Transcript of CREATE! Life Changing Journeys Workshop Announcement
REGISTRATION FOR CREATE! Life-changing Journeys WORKSHOPS is officially open!
If you didn’t attend the FREE workshop series of three videos, you can still watch it here. It will be up for a few more days. Then come back for the workshop registration.
Life-changing! Big promise, big delivery. Here’s what’s possible: you can pretty quickly and easily maximize your psychedelic journeys by supporting them with the proven CREATE! technology.
Psychedelic journeys (and shamanic, creative, etc) can be peak experiences but catalyzing lasting change takes additional tools.
If you’re paying to experience journeys, you may not be getting your money’s or your time’s worth if you are not doing adequate preparation, intention setting, decoding and integration.
And if you are a guide, insuring that your client is well prepared, can decode the messages received and can integrate the session can make the difference between a client you see once and a client who comes back regularly to work with you because of the value you provide as you both watch their lives transform.
Learning and applying the simple 7-step CREATE! process to journey experiences is the key to unlocking that deeper wisdom and value for journeyers.
Let your journeys accelerate your healing, reveal the true essence of who you are as you awaken and deepen on your spiritual path and enable you to live a life you’ve only dreamed possible. And while it’s possible to do this alone, it’s much easier, faster and frankly, way more fun to do it in a community of like minded and like-hearted folks.
The ketamine case study I shared with you is such a great example of what’s possible when combining CREATE! with a psychedelic. The FIRST CREATE! write revealed the perfect journey intention. Turns out it was about shadow. The journey revealed golden shadows — three big amazing realizations: You are ecstatic (I am ecstatic), you are rich (I am rich), you are beautiful (I am beautiful). There was so much to integrate afterwards. I received a new power animal, a new ally — Dragon. Dragon showed up as the manifestation of technology in my life — which frankly had been causing me suffering, especially as I’ve learned to do these videos, post them to my website, figure out email lists and Facebook ads and, and, and. Now the frustration is gone. The hair pulling and gnashing of teeth when something doesn’t work immediately — gone. Befriending the Dragon is essential to my success with getting this workshop out in the world to the people who want and need it. AND THAT IS MY PRIME PURPOSE AT THIS STAGE OF MY LIFE.
Another gift that came a day later through the CREATE! integration process. I’ll read you an excerpt from the CREATE! write:
This medicine (meaning ketamine) releases your medicine.
Your medicine releases others’ medicine.
A healing wave washes over humanity.
Icebergs of trauma tumble into the welcoming arms of the sea.
Holy beauty reveals itself in all its glory, in all its grace, in all its world changing power.
Be the voice of transformation, of hope, of positive assurance, of challenge.
Not for the weary or weak.
Brave hearts all.
Courageous souls are called to the front lines as examples, as way showers, as truth tellers.
Never underestimate the power of truth telling.
Your soul’s voice only speaks truth.
Turn up the volume.
Be an instrument of holy beauty.
After 20 years of using CREATE! and more recently combining it with various psychedelics, I am consistently humbled by how powerful this work is in the lives of my students. My fellow adventurers. My community of creators.
Kirstin, who took this workshop last year, by her own description was “a writer who doesn’t write.” Within a couple of months of the workshop, she had written 90 poems.
David said: I cherish this — the holy source of creation. I also loved the community we created.
Margit, a coach, guide and my co-facilitator on this upcoming workshop said: I LOVE the power and alchemy of doing this work in group space - the messages are so full of nuance and learning, and they have the strange capacity to adapt themselves to so many different listeners. I guess this is what Truth does - it speaks to each of us specifically, uniquely.
I know it’s short notice for this upcoming in person workshop. And being able to be in person again after several years with that not being an option — well, we’re just very excited. And inviting you to come experience this powerful work in a safe, creative community.
There’s only room for a small number of people for this in-person workshop. Grab your spot right away before it fills.
The second workshop later this month will be online, so wherever you are, you can attend. I’ve done quite a few online trainings and they work surprisingly well. It’s a safe container. It’s ultimately convenient as you're in your own home, your own known environment. The bonding and energetic connection happens just as quickly and easily. Energy —as you know — knows no boundaries. We connect across the miles at the level of heart coherence and brain wave entrainment. If we didn’t have the science to validate what’s happening, we’d just call it magic.
