Creative Presencing
Online Events | tapping into the creative field of our collective presence
image: Natasza Zurek
One of my pandemic projects was initiating “The Creative Centre” in the Rebel Wisdom sense-making community online forum. That quickly became a lively meeting place for artists, poets, musicians, and other consciousness-inspired creatives. From that fertile ground, a group of us began experimenting with a collective practice of deep-diving for downloads from The Field!
. . . and we called it “Creative Presencing.”
Creative Presencing In Action
Click here to see a full session of Creative Presencing in action — with a group of good people at Earth Regenerators. The field-generated theme was The Healing Pathways of the Unknown. (114 min, with timestamps below.)
The Foundation: COLLECTIVE Presencing
Creative Presencing builds upon the foundational practice of Collective Presencing, developed by Ria Baeck and friends.
Collective Presencing is a way of cultivating a field of presence and harmonic resonance among the participants. As we settle into the field together, the co-hosts of the session drop a question into the center and open a space for dialogue. We use a virtual “talking stick” by muting and unmuting the microphone, we are invited to “speak when spoken through,” and we aim to speak “to the center from the center” rather than to have a conversation across the circle.
Collective Presencing is a powerful practice that builds the muscles of social sensing, group coherence, and personal presence.
The CREATIVE Presencing Practice
Creative Presencing builds upon collective presencing in a number of ways that support our individual and collective capacity to be of creative service to the whole:
We explore the inquiry and expression through creative means during the session or afterward — through drawing, painting, music making (on mute), poetry, digital art, body movement, or whatever creative channels are activated. This is optional but encouraged.
A forum for expression after the session where creative works and further reflections can be shared.
Channeling the intersubjective presencing power of Collective Presencing into our emergent co-created world. We do this by creating physical (including digital) art-ifacts that ground the insights and inspirations into physical reality.
We apply this process in service to actual life questions and experiences including:
Cultivating personal and interpersonal creative capacities and cultivating group resonance through the basic Creative Presencing practice.
Supporting leaders to navigate complex situations and questions.
Creating spaces where the spirit/muse that moves through artists can blossom into deep communal understanding — through Intersubjective Art Salons.
Bringing depth, meaning, creativity, and power to traditional group experiences such as Birthday Presence online gatherings.
Future possibilities include — tapping into collective wisdom and creativity to support people on a path toward right livelihood in a complex world, applying our collective subtle-sensing organs to tune into a piece of land to discover “what it wants” and our co-creative relationship to it. New possibilities continue to reveal themselves. One experiment at a time.
The Creative Presencing Experiment
We have experimented with Creative Presencing in a number of communities and projects:
Rebel Wisdom’s online community, now Emergent Commons — free to join.
Sacred Ground online community — free to join.
Earth Regenerators online community — free to join.
The Creative Presencing For Leaders project — where we placed CEOs in the center of the inquiry and supported them with complex questions.
Birthday Presence — a new kind of international online birthday celebration!
Intersubjective Art Salons — art exhibit meets deep presence and intersubjective dialogue.
Participant Feedback
We have received consistent positive feedback from participants. Here are some of their reflections:
Why Do Creative Presencing?
It opens people’s consciousness and creativity.
People get confidence in their creativity to apply it in other domains.
It creates a resonance of inspired ideas that everyone can participate in.
It helps us be willing to feel into the pause and not know.
The future shows up through creatives. — and we are all creatives.
We know there’s fire and water out there. This is the greenhouse.
We need more of this in the community.
It feels like a good relationship-building session.
The Experience of Creative Presencing
That was truly beautiful, and I would love to open up such a process to the wider Earth Regenerators community. It's not just fun, it's also great to foster a deeper sense of community among us!
I felt really connected to people after the session. Connecting through this imagination.
There’s something else that felt bigger and it’s connecting. I’m aware that I can read anything into anything, but the synchronicity was so clear and awes me.
Often in conversations, you can feel people burning to respond with what they already have in mind. Here it was organic and building on top of each other, it had an emergent quality that taps into different energies I find fascinating.
The shared creative experience is a different kind of adrenaline.
What we are doing? Exploring and investigating questions related to regeneration in a community context
It was an exploration of being together, through a more unconventional way of thinking deeply about what this question means to you.
I had distractions zooming in from a park, but it drew me in. I felt present, like being inside a river instead of just looking at it.
I felt really connected to everyone. It made me really amazed, that it was possible to do that via zoom, I really could feel the “field of love”.
I found it deeply nourishing and calming. I definitely feel it shifted things inside me.
Join Us!
Click the button below to add yourself to the Interest List.
At the time of this writing there is no fee for participating.
About Creative Presencing
“Opening and standing before The Field of emergence itself, of primal generativity, has been likened to the raw condition of the artist standing before a blank canvas, the writer staring into the electric void of page one, the musician diving into the effervescent silence that precedes each unwritten song.” ~ Nick Shore
During the lockdown of 2020, a small crew of creatives with a common interest in sense-making, art-making, and world-making spontaneously gathered and began prototyping a practice of deep inquiry.
Modeled on Ria Baeck’s Collective Presencing process and further developed by Nick Shore, Natasza Zurek, and Maja Apolonia Rodé, Creative Presencing integrates deep shared inquiry with creative sensing and expression. We utilize our capacities of inner vision and symbolic perception to draw insight and inspiration from The Field dancing in space between us.
In Creative Presencing sessions:
We collectively attune to the “space between” and dialogue about a central question.
We dialogue through words, as well as art, music, poetry, etc. Artistic expressions are inspired by what comes through in the dialogue, and vice versa.
We begin each session with a poetic dice roll to generate the guiding question. We then go where we are led by “the Field” with authenticity, curiosity, and creativity.
Creative Presencing was started by artists for artists of all kinds. We believe that everyone who desires it has the capacity to intuit subtle messages from the great Mystery and translate them through creative expression. In so doing, we commune with the very source of creation and develop our individual and collective capacities to co-create a kinder, more beautiful world.
In Creative Presencing sessions we all learn together as we feel into the majesty and generativity of The Field between us.
Our Collective Inquiry
Each session is like a creative gym where we tune in together and into The Field as we exercise our creative sensing organs.
If there is a stated purpose or topic for the session, the co-hosts meet beforehand to intuitively and sensitively craft the question.
As a general practice, the guiding question for each session is revealed during the session itself and begins the same way:
What does The Field want us to know about __________ ?
The blank is filled in by a roll of the poetic dice — naming a unique facet of a more beautiful world calling us to co-create it into being. There are 8000 possible questions! You can “roll” them for yourself in Maja’s online Creative Presencing Inquiry portal. Here are a few examples filling in the blank:
. . . the luminous purpose of being together
. . . the emergent pathways of consciousness
. . . the deep evolution of generosity
After each session, participants are invited to share their creative expressions (music, poetry, sketches, paintings, mandalas, digital art, etc.) in the community online forum. All members of the forum are welcome to join in with comments and further responses, reflections, or expressions related to the topic.
How to Join
You are warmly welcome to join us no matter what your artistic/creative skill level. However, artistic guidance is provided. Creative work is encouraged but not required to participate. As of this writing, Creative Presencing sessions are offered at no cost.
To join us, scroll back up and click the red button to let us know you’re interested.
❤ 2022 | Maja Apolonia Rodé
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Past Event | May 2022 — Mandala: Seeds of Creation Virtual Art Exhibit
Cohosted by Nick Shore and Cheryl Hsu, this intersubjective art salon features my mandalas, insights on the emergent creative process, and an inspiring intersubjective group dialogue in response to the art.