As our spring session of Embodied Creators: Awareness gets underway my head is full of thoughts about our Map of Self project and those thoughts take me back to the project’s roots. Spring semester of my first year in Architecture school our professor, Yusuke Obuchi, assigned us a project…on a big sheet of paper draw a map of yourself. That was it…those were the instructions that I remember.
Okay…so what does a map of me look like? Well, I love ballet…I am a dancer…so I drew a ballerina. Music is very much a part of my life…so I drew some musical notes. I am a Christian…so I drew a cross. You get the picture. I, as many of my fellow classmates did, drew the symbols of the things that we enjoyed, or that we felt defined us in some way.
I can still see Yusuke shaking his head as we presented. He wasn’t very impressed…I’m pretty sure if you’re talking grades most of us failed that day. WHO are you? That was the question Yusuke wanted us to answer. Instead, most of us answered the question, “WHAT are you?”
We assumed that those symbols of all the things we liked or that were somehow important to us were WHO we were. All those things though only identified objects or attributes of us…that is “What’s” job. “Who” on the other hand is a word that asks about identity. Usually in speech it is looking for a name (we can talk about the power of names another time), in our class it was looking for that essence of us that really there aren’t words for.
Thinking about this last night, one of the few words that I think might best serve both who and what is Creator. We are all creators…it is part of the essence of our being…part of our soul perhaps.
According to the Cambridge Dictionary, to embody is “to represent a quality or an idea exactly.” We have chosen to call this series of courses Embodied Creators because they are about truly stepping into “representing exactly” our inherent creativity in whatever form (leader, athlete, spreadsheet guru, artist, doctor, etc.) that may take.
Embodiment is about the underlying “Who” creating a container and structure for all the “What” to work as a whole…and it starts with our Body. And so, in EC: Awareness, we start with the Body. Not just what we see in the mirror, but we look deeper, what is our experience of our bones? Not something you think about everyday is it? We move to muscles where it’s nearly impossible not to start noticing connectiveness, and then we examine our organs and the systems that give us life. From there we move to the less tangible, our thoughts and emotions, and we wrap up the course considering where the boundary is between us and that which is more than us. Whether you recognize that “more than us” as God, Spirit, the cat, community, or something else there IS something more.
We focus first on Awareness because it is the doorway to so much more. When we become aware of us and all that around us in this present moment the colors are sharper, the feelings deeper…there is just more life.
My map of bones, muscles, and organs from our current workshop. Since we are in the midst of house renovations I used drywall from the recently demo’d ceiling as my “paper”.
I am being amused today as I write this by the memories that keep leading me back to my days in Architecture school…apparently where I am today has some deep roots there and some liberal inspiration from Yusuke. Fast forward to fall semester of my third year and an amazing opportunity to spend a semester traveling abroad in Japan and India led in part by none other than Mr. Obuchi. Inspired by the awareness it took to navigate the gardens and temples in Japan…steppingstones spaced in such a way that they didn’t match my natural gate, when we were given the assignment in Jaipur, India to create a temple to what was most important to us, my temple was a Temple of Awareness suspended in an unfinished elevator shaft. A few more years down the road, my thesis was “The Dance of the Mundane”. A project about finding ways to subtly shift (disrupt) our daily routines to bring back our awareness. So yes…Awareness is the foundation.
Temple of Awareness in the elevator shaft of an unfinished building in Jaipur, India.
So, I challenge you today to stop, notice what is around you, notice the patterns of your thoughts and emotions, notice the movements of your body, consider what your creative essence is and then use all of that information to CREATE. Create a drawing or a puzzle, sing, dance, make dinner, balance a checkbook, discover the cure for Alzheimer’s disease, or whatever else your creativity calls you to. Just CREATE.
- Alysia Kampf
P.S. If you think you’re not creative, heed the words of a wise friend, “…it [creativity] never left you…it’s just quiet, and now much wiser; cozily awaiting the “permission” to come-out and play.”