So, two weekend workshops — take your pick. Which one works for you?
In each workshop, you’ll learn and practice (multiple times) the simple 7-step CREATE! process. You’ll learn how to apply it to your upcoming journeys and even to past journeys to derive even more value from them as well as to the entire whole of your life.
We’ll start Friday night going over the entire process and doing our first practice. We’ll meet for two sessions on Saturday and Sunday — morning and afternoon, leaving your evenings free for rest, family, social activity — whatever you need.
This is for you if any (or all) of the following are true:
You are a journeyer — using psychedelic medicines or shamanic journeys to deepen your self-awareness, to expand your consciousness, to heal from past wounding
You are a guide — working with others as they journey, as they heal, as they explore parts of themselves that have previously been unavailable, hidden.
You are a creator — an artist, an inventor, an idea generator who is looking for a guaranteed way to get into the flow state where new ideas, visions and opportunities are easily available.
There is nothing else out there quite like this. This proven combination of science and art that works quickly and effectively every time, anywhere, for anyone.
By the end of the weekend, you will have the complete CREATE! technology and will have practiced the protocol several times. Of course, like any new skill, you will improve over time the more you use it, practice it, put it to work with your journeys and in your life.
We will spend 11 hours together over the weekend, so this is an intensive. But an intensive that is rejuvenating, regenerating and revolutionizing.
As a bonus, you will receive my book (second edition), which goes into a lot more detail about each step, how the work was born and includes writings from a number of graduates, lists of intentions to choose from or refine for your use and a set of opening lines that can get your started on your CREATE! journeys.
An additional bonus is a blank notebook for your use during and after the workshop.
All this for $497!
You can pay easily on my website with your credit card.
Right now, I want you to go follow the link and sign up for one or the other workshop. Of course, I’d love to meet you in person, but I know that’s not possible for all of you. We’ve all experienced the power and possibility of zoom over the last few years, so I can assure you that you will get the same value in the virtual workshop. It’s not like boring zoom meetings you’ve had to sit through — you will be engaged, writing, reading, sharing, exploring. This is an engaged, embodied experience. You WILL love it.
I limit participation in both the in-person and the virtual workshop so every person get individual attention in crafting their intentions, in decoding their work, in integrating the wisdom they receive. So, be sure you grab you seat now.
As a special early bird bonus, the first 10 people who sign up will also get my Venus & Friends Divination Deck — a beautiful compilation of 33 divination (like poems, like prayers) coupled with 33 original images of the divine feminine, the goddess in each of us (that’s women and men both by the way). A rich tapestry that can be used like a tarot or as a pull-a-card-a-day or when you need that boost.
Click on the button below and sign up now. I can’t wait to meet you and share this life-changing technology with you.
Until then — BE WELL!
Transcript for video #3 in this series of CREATE! Life-changing Journeys.
(Transcripts for videos # 1 and 2 are below.)
Welcome to CREATE! Life-changing Journeys — this is the third and FINAL session in this workshop series. The purpose of this series is to introduce you to a way to elevate your journeys from being just peak experiences to being a source of deep wisdom and change that becomes an integral part of your embodied life going forward.
I’ve been teaching CREATE! for over 15 years to hundreds of folks — some of whom you’ll hear from in a minute. I am the founder of this method and author of the book: CREATE! Accessing Depth Creativity, Divine Guidance and Universal Wisdom at Will. Also the creator of this card deck: Venus & Friends Divination Deck.
My card deck, Venus and Friends Divination Deck was created during two separate periods of Venus retrograde. I used CREATE! for short morning meditations where I just spend 10 or 15 minutes, like I would for other forms of meditation. Every morning during the first retrograde period, I wrote a divination, so at the end, I had 33 divinations. Then in the second retrograde, I was inspired to create a unique image for each of the divinations. This is a good example of something tangible that can come out of the CREATE! process.
If you haven’t seen the first two videos, you will benefit from watching them first and then coming back here. They are posted below on this same page. There are also transcripts of each session if you prefer to read rather than watch.
Thank you for all your comments and questions. It’s great to see excitement building for this work. Journeyers and guides understandably want to get more value from their journey experiences.
