May 12th 2023

The Birthright of Creativity

I wrote this piece as my ghostwriting business on Fiverr, which had been my full-time job since 2015, was beginning to show signs of vulnerability to LLM-based writing tools.

Imagine what it must have felt like for our ancestors to have invented writing. As it dawned one them that they were looking at the same thing, that as one scraped marks on rock or in dirt, the other saw those marks and read them.

“Here, it means 'fruit' because there is fruit here,” the first might have said.

There's power in that, in tapping into another's words. Each of us holds that power in a group context. Lateralization means that inside of us, we hold that power individually as well.

I can ask, with my thinking and reasoning mind, what my hoping, loving, playing mind believes I ought to do in my life – or what I ought to write, or paint, or say.

Anything.

This power is infinite, and it's our birthright.

Bill Donius, through his teachings about brain lateralization and exercises using the non-dominant hand, to access the less-used half of the mind, is working to spread a means to remind people of this birthright.

Last weekend, I attended Bill's workshop “Meet Your Better Half” at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California. This was the second time I attended the workshop: the first time was as a participant in August 2022, and in May 2023 I served as one of Bill's two assistants. Both perspectives were enriching.

Common between the two was the breakthrough. That came on the second day of the workshop my first go-around. Although I had signed up for the workshop to explore my creativity in a new way, and to pick up a new tool to apply to my life as a writer, it was seeing people use the tool to address more personal challenges that hit me hardest. I carried the technique forth with me, as did my then-partner, who integrated it into her psychotherapy practice.

My more recent breakthrough occurred while I was driving out of Big Sur, north to my Airbnb in Menlo Park. It was a breakthrough of personality: I realized that something I had been pointing out to others, the value of applying the technique daily, was something that I could get much better at.

So, I am working to do that. I am making daily time – not just planning to make time, but penciling time into my schedule – for Bill's creative thinking and problem-solving technique. I hope for it to become not just a lever to pull in case of emergencies, or a tool to pull out when the wall pops up in front of me, but a ritual, as frequent as meditation, which I have practiced for nearly twelve years.

In this post, I would like to set an intention for my July workshop with Bill in Manhattan: to inspire and motivate others to dive into the technique with that enthusiasm, with that regularity, so that it can take its rightful place among other such techniques, like breathwork, like mantra meditation, like single-point meditation.

If this sounds like something you'd be interested in, visit Bill's website here and sign up for our workshop – to be held the afternoon of July 13th in New York City.

Hope to see you there!