This week on The Side Woo I talk with Rachel Dawson, an artist, educator, and intuitive who shares the way her intuition has guided her through both personal challenges and her artistic journey.
Our conversation made me reflect on the connection between creativity and intuition. While they have a similarly mysterious quality, they are not the same. As far as I can tell the relationship between them is complex and multifaceted- a prismatic intersection of material choices, subject matter, style and being in the right place at the right time.
And where does intuition come from? In the Psychology Today article, The Science of Intuition, the authors believe it’s a combination of conscious and subconscious data that our minds integrate to give us feedback.
“There is a great deal of incoming information and interpersonal processing taking place outside of conscious awareness in the neural networks that organize emotion and sensory and somatic information. This is how we come to know things without knowing we know them.”
While this aligns with some kinds of intuition, it does not explain the more divinatory aspects of Rachel’s experience. As a child, Rachel had prophetic dreams. Growing up she often experienced a sense that something was going to happen right before it did. As an adult, while her husband was battling with alcoholism, it enabled her to find his hidden stashes, even one bottle he had hidden inside a potted plant. (As an aside, he is fully recovered and three years sober. I am hoping we are going to have him on a future episode of The Side Woo.)
I am curious how to reconcile that divinatory kind of intuition, which seems more in line with psychic ability, and the idea that we are taking cues from things in real world.
For Rachel’s MFA project at CCA, she invited a group of artists to make a series of ceramic sculptures, then took those works to be ‘read’ by a local psychic, the now podcast-famous Jessica Lanyadoo. What this project revealed is that the act of making in itself left energetic deposits in the artwork that Jessica was able to read through psychometry, the art of reading energy in objects.
In the final video project that Rachel made, you can hear Jessica’s voiceover describing the intention of the artist as well as some of the personality traits about the artist making the piece - as she understood them.
When you really start to unpack this finding, that psychometry is to some extent real, it opens up the possibility that as artists we are not just communicating physically with our materials, but we are also infusing our work with our intentions, our moods and our personalities, which are all contributing to the way our work is interpreted and valued. I hardly even know where to begin with that, but look forward to investigating it further.
Putting aside for a moment that this revelation could lead to serious anxiety about infusing my work with the right or wrong kind of energy during a studio session, I am also interested in how intuition can reinforce our connection to our creativity and the way we receive and choose our ideas.
In the book and subsequent podcast Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear, Elizabeth Gilbert tells a story about trying to write a novel about a secretary whose in love with her boss who runs a construction company in the Amazon, I think it was in Brazil. But she got stalled and never made good traction on it. During that time she met author Ann Patchett at a reading. They became friends and a year or so later during a conversation, Patchett tells her she’s writing a book: it’s about a secretary who is in love with her boss who runs a construction company in the Amazon, yes, in Brazil.
Gilbert was gobsmacked because she had never told Patchett about her own book. Her theory is that somehow this idea for a book jumped from her, Liz Gilbert, to her friend Ann Patchett during their first meeting. The timing of their reading lined up with the start of Patchett’s book. Gilbert had not made progress on her own novel, so it is her belief that the idea sought out a better vehicle where it could actually come to life, aka Ann Patchett who eventually turned it into State of Wonder.
Whether or not you believe it, I love this story because it further illustrates how much we don’t know.
So how does one strengthen one’s intuition? There are classes you can take on mindfulness which from my research seems to be the building block for all mystical practices and general good mental health. Without your presence of mind, you’re like a plastic bag in the wind: getting blown in every direction and polluting the environment around you. (Yes I just made that last part up, I’m very proud of myself.)
I was surprised to find during my lite research that the University of Minnesota recommends a few, fairly witchy exercises that involve sitting quietly and asking for guidance to come in one form or another through drawing, journaling, or a cinematic series of images in your mind’s eye.
Have you had any crazy intuitive experiences? Let me know and I will share them on future episodes of The Side Woo.
Show notes from Rachel Dawson’s episode:
PS: I rewatched Close Encounters of the Third Kind as inspiration for this blog post and realized that the movie is technically about alien encounters, but it’s reallhy about being an artist struggling to understand their own creative output, to be understood by others and to find their tribe.