For the purposes of our work together, I am choosing to focus on the possibilities of cannabis (legal in the majority of US states) and ketamine (can be legally administered in a clinic or by a therapist) — enhanced by the CREATE! protocol. You may be using other medicines or practices to achieve altered states of consciousness. Coupling CREATE! with them will also work beautifully.
While people can and do both of these — CREATE! sessions and psychedelic sessions — on their own, there is tremendous value in working with a coach, a guide and in a community of like minded and like hearted people. There is a transmission in a group that will pull you in and enable you to experience the awakened mind state without having years of practice. It truly is accessible to everyone.
You know the power of a group, of a community. That all important sense of belonging and the exponential power awakened when we come together with common visions. CREATE! groups go beyond just being supportive, authentic, and fun into being life-changing, heart opening, catalysts for expanded consciousness.
The brain wave entrainment that I talked about in the last video coupled with the group heart coherence supported by legal psychedelics — combines the best of contemporary brain and heart science with ancient medicines to enable you to break through personal barriers, plumb the depths of your unconscious mind and heal, to release that which doesn’t serve you and to craft a life you love. This work can accelerate your spiritual path if you are already on one or can literally become a spiritual practice with YOU becoming your best and only guru.
Let’s hear a sampling of what creators have had to say:
David: “I'm a creative person, but taking this class made me realize I hadn't been genuinely surprised by what's come out of me for a long time. I cherish this - the holy source of creation. I also loved the community we created.”
Margit: “I use CREATE! when something is rumbling in my system, below consciousness but definitely wanting attention. Or, when I feel stuck about something, unclear, wrestling, edgy. I use it to bypass my habitual mind, bypass the spinning in circles, and to drop into a deeper place of wisdom. It always takes me beyond the narrow frame that I've been holding myself or a situation within.”
Bliss: “One thing I really appreciated is it helped get the critic away from the driver seat. What I'm most excited is the opposite of what I expected to get: I thought I'd "produce more" but I'm valuing the chance to experience my feelings, and also practicing coming into alignment with my intentions.”
Several workshop participants said:
“Your workshop is soul food.”
“You rock!“
“A powerful therapeutic technique for personal and professional growth.”
And lastly, we’ll hear from Claudette who offers an apt analogy: “There was a time when farmers living on the Great Plains tied a rope from their back door to the barn so that during a blizzard they didn’t lose their way. They knew how easy it was to get lost during a whiteout, even though they didn’t travel any further than their own backyards. The CREATE! process gives me such a rope. By using the processes this form provides, I have a rope to hang on to as I make my way back and forth between my mind and my deep heart. Especially when I go digging in my own backyard, it is easy to lose my way. Like the farmer’s rope, CREATE! helps me find my way back home to my true self.”
I’ve gotten some questions and concerns that I want to address. There were questions about the practical aspects of CREATE! and ingesting mind altering medicines. Again, for clarity, we do not ingest medicine during a CREATE! workshop as this protocol has built into it it’s own path for entering non-ordinary reality.
Folks want to know how often they should take these kinds of medicines. That’s a personal decision. I know you want to get more value from each journey, you want your life to change in the ways you intend. When that happens, each journey becomes a threshold to a new you. When you can increase the depth and value of each journey, you may choose to take fewer of them. CREATE! increases the depth and value.
I know many folks use cannabis often but if you are not doing it with intention, decoding and integration, you are missing much of the value.. Nothing wrong with recreational use. You can use your car to drive to a movie or concert and enjoy it immensely or you can use your car to take a cross-country, multi-state or multi country adventure which might change your life. They’re just different trips.
People asked about fear. Fear can be an impediment to journeying or exploring your unconscious mind. Fear can get in the way of personal growth. Working with a coach, guide and in community can provide essential safety, support and experience from others who have successfully gone before while enabling you to honor your own limits.
When working with powerful medicines of any kind, my recommendation is to start with low doses and get to know the medicine. Once you develop some familiarity with a medicine and have explored it a bit, then you can decide if you want to experience something more.
With CREATE! there is also a way to titrate your experience. Starting with shorter writes gets you familiar with the potency and synergy of all 7 steps. Eventually, most people want to experience a longer period of time in that awakened mind state and will write for 45 minutes, an hour or longer.
CREATE! can become a tremendously supportive daily practice. Or weekly practice. Or a pull-it-out-when-you-most-need-it-practice. I find the more often I do it, the more centered, calm and creative I am. It also was instrumental in my healing process from childhood abuse. That’s a story for another time.
