Embody Your Creative Spirit

Course Description

We all came into the world with a creative spirit, and one of our challenges is to embody and give form to this spirit. How do we know which creative spirit or spirits are alive in us, and what does it take to learn to embody the spirit? Through this process we are in service to something higher than ourselves, (that what Jungian psychology calls the individuation process), and we can make a positive contribution to the world as well live a more colorful and meaningful life. 

These interviews will explore this topic from different angles, such as embodiment work, dream work, Jungian psychology, mythology and spirituality. We will also provide practical exercises and tools for those that would want to bring their creative spirit further into the world. 

Your life is a creative expression of who you are. You can learn about yourself by taking on this perspective. New parts of yourself will make itself known, and will ask you to relate to them. Life is a continuous stream and we are often asked to find new answers and new ways of being when presented with troubles. 

You can also get a greater sense of your personal journey through engagement with your creativity. What does the way you live your life reveal about who you are? About your potential? And why are you here? 

This course is interview-style. Machiel Klerk and Akke-Jeanne Klerk – Jung Platform founders and siblings –spoke with these experts to create the Embody your Creative Spirit summit. This course is a remastering of that summit.

Light your creative spark with twelve inspired teachers from different walks of life.

The classes are available now.

This course is ideal if you want to:

• tap into your creativity and respond more optimally to life situations.
• get unstuck and let the creative spirit of life flow through you.
• connect with your creative spirit and live a meaningful life—a life that is authentically yours.

Course Overview

Class 1:Mythic Creativity with Michael Meade

The hypnotic storyteller Michael Meade weaves mythic tales with street savvy insights into a practical way of being with creativity. In this session, Meade talks about the various ways we can find and connect with our creative muse, bringing for us the good news that everyone, not only the artists, has a muse. Creativity is a larger force than ourselves—it is spirit, the muse, the divine. It wants to flow through us, be expressed, and given to the community around us.

Meade shares rituals we can engage in to help us move through these different stages of creativity. He shares myths that have to do with endings and beginnings. These myths show how creativity is present, in abundance, during times of ending, danger, and despair. Times of chaos also births creativity and will lead us to the next phase of life, in an never-ending dance of chaos, order, and ongoing creativity.

Class 2: Living Your Embodied Soul Spark with Tina Stromsted

Join this session with Tina Stromsted. Creativity, she says, is the ‘divine child’ within us. Our body, the temple holding this creativity inside it, dreams of the potential yet to come. But the task is not simple. Even though it can spring up through the cracks of adversity, pointing to where our life’s energy is taking us, the creative spirit needs tending and cherishing for it to bloom.
Breath, curiosity, and a hovering awareness allow us to become more comfortable with the unknown. As we open ourselves to the deep treasures that have been incubating in the dark, the creative spark sets into motion events that bring a profound sense of nourishment and renewal from an inner source.
Through Jung’s Active Imagination and natural movement, we can give form to what was not yet visible in the unconscious. And, we can then begin the dialogue with it—through free writing, dance, drawing, dream work, singing, and other arts—to inform, direct, and enrich our life. These embodied methods allow the body to remember why it is here, its purpose, its destination that is experiencing healing, embodiment, and incarnation—in ourselves, in our community, and the life we hope to see in the world.

Class 3: Creative Spirit and Dreams with Machiel Klerk

Dreams are a source of wisdom. They provide clues about our calling in life, they guide us in relationship matters, connect us to what truly matters to us, and they can also help us to express ourselves in our own unique ways.
This summit session is about asking your dream for guidance to connect and engage with the Creative Spirit that is alive in all of us. We can do this through a technique called ‘dream incubation’. Dream Incubation is also found in many spiritual traditions; we ask our night time dreams for guidance. Machiel Klerk (Jung Platform Founder) wrote a book on this topic that is available now. He explains how this effective technique can help us to be close to our Creative Spirit and give expression to it.

