves.

The ability to mirror self and others is key to creating something new and useful for the world. 

A catalyst is an agent of change that often leads to transformation. 

Change is a universal constant, the only thing that can never be stopped; it is also the thing many of us fear above all else. Yet change is the engine of the universe, the inciting incident in every story that sets the Hero/ine on their journey: You leave. They arrive. A magic ring is found. There has been an accident. She kisses you. You tell him a secret. The sky falls down. 

Whether the catalyst is as delicate as a feather or as fierce as a hurricane, it serves as a destabilizer, inciter, impetus, stimulant, or agitator–requiring us to respond, adapt, invent. 

Catalyst Facet Training teaches us to face our dragons and use them to make a new order or form out of the chaos that inevitably follows a rupture.

 We also learn how to overcome stagnation by throwing our own catalysts in our paths when necessary, purposefully altering the dynamics of a situation so that novelty can emerge. 

Flexible Attention is the ability to respond in the moment with agility and without getting stuck. 

Flexible Attention allows for ease in reversibility: the ability to react spontaneously in the moment with a corresponding shift.

 Flexible Attention is key to creative leaps because it is in the shift of attention that new neuronal networks are sparked, leading to creative solutions and innovations.

Flexible Attention Training exercises our ability to select where our attention is focused, while also allowing it to be soft and easily moved by incoming stimuli so that new information can be synthesized. 

We strive to “Hold on tightly and let go lightly,” a phrase from the Japanese Judo sensei of old referring to the yin and yang balance between two ideas that seem to be in opposition: the first being full commitment, and the second being the flexibility to adapt and make changes. 

Flow is pure presence resulting from harmonious absorption into a project, activity, or even another person. 

In a Flow State, self-consciousness and our sense of linear time are temporarily suspended, allowing fresh insights, serendipity and “aha” moments to spontaneously surface. 

In Flow, focus is singular, effortless, and total. In sports lingo it is called The Zone. This is the optimal state for creative thinking and emotional well-being. 

Flow Facet Training strengthens our ability to create the ideal internal and environmental conditions that allow us to achieve the Flow State and experience the kind of focused, electrical current we can observe in professional athletes or dancers.

We learn to access that current and ride it effortlessly so that we can function at the zenith of our interests and abilities.

A Liminal Space is the mysterious expanse between known forms. 

It is the betwixt and between; a transition; a threshold;  a fertile void of possibilities.

The unknown can often appear to us as a scary abyss, but it can also be a luminous gap: the invisible waiting to become visible.

Liminal Facet Training helps us to have the courage to peer into the unknown and understand it as a frontier of infinite abundance. It encourages us to step into the fertile void and to stay there when the going gets rough. 

We train to experience the discomfort of the unknown with persistence, curiosity, and stamina. We learn to explore Liminal Space with pure and patient reception, searching for the new and useful to emerge.

We function inside of endless and universal patterns: the seasons, growth, decay, space, time, the grids and spirals of our planet. 

Think of the Fibonacci spiral, a shape that can be found in everything from galaxies to flower petals. 

Our unique brains form patterns in order to organize the chaos swirling inside and around us. 

Our intuition works through unconscious pattern recognition. 

Our personalities are made from the patterns of our autobiography; some of these patterns are motifs that are useful to our lives and work, and some turn into the compulsive habits that limit us.

In Patterning Facet Training, we become more aware of our place in the cosmic dance of universal patterns and begin to recognize emerging patterns in a project or research we are immersed in. These newly emerging patterns often synthesize with universal patterns and can lead us to new insights and creative breakthroughs.

We become aware of which habits of thought and behavior are medicine and which are poison for our work and lives. We work to enhance some brain patterns and re-groove others. 

Synthesis is the most sophisticated aspect of the creative mind. Some scientists assert that the synthesizing mind is the most necessary for our current challenges, and therefore for our survival as a species and planet.

Synthesis is our capacity to discern potent, and often nuanced fragments of information from an ever-increasing barrage of input, and integrate them into original patterns.   

Synthesis is the ability to spin seemingly disparate pieces of information into spellbinding originality. 

During Synthesis, new kinds of neuronal activity are sparked and unlikely pathways connect and begin to dance together. This literally lights up the brain– our “lightbulb” moments.

In Synthesis Facet Training we practice using all the Ten Facets in concert, bringing together complex layers of perception, knowledge, and experience.  

We apply our Synthesizing Minds towards our individual projects, research, and life challenges; creating collages, mash-ups, compositions, and symphonies.