CREATE! is one of the simplest, most adaptive and most powerful tools I’ve ever used in my personal evolution. It can be for you, too, as it has been for countless others over the years.
My own excitement has built from offering this video workshop and taking a deep dive into the power and potential of CREATE! coupled with psychedelic medicines. As I hinted earlier, Margit Bantowsky, who is a creator, coach, artist and also a psychedelic guide, will be joining me in the next weekend workshop offering coming up soon. I’ll be announcing it in the next video and opening registration so you can grab one of the few spots. There will actually be one in person workshop, here in Olympia, WA. I will also offer an online workshop in a couple more weeks for those of you that wouldn’t be able to make it here in person.
If you’re ready to take your personal, professional, spiritual transformation to the next level be sure and watch the next video. This will be a limited time offer. Because of the constraints of the venue we are using — which happens to be a fabulous, private studio deep in the forest on the outskirts of Olympia, we can only accommodate a small number of participants. It’s really a lovely site and is already deeply steeped in journey work. While I can host more in an online format, I do keep the workshops to a reasonable size because of the nature of this work and since everyone will get individual attention. I guarantee there won’t be hundreds packed into a zoom room.
You may have questions I haven’t answered yet. Put them in the comments below and I will answer every one. I’m also — still and always — interested in your comments and response to what you’ve seen and heard. Drop a comment below and let’s keep the conversation going.
OK
Be WELL
Transcript for video #2 in this series of CREATE! Life-changing Journeys.
(transcript for video #1 is below)
Welcome to the CREATE! Life-changing Journeys video series… this is the second video in the series and whether you a regular journeyer, a guide, a shamanic practitioner, a practicing creator, a cultural creative, spiritual seeker this is the place to find your soul’s voice.
I’m Joanne Lee and I’ve been successfully teaching others how to create lives they love for over 24 years.
This is the second in a series of 3 training videos. The response to the first video has been great. Thanks so much for tuning in and for your comments. Now if you missed the first video in this series, you should go check it out because I laid the foundation for finding a way to multiply the value of your journeys with the preparation, decoding and integration possible when CREATE! is coupled with altered state experiences. I showed how this simple, easy to learn 7-step process can give you the tools you need to create powerful, life-changing journeys on the road to a life you love. What would it mean for you, your community and the world if you could find and express your unique genius easily and completely.
If you haven’t seen that video yet, go watch it right now… it’s posted right below this one… and then come back for this second video. This one will make way more sense if you build on the foundation of the first one.
In this video we will dive more deeply into the process of CREATE! and how it combines so beautifully with journeys — of all kinds (psychedelic, shamanic, breath work, etc); how the CREATE! process itself ushers us into a state of non-ordinary reality. Using it to prepare for, interpret and integrate journeys results in you getting so much more value and desired change from your investment of time, energy and money.
If you’re a guide or a peer sitter, it gives you a new tool to insure your journey clients get the most possible from their experiences. Before we go there, I want you to hear from a few from folks who have used CREATE! both as a stand alone practice and to support journeying.
JANE: "Awesome! I love the CREATE! process and the way you describe it. Love the neuroscience, the mix of science and spirituality. And can verify it works. I’ve used it myself and with some of my clients. The unconscious is powerful. Why don’t more people teach how to access it?"
EILEEN: "I have benefited so much from using the CREATE! process ever since I learned it from you. The opportunity to combine it with both intention setting and integration of journeys is brilliant. So much happens in a journey and the CREATE! process powerfully assists us to fully access the wisdom, the gold, of the experience and bring it into our lives. I find it invaluable. Thank you so much for your offering!"
MARGIT: "I was struck by the depth that happened in the . . . create group. I LOVE the power and alchemy of doing this work in group space - the messages are so full of nuance and learning, and they have the strange capacity to adapt themselves to so many different listeners. I guess this is what Truth does - it speaks to each of us specifically, uniquely. More and more I feel that the true power of this work is expressed in a group situation, even though it's wonderful to do it on my own."
That’s a sampling of what I hear from folks who learn the CREATE! process — some of whom apply that to journeying but some don’t. It stands alone powerfully and it complements journeying powerfully.
With or without the assistance of psychedelics, this work can help you solve problems, make important decisions, choose a career, design a life or spiritual path and fully actualize who you are and what you came here to do.