Class 4: Find Your Own Lure of Becoming with Jean Houston

This session with Jean Houston, a world-renowned global catalyst and one of the principal founders of the human potential movement, is about reaching for and touching into the creative genius. For this we need our imagination. Jean Houston talks about stuckness and how to break through (old) patterns of stuckness, as well as what imagination can do to create a breakthrough.
In this session, she also offers an exercise, in which she encourages us to dwell on an image of the future. This exercise helps to sense that life has a passion for each of us. This is what she calls ‘the lure of becoming’. By expanding our consciousness of our co-creative powers, and by allowing imagination to be part of life, we touch into our own creativity. It becomes clear that our lives are creative self-expressions; we don’t necessarily need artistic talents or creativity—“the recreation of yourself is the greatest form of creativity.”
This session is lead by our guest host Stephen Aizenstat.

Class 5: Soulful Creativity with Thomas Moore

Creativity can make life sacred, says Thomas Moore. In this session, he suggests ways to open the doors to a life rich in the blessings of everyday creativity. Moore talks about the old times when people saw creativity as a direct link to God, to the divine, to that which is greater than us. Taking inspiration from this period, he calls for a re-imagining of the creative process, into a way of living that nourishes the spirit, and promises to bring awe and beauty to the smallest details of everyday life. This creativity, born of the soul, Moore teaches, is a path to self-enrichment open to each one of us.

For Moore, soulful creativity is a craft, an ongoing process that requires work, love, and tending. This is different from the vertical flashes of inspiration, which while they are part of the creative process, do not encompass the whole creative journey.

Class 6: Inviting the Creative Genius into Your Life with Robert Bosnak

The world today asks for creativity and creative expression of ourselves. However, more often than not, we are limited by our habitual consciousness and as a result, we end up recreating certain patterns of response. These patterns may have served us in the past but are no longer relevant in approaching the world in the present times. This session is about cracking open routine consciousness so that the light of the Creative Genius can enter. Dutch Jungian Analyst Robert Bosnak will explain how this can be done with a therapeutic and creative form of working with dreams and memories that he has called Embodied Imagination®.

Class 7: Creativity as an Expression of the Soul with Stephen Aizenstat

Creativity as an expression of the soul emanates from a soulful engagement with the psyche. This session with Stephen Aizenstat focuses on developing a practice that cultivates this soul-enriched creativity.
Aizenstat suggests that connecting to the Soul can be as simple as taking a step back. That is, we pause, we open our senses, and develop curiosity for what we encounter in nature, on a stroll through the city, in a mood, a song, a dream, or a fantasy figure. Our relationship with these ordinary experiences changes when we see them as ‘visitations’. When we develop a sensitivity, a responsiveness to these experiences, we start feeling more alive, more creative, and connected to our soul’s purpose.

Class 8: Expressing Spontaneous Creativity with Tenzin Wangyal Rimpoche

Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche shares, from the Bon Buddhist tradition, his perspective on creativity. He says that everyone’s essential nature is creative. When we are connected to the source of being then joy, humor, playfulness, and creativity, naturally arise. When you express the creativity emanating from this space, it is sacred. This sacred creativity, when expressed, has deep meaning and purpose and benefits everyone.
However, we might often have blockages in our engagement with creativity. These blocks could be the lack of time, the mounting bills to pay, the fear of the process, the belief of ‘I can’t’, and so on. Rinpoche addresses how we can engage with these blockages by turning towards them with an open mind and attitude. In this session, Rinpoche will walk us through the different phases of creativity and teach us a meditation that we can practice to get in touch with our innate spontaneous creative nature.

Class 9: The Full Expression of Your Voice with Barbara McAfee

Your voice is the primary way your ideas and inspirations find their way into the world. Nothing much can happen without it. Opening more sound and freedom in your voice is a powerful way to enliven your creative spirit.
In this interview, master voice coach and singer/songwriter Barbara McAfee will offer tools and insights for tapping the power of voice in your creative life. We’ll explore the role of voice in bringing the unconscious into consciousness, and how sacred play can awaken the unexpressed potential within us. Join this joyful conversation!

