I had my first Covax jab (Covid vaccinations).My personal stress load plummeted, and my creativity got a booster shot. Lowered stress = increased creativity! I know there is No Going Back to the pre-covid world. We must reinvent ourselves and recreate the world. We must be mindful, practical, compassionate, and connected on a global level. We must redefine ourselves as a human family, a single race of homo sapiens sapiens (modern human beings). It is time to proactively empower the idea and practice of Species Tribalism. We must recruit and coordinate our individual and collective Creative Intelligence (CI). Resilience + Creativity = Creative Intelligence.
During this last year, the “Earth Stood Still.” I closed my office and adapted my private practice in family psychiatry with telemedicine. I reframed the mandate for social distancing as a year-long, personal retreat for mindfulness practice, daydreaming and creative problem solving. I was inspired by Ariana Huffington’s platform, thriveglobal.com, and her mission is to “go beyond raising awareness and create something real and tangible that would help individuals, companies and communities improve their well-being and performance and unlock their greatest potential.”
I wrote fifteen essays for Thrive Global. In “Falling into Covid” (https://community.thriveglobal.com/?s=falling%20into%20covid), I reflected about breaking my leg on my first post-lockdown stroll. We can all feel like victims and hostages, especially with two surgeries and prolonged rehabilitation. Practicing mindful meditation and with my program, 6Rs for Creative Intelligence, I transformed the negative stress into creativity.
From Logosoma Brain Training to Creative Intelligence.
Over the last ten years, I evolved my Logosoma Brain Training (1986) method for relationship stress management into a fresh concept: 6Rs for Creative Intelligence training. Advances in the neuroscience of creativity inspired my personal creativity to integrate my fifty years of practice in Tibetan and Zen meditation, my lifelong experiences as an artist (painting, photography, filmmaking), and techniques from Tibetan dream yoga.
By integrating multiple attentional practices, I developed the 6Rs for Creative Intelligence (CI). CI training activates the brain’s neuroplasticity. The brain is a creativity machine that can rewire itself. We can continue learning throughout life. The neural networks of our sense-of-self can be changed by unlearning old patterns and learning new attitudes, behaviors, and values.
The 6Rs for Creative Intelligence recruit the brain’s natural default network for creativity. By practicing these six steps, we activate a complex process of rewiring the neural networks of our sense-of-self. We can also approach reinventing global culture to face the existential challenges that face our species. The process holds the potential for amplifying individual and collective Creative Intelligence.
(1) By Remembering negative emotional experiences (especially pandemic memories), we can activate our cognitive ability to
(2) Reflect on our perception of ourselves as victims or hostages. Using our ability to
(3) Reframe our experiences, we can practice acceptance of the pain of living with gratitude for our creativity. Using our imagination, we can
(4) Reimagine reality. In creative conversations we can
(5) Reinvent ways of living. We must create many new “blueprints” for living with each other, from the nuclear family to the ever-shrinking global village. Creating new “maps for cultural change” guide
(6) Reconnecting global village communication in all areas of human endeavor.
To prevent future global catastrophes, it is imperative to focus our individual and collective Creative Intelligence to meet the existential threats we face. Unless we band together in a narrative of species tribalism, the challenges of climate change and future pandemic, world hunger, mass migrations, and socioeconomic disparity can produce global systemic burnout beyond imagination. Creative Intelligence training empowers personal creativity, and it empowers the collective social application toward cultural evolution—species tribalism.