We’re going to be covering a lot of ground today, so you might want to have a pen and paper handy so you can take notes when you hear something that raises a question or sparks an insight. I want to hear those.
First, let’s address the question of legality. I am going to be focusing on the legal methods of entering altered states of consciousness. And there are plenty of them. I’m not dismissing the use of entheogen that aren’t yet recognized in the US as legal medicines; I’m just not going to promote them. I’m also not going to talk a lot about other legal methods like shamanic journeys, trance dancing, drumming, meditation and the many other ways we can alter our consciousness. Not here and now anyway. I’ve trained in and experienced the power of these practices and do recommend them highly. I would love to have those conversations with you if you’re interested — hit me up in the comments.
The word entheogens, by the way, derives from the Greek meaning “becoming divine within” — isn’t that lovely? And such a perfect complement to CREATE! which itself opens the door to your divinity.
My CREATE! workshops DO NOT include taking psychedelics. That can happen on your own or with a professional guide. There are well trained guides in most communities. Some folks set up peer sitting circles where they offer that service to each other. We can talk more about that if you’re interested.
We can talk mostly about cannabis and ketamine. Cannabis, it turns out, is one of the most powerful psychedelics and one of the most underutilized for that purpose. We know it gets plenty of recreational use, use for pain management and sleep but it’s more recently becoming recognized and used for its other potentials. I want to mention Daniel McQueen in particular, who wrote Psychedelic Cannabis. If you haven’t read it yet, I suggest you check it out. He is providing much needed guidance for really mining the depth and breath of what’s possible with cannabis - which as you know is legal in many US states.
Ketamine, as you may or may not know, is performing spectacularly well in clinical use with licensed counselors and medical professionals — for clients with depression. Many are experiencing relief from their depression. It, too, has potential as an entheogen as you saw from the case study.
So maybe you’ve been experimenting with psychedelics — or other ways of entering altered states of consciousness — or you are curious about what might be possible if you did. Or you could also be a blocked artist staring at the blank canvas, or author staring at the blank page and want to be able to express your genius whenever you want. Maybe you’re a cultural creative who is mired in a dysfunctional culture unable to accomplish what you can see is possible or have the impact you know you want. Or you’ve been on a spiritual path but have gotten weary or lost and are questioning looking outside of yourself for answers.
There’s never been a better time to find that still, small voice within — and pump it up — because it will always voice your best interests.
In this video, we’re going to look at what it takes to tap into that guidance, creativity and wisdom.
Let’s start with Intentions. When setting intentions, the first thing you do is get curious and get honest about where you are in your life right now. Your intention for a session or a journey will always point toward something that is currently going on in your life that you want to understand, heal, release or reinforce. It might also point toward something you desire that may feel unreachable.
Intentions are stated in the positive, in the present tense and as declarative statements or requests. In a CREATE! workshop we take our time going around the circle multiple times to be sure each person has found an intention that is a perfect fit for them — right here, right now. Here are a few examples from my book:
I speak my truth.
I am the voice of the Earth.
I own the wisdom of the past and I am free.
I express my genius everyday in every way.
Give me clarity on my journey.
My head, heart and actions align in all my relationships.
In the ketamine journey case study, you probably remember that the first intention was: Give me my ketamine journey intention. So, I was asking my unconscious to guide me in the right direction for the journey. I was letting my unconscious choose my intention for me. You also probably remember that I “misinterpreted” what I got by thinking it was pointing me toward dark shadow work. Now I’ve done a lot of that in my life already and I value it highly. It’s just not always fun or pleasant. I did bring my shadow Soul Collage cards to the journey site to put around the altar as support. My thinking was that one or more of those shadows might come forward in the journey. Or a new, previously unmet shadow might emerge. So, as you read, it was actually the latter that happened BUT it turned out to be 3 BIG BEAUTIFUL golden shadows. If that’s a new term for you, it’s borrowed from Carl Jung to identify those aspects of our creative genius that we deny or disown or just haven’t grown into yet.
Once you have an intention the next step is to Engage. When I teach CREATE!, we engage through writing as it’s something that everyone knows how to do. Everybody’s got a pen and paper. Everyone knows how to write. In a psychedelic journey, engaging means ingesting the entheogen and experiencing what your psyche brings you or where it takes you. You may or may not take notes during and after the journey. A visual artist may engage through their art; a musician through music. You get the idea.
