Exploring the Creative Self

Course Description

In this live course, our skilled faculty member Dennis P. Slattery dives deep into the Creative Self and its relationship to spiritual development. 

Each of us has a yearning, a hunger, to make something of ourselves. This statement implies a making and a shaping of a life into some coherent form. Such making is the original sense of the word poiesis. A formative principle in the soul is awakened when we create analogies of ourselves in whatever form they may take and, perhaps, in different formats as we age. In creating we become witnesses to our own power, our inner authority, that allows us to live each day more deeply and more mindfully. 

The Jungian analyst, Linda Schierse Leonard, discovered that “creativity is a response to a call of nature and psyche to the wilderness within and without,” and that such a response is also related to our spiritual growth” (The Call to Create: Celebrating Acts of Imagination ( 2000, p. 4). 

Her insight reveals how mythically-inflected is our yearning to leave a trace, to be part of a larger community, and to live a life of mindfulness, which is to be intimate with and guided by our own incarnational reality.

This course is ideal if

• Explore your creative Self and increase your creativity
• Be engaged in writing meditations
• Seek greater consciousness
• Deepen your understanding of the Creative Self

Course Overview

Class 1. Creativity: Its Essential Principles and the Spirituality That Guide Us.

The focus here will be on two texts of inspiration: Deep Creativity: Seven Ways to Spark Your Creative Spirit by Deborah Anne Quibell, PhD; Jennifer Leigh Selig, PhD, and Dennis Patrick Slattery, PhD. Published in 1999, it was awarded  first place in a Nautilus Book Award in 2020, under the category of “Creativity and Inspiration.” We will look at the creative inception of the book and at stories that will encourage your creative self. The other is A Pilgrimage Beyond Belief: Spiritual Journeys Through Christian and Buddhist Monasteries of the American West, which surveys Slattery’s pilgrimage of faith as well as the nutrients that fed this creative hunger that will surely relate to parts of your stories.

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Class 2. Wounding and Healing: The Place of Embodied Suffering and Creative Healing.

This presentation will relate Slattery’s own upbringing in a violent alcoholic household which, in retrospect, was the impetus for my life’s work. I want to call it “suffering into one’s destiny” and it will, I am certain, touch on your own woundedness as a source of creative power. Our wounds can lead us to wonder, and to be curious on a deep level; wounds can be one of the most important ingredients for cultivating a creative life. In addition, the energy that gathers around our suffering, of loss, of fragmentation and of disabilities is often the seedling that finds soil to prosper in.

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Class 3. Creating a Life of Coherence: Moses and the Burning Bush of Poetic Inspiration. 

Slattery finds in the rich story of Moses a moment of creative insight. While  tending his flocks he comes upon a burning bush just off his routine path in life; it serves  as a delicious metaphor for discovering our life purpose while we might have been busy tending to a flock of incoherence. The poet Rumi tells us in verse, “Moses, the inner light of revelation/lit up the top of Sinai, but the mountain/could not hold that light” (1990 Delicious Laughter, p. 44). We will explore Moses’ fear, his imperfect speech, and his reticence to step off the familiar path; within these human responses, he discovers, with God’s guidance, his true calling.

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Class 4. Creative Aging: Recognizing the Wisdom of Becoming Older.

Aging is a time for deepening, and our mortality a time for musing, for remembering and for recognizing the large patterns that have guided us to the moment we are now in life. It is also a time to reflect on what we do to nourish this precious, tender place in us, where we open ourselves and risk our vulnerability in order to gain access to dimensions of life that we may have previously ignored, but now want to return to reevaluate our past in light of the present. Being grateful can open us to presences that insist on some attention, and seeing where freedoms that we had not noticed, are budding in the garden of our lives. We will explore the direct and intimate connection between mindfulness, gratefulness and ‘createfulness’.

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Preparation

Be sure to have a journal or a notebook close by; each class is both conversational and experiential as we call up parts of our own unique narrative and note where creative impulses, attitudes and desires have nourished us, given the four areas outlined above.

By the end of this course you will

• Experience several creative dimensions of ourselves
• Have an understanding of how to give form to your creativity
• Be able to explain the dual condition of our woundedness, and how wounding can affect the creative path
• Have explored mythological figure that lives inside, and know how to heed the call that can unfold our destiny
• Have gained greater awareness of who you are