Class 10: Divine Creativity with Andrew Harvey

Enhanced creativity flows out of a deepening realization of the divine and helps root the divine truth and joy in the human experience. No one exemplifies this more than Kabir, the great 15th-century Indian saint. Andrew Harvey has spent ten years translating his poetry and will share his excitement and initiation with the participants. Andrew is himself infused with the divine creativity and exuberance we aspire to; and, this session is an invitation to experience the transcendental and wild creative state infused with the energies of Andrew Harvey and the divinely-inspired Indian saint. Andrew will share his findings on how to open up to the glory of the divine, engage with this tremendous force, and be a vessel for it in the world.

Class 11: The Deep Source of Creativity with Dennis Slattery

Creativity is an opportunity to take risks—risk-taking is myth-making, states Dennis P. Slattery.

But what do creative moments look like? Are they extraordinary, elusive, and rare or can they be part of our common and ordinary lives? In this session, Slattery states and shows that with an open, porous, and creative attitude, everything we do and experience, can be moments of creativity. That is, all of our daily life engagements have the potential to and can be creative.

The deep source of creativity innate within each of us, can be engaged through creative practices; Slattery also shows us their importance and their capacity to guide us in our yearnings to create. The session also delves into the dynamics of creativity and our limitations, imperfections, and boundaries.

Class 12: Virtual Identities and Creativity with Alia Aizenstat

In this interview, Alia Aizenstat, a licensed psychotherapist and digital responsibility educator, will explore one of the new frontiers—the digital world—where the creative spirit can be ignited, embodied, and pushed to the furthest edges of possibility.
The digital world has expanded the limits of reality and has become the boundless frontier of creative imagination. In this place, curiosity meets imagination and imagination meets embodied experiences. This session explores how creativity is played out online as a means of searching for and manifesting soul, spirit, and identity. It will look at the negative and positive effects of having virtual identities in our lives.
Alia will show how depth psychology can help us integrate our virtual identities that otherwise might remain fragmented and unacknowledged. How do we embody our virtual identities? We will conclude this session by exploring how creativity and embodying virtual identities can be the high play acting out the soul’s desire. That is, maybe we do not escape ourselves online, but we meet a deeper Me within the Metaverse.

Bonus Video 1: Ripped Paper Composition with Janet Martha

In this physical, colorful, and spontaneous creative exercise, you will be guided to remember what you knew as a child, how to perceive your world sensually and then, actively shape it. You’re guaranteed a visually evocative and expressive result. Play with Janet for 15 minutes to unblock creative juices.

Bonus Video 2: Haiku Poetry with Janet Martha

This creative writing exercise is emotional and contemplative inviting the imagination to make the invisible, visible. Haiku is a form of Japanese poetry that consists of only 3 lines. It takes a snapshot, in words, of a moment, catching connections between strangers, trees, cars, clouds, and sticks in the puddle and what that stirs within us.

Bonus Video 3: Invite Your Creative Genius into Your Life with Robert Bosnak

If you feel a desire to create value, to make a difference and foster change in this world, Alchemy and Robert Bosnak can help you do so. In this first 90 minute class (of a 10 class course), you will get a taste of how to crack the routine consciousness so the light of Creative Genius can come in.

Bonus Video 4: Film about Kabir by Andrew Harvey

This film is made by Andrew Harvey about Kabir in the ancient city of Benares. It accompanies the conversation with Harvey in this course, and is a gift to you. Enjoy!

Bonus Audio: Elements Warm-up Exercise with Barbara McAfee

When we shift our voices into new territories, particularly those outside of our current identity, we can begin to reclaim the suppressed aspects of ourselves. This voice warm-up exercise helps you to open up and explore the full range of your voice. A playful attitude is key to this process.

By the end of this course you will:

• explore your somatic awareness, artistic creativity, and imagination.
• learn how to express yourself creatively.
• learn about your creative spirit and how to invite it into your life.
• gain the confidence to be creative and get inspired to realize your talent.