This is where we actually take the deep dive into our whole mind — Conscious, Subconscious and Unconscious. It may sound more mysterious and harder than it actually is. In a CREATE! group, the individuals entrain both brain waves patterns and heart coherence. Those new to the idea of entrainment, experience it with ease, the same way one does while drafting behind a cyclist. If you’re willing and open, you get pulled along into the awakened mind state by the facilitator and other creators. Available to you then is your own deepest wisdom, your internal healer, your psychic adventurer.
With entheogens, the medicine is actually taking you where you need to go. But now, guided by your intention.
Using CREATE! in the decoding process after a journey, you would start with an intention like “I understand my journey” or “Give me the meaning of my journey.” Then your unconscious mind can begin to decode the experience within the context of your soul at this time in your life as you write. It’s not unlike decoding a night dream.
Finally, we come to !ntegrate — which is a process that usually happens over time rather than being a discreet event. More CREATE! writes can be done or art or music may be created as you turn your journey experiences into embodied states of being. It’s one thing to believe the concept that you are love, that the universes is made of love, it’s another to awaken to that at your cellular level, embody it and live your life from that place.
OK, we covered a lot of ground in this video. Take a deep breath. You don’t need to KNOW all of it or understand all of it. This video was about setting intentions, decoding and integration — the heart and soul of the CREATE! process and the keys to unlocking the fullest potential of your journeys. It also just happens to be what makes it possible to access your deepest creativity, your divine guidance — spoken in your soul’s voice — and universal wisdom at will.
Now I want to tell you about the next video I’ve got for you: that’s the third and last in this series. You’re going to love this one. In fact, I think it will be your favorite in this series. YOU’LL HEAR FROM MORE CREATORS — AS YOU DID TODAY. I’m going to walk you through putting CREATE! into practice in your life and what you can expect when you do.
Now I want to hear from you. Let me know in the comments below what your experience is, what your thoughts are, what questions you might have.
Now if you found value in this video, please share it with at least three people you know – especially if they have any thought of upping their journey game or their larger game of life. Life’s journey is easier and more fun when you have other people on the path with you.
But right now, please scroll down and… first of all, leave a comment. I’ll see you in the next video in a couple of days.
OK, Be WELL (Whole, Embodied, Loving and Loved)
Transcript for Video #1 of CREATE! Life-changing Journeys
Welcome to CREATE! Life-changing Journeys!
Whether you are a practicing creator — could be an artist, musician, designer — or a cultural creative — social activist, environmentalist, feminist, a leading edge thinker, or a spiritual seeker, a healer, maybe a guide for others or likely some combination of these — this is the place to be, the place to amplify your personal growth experiences and accelerate your awakening process.
I’m Joanne Lee and I’ve been successfully coaching and training others how to create lives they love for over a quarter of a century.
This is the first in a series of 3 videos. In this session we’ll be focusing on the powerful combination of using my CREATE! protocol with psychedelic journeys. CREATE! provides all you need to adequately prepare for, interpret and integrate your journeys — whether they be psychedelic, shamanic, creative, breath work, etc. This process will also awaken your deepest creativity, tap into your divine guidance (or what I call your soul’s voice) and access universal wisdom at will. Whenever you want, wherever you want.
This first video is the longest of the three. I want to really dive deeply into the details of the 7-step CREATE! Process and how you can combine CREATE! and journeying for exponential results. I’ll start by giving you some background on me and what led me to do this work.
My experiences with altered states of consciousness has been life long and life affirming. I took what I thought was a spiritual approach to drugs in my youth though it wasn’t really grounded in any particular practice or philosophy. So, you could say I landed somewhere between a recreational user and a seeker. I was frustrated with having peak experiences and what seemed like amazing insights, but then coming “down” and landing right back in my same old body and mind. Same thought patterns, same confusions, same habits, same discontent.
What followed my early experimentation with psychedelics was decades of ongoing attempts at understanding myself, my psyche, to heal my childhood wounds, to unearth my shadow parts and diligently attempt to become whole and well. Spoiler alert: it worked. I am the same person as who I started out as, but I am healthy, whole, awake, and fundamentally well. Life truly is good.
