For those in our Healing With The Muse community, I’ve asked my dear friend, fellow artist, Cosmic Cowgirl, and muse-whisperer Shiloh Sophia to join us. My upcoming book Sacred Medicine has a whole chapter about Shiloh and the healing method she created, which she calls Intentional Creativity. Intentional Creativity is being used by countless trained practitioners to treat trauma, as well as intractable mental and physical illnesses, using art-making linked to the intention of healing and the quantum field. Shiloh will join us to talk about Intentional Creativity as a healing tool, as well as to lead us through an exercise showing you and your muse how to practice it. If you thought healing had to be hard or serious, you haven’t tried it Shiloh’s way! When healing is happening anywhere Shiloh shows up, there tends to be music, laughter, red wine, and lot of playful, muse-winking badassery. So bring your muse on February 8, noon-2pm, to take a romp with your muse in the land of imagination.
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Badass in a Ball Gown by Shiloh Sophia
Are you curious what “muse energy” is like and what could happen if your muse showed up at your back door one night? Hold onto your bloomers and listen to Lissa read Shiloh Sophia’s short story, Badass in a Ballgown.
SACRED MEDICINE EXCERPT: INTENTIONAL CREATIVITY
In case you’re curious, here’s an excerpt from my Sacred Medicine book about Shiloh.
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In her early twenties, Shiloh Sophia left San Francisco’s corporate world and art school for a “chop wood, carry water” mentorship with the artist Sue Hoya Sellars. Shiloh went from high heels and high tech to hiking boots, living in a trailer in Mendocino County, running naked in the woods , digging red earth from the hills to make clay, paint and write stories. Her mentor, Sue, a ‘back to lander’ from the early 70’s, who was also a mothering figure to Shiloh, wanted her to learn the goodness of hard work. One day, Shiloh playfully complained, saying that she didn’t understand why she needed to actually dig the clay out of the hillside. Why couldn’t they just go to the art store like normal people and buy it?
Then something happened which would change the course of Shiloh’s life. As she wedged the clay, Sue asked her “What do you care about seeing changed in the world? Solving the problem of global hunger? Poverty? Ending violence against women and children? Sex trafficking and gender inequality? Get clear on what your heart cares about and put that love into the clay as you wedge it. Imagine your love going to those who need it the most, right now. Because the love is already with them as you say it and wedge the clay. As you intend it, it begins to happen-right then. Believe this. This is how the universe works.”
In that moment of infusing healing energy into the clay, Shiloh got a transmission. A lightbulb flipped on inside of her, and everything as she knew it changed. She got it. She infused the clay with passion, sending love, and a desire to end violence against women and children. The clay itself, and Shiloh’s own heart, were both awakened in that quantum experience. Shiloh would later learn this awareness was connected to the observer effect. But at the time, Shiloh just knew in her body, that the molecules of the clay were responding to her energy, and that anything she made from that clay would carry the signature of that intention. Whether she infused it with neutrality, hostility, or healing love, it would be changed either way, so why not infuse it intentionally with healing?
In time, and through her studies on the scientific impact of intention on matter, she realized that if we did this with everything in our lives – not just the clay and our art, but also the way we deliver medicine, the way we educate children, the way we govern, life as we know it would fundamentally transform. She realized that intentionality is always at cause in our lives, but it is often happening unconsciously. When we make things with fear, greed, the mentality of scarcity, and other toxic intentions infiltrating so much of what we’re making and absorbing, it carries that signature. Rather than what we make being tended to mindfully and with love, way too often, our food is intentionally poisoned, and the standard approach to medicine is often at cause for killing people, when the intent is to heal.
As Shiloh’s work and research progressed, she learned that early cultures had been practicing a form of “intentional creativity” since the earliest art between 73,000 and 500,000 year ago. For our ancestors, it was likely natural to make whatever you create with an intent to teach, share, or tell a story, as in the case of pre-historic cave paintings and carvings.
Whether we’re creating art, water, food, wine, herbal remedies, poetry, music, or dance, Shiloh became so inspired and aware of the effect of conscious intention, putting her attention on how the intention we imbue into something-impacts it in a way that amplifies any medicinal properties it may already carry. In Laura Esquivel’s magical realism novel Like Water For Chocolate, the heartbroken Tita imbues the food she prepares with love, tears, and other emotions, and those who eat her food, are then impacted by the feelings she imbues the food with. Yet the idea that you can “feel the love” someone puts into their cooking is not just metaphorical. As the indigenous people in many parts of the world practice, putting your prayers into what you make- whether a beaded necklace, a painting, a drum, or a weaving – amplifies the prayer and the energy.
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If you feel called to experience a bit of Intentional Creativity yourself, join Lissa and Shiloh in our next Healing With the Muse Zoom session on Monday, February 8th at 12pm PST.
If you can’t make it live, you can still participate with the recording afterwards.
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