I have always been deeply interested in the bodymind, in relationships between people and in how to live a good, fulfilling life. To give you an idea of the continuity of this theme in my life, let me list a few, though probably not all of the modalities I worked with over these decades attempting to get to that elusive state of fundamental wellness. These are roughly in chronological order. Some were short forays into the modality and others have become valuable tools that I still use — for myself and for my clients:
Psychedelics (following Timothy Leary’s The Psychedelic Experience: Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead)
Primal Screaming — Arthur Janov
Self Realization Fellowship — Paramhansa Yogananda Yogi’s teachings
Option Process — Bears and Suzi Kaufmann, Son Rise
Technologies for Creating — Robert Fritz
Essential Peacemaking Women and Men — Daanen Parry Jerilyn Russeau
NonViolent Communication — Marshall Rosenberg
The Work Byron Katie’s
Emotional Freedom Technique — Gary Craig
Focusing — Gene Gendlin
Internal Family Systems — Richard Schwartz
Shamanic Training — Quero (3 years with Mary Blankenship) and Celtic (2 years with Tom Cowan)
Yoga — classes, books, eventually certified teacher training and further certification with Dr. Loren Fishman (YSB)
Trillium Awakening — an international spiritual community — home — with over 40 teachers
That list does not include the books — too many to track and the therapy, both individual and group. On top of these activities, I also earned 2 Bachelors Degrees (one in Social Ecology UCI and one in Fine Art FR) and a Masters Degree focused on creativity, education and microcomputers and graduated from Coach University, Coaching from Spirit and Transformational Coaching.
Though I benefited from all that learning from other wise teachers, there was something missing. When I first began using the key the elements of the process I now teach, I realized I had found the missing piece.
It was late-90’s. I was unhappy in a part-time job; I was not able to consistently create art; and I was struggling in my spiritual development in that I had an idea of what I wanted but gave up believing it was possible in this lifetime. I needed to find an infallible guide that I could consult and work with. I needed to listen to that trusted guide, take the recommended action and get my desired results.
Imagine my surprise when I discovered that infallible guide was actually within me, was my own soul speaking to me. I had been looking out there, to the experts, to the gurus, to the commonly held wisdom and practices — and though they are valid and valuable, they weren’t ultimately what I needed. When I learned how to access that inner guidance regularly, how to decipher the guidance and integrate it into my life — my life changed in remarkable ways.
I went from that unsatisfying part-time job to creating a coaching business doing what I loved and was good at — that has supported me for over 25 years. I went from not finding time or energy to do art, to art being an integral, easy and natural part of my life. I learned to trust my inner muse. No more waiting for the mysterious muse out there somewhere to deign to grace me with her genius. I went from feeling skeptical and disheartened about spirituality to awakening to my whole embodied being as part of a beautiful international spiritual community.
After using and teaching this process for many years and finding its infallibility and trustworthiness, I became interested in psychedelics again. As you know, there is a significant resurgence in the use of both legal and not-yet-legal substances that enable us to take deeper dives into our psyches — some would even say souls — to heal, to grow, to breakthrough stuck places, to transform our lives.
The goal of this series of videos is to show you the critical things you need to know and do to awaken your own deepest and unlimited source of creativity, to find your soul’s voice and begin to use your unique genius in a way that serves you and will, then inevitably, serve the world. Coupling this process with the altered stated of consciousness (through the use of mind altering substances or mind altering practices) literally opens up unlimited potential for growth, healing, creation, wellness.
If you’ve seen my email, you’ve seen that I close with Be WELL. WELL is an acronym I created that means Whole, Embodied, Loving and Loved. It’s what we all want. It’s what we all deserve. And truly it’s what we all are — whether we have realized it yet or not.
I will introduce the process and then I’ll weave in its capacity to dramatically expand what’s possible with psychedelic and shamanic journeys.
CREATE! is an acronym for the 7-step process that I created to transform my life and the lives of others:
C = commitment
R = remove/reframe barriers
E = explore intention
A = activate brain waves
T = think bilaterally
E = engage
! = integrate
These simple steps — when practiced together in a sequence grant you the power to transform your life.
The entire process amplifies substances (or practices) that alter our state of consciousness, but today I’ll especially touch on three parts: the preparation, interpretation and integration.
Preparation involves the first three steps: Commitment, Removing Barriers and Exploring Intention.
Explore Intention — is foundational. It is the compass that directs the rest of the process. If you set your compass to true north and follow it, you will arrive at that chosen destination. If you set your compass to SSW and follow it, you will arrive at a different destination. Many of us wander through life without a compass, without an intention, so we end up places we don’t really want to be. And can’t figure out why. Learning to set intentions that get you where you want to go is a little bit art, a little bit science. And totally doable although it may at first be unfamiliar to you.
When journeying, setting a clear intention will impact everything you experience — not control, but impact. Even more powerful is actually using the CREATE! process to receive your intention. In other words, letting your intention emerge from your depths, from your subconscious by using CREATE!.
The brain steps 4 and 5 of the process are the science that enables this to work. Brain science changes by the day; this science is the latest and best I’ve found.
I can get nerdy about the brain science. For now I want to just introduce the main concepts. We start by activating all four primary brain wave patterns at once which puts us in what I call an awakened mind state. Four brain waves (Beta, alpha, theta and delta) all engaged, online, and balanced at the same time. This enables you to access all (or more) of your capacity than normal waking consciousness does (which is just beta brain waves).
You’ve no doubt seen the iceberg metaphor of mind. The top 10% is our conscious mind visible above the water line. We want to credit it with all of who we are and what we think and decide to do. But 90% of the iceberg (the mind) is hidden from us. Here resides the subconscious and unconscious. This part of the mind below the water line is processing 11 million bits of information every second. But our conscious minds can handle only 40 to 50 bits of information a second. That’s 1 (conscious mind) to 220,000 (unconscious mind). Big difference.
We all have had strokes of genius, flashes of insight, hits of intuition but few have learned how to have those happen whenever we want. How to access that part of our minds that is the source of our greatest insight, guidance and wisdom. CREATE! does just that.
The heart of the process, step 6 — Engage — is the tool to do just that. It’s a simple, proven protocol that lets you enter an altered state of consciousness (this part happens without drugs), dive into the depths of your whole miraculous mind (led by your intention) and enables you to make what is unknown to you, known. Enables you to discover solutions to your gnarliest problems. Enables you to produce works of art, poetry, literature, science, invention, relationship. Enables you to see the whole of who you are. Enables you to prepare for the perfect journey experience for you in your life right now.
The final step, 7 — !ntegration — is where you are able to interpret and apply the guidance and wisdom you have unearthed. This can be done on your own but can be faster, more powerful and frankly, more fun, when done in community.
Decoding/interpretation — the first stage of the integration process (whether it be a CREATE! write or a psychedelic journey) — is like decoding a dream. You’ve had this phenomenal experience but it may not make sense to you. In order to benefit most from the experience, taking the time to decode and interpret the experience is crucial. Your psyche and your soul are speaking to you in metaphor and image, think of it as code — code only you can break. Once you have a sense of the messages, then you can begin the process of integration.
Your soul may be asking yourself to do something different in your life, take some action that expresses more of the wholeness of who you are. You may choose to write again for deeper understanding. Or use art or music to more embody the message. My recent blog post about a ketamine journey is a great example of using CREATE! to surface my journey intention, decode the experience and begin to integrate it into who I am — to embody it. My integration process includes writing and art work.
In this video, I’ve scratched the surface on CREATE! and how it can be coupled with journeying. I’m going to go even deeper into exploring intentions, engaging and integrating in the next video. Applying these to life — and if you’re inclined, to your journeys — will increase the understanding, value and impact of your experiences exponentially. These are the heart and soul of the CREATE! process.
I’ll also introduce you to some CREATORs and their transformations over the years. I’ll share the highlights that emerged from my recent ketamine journey using CREATE! to set the intention, interpret and integrate the experience.
I’m a coach, so I can’t leave without offering you a challenge. I challenge you to commit to sticking with this series of short videos. Really it’s a commitment to your own growth, evolution and happiness. Practice Step 1 of the process — commit.
I want to know a little more about you — what would it mean to you to have a simple system you could work every day or every week to keep you pointed toward your true north, toward creating a life you love with all that entails? Please scroll down below this video and tell me in the comments section.
And of course, if you liked this video and found it useful, I would love if you shared it with your friends who might be struggling with some of the same challenges as you or committed to realizing their biggest dreams, like you.