AWAKENING GENIUS MARK MATOUSEK MEDIA AN EXPLORATION OF DESIRE & THE CREATIVE LIFE PERSONAL E-STUDY COURSE TRUTH STORY TRANSFORMATION

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1 AWAKENING GENIUS AN EXPLORATION OF DESIRE & THE CREATIVE LIFE PERSONAL E-STUDY COURSE MARK MATOUSEK MEDIA TRUTH STORY TRANSFORMATION

2 A WELCOME NOTE FROM MARK Greetings! I m glad that you re participating in my Personal e-study Course and wanted to make a few suggestions before you begin this six-week course. First, try to take no longer than a week to do each lesson; by keeping up this pace, your work (and insight) will build momentum. If this is impossible, no worries! The material will be enlightening in whatever dose and at whichever speed works for you. Second, I encourage you to use these lessons as points of departure rather than as strict assignments. If you are working on a piece of writing, for example, feel free to use the week s lesson to move your project forward. If the lesson prompts you to write something unrelated to the topic, let the inspiration carry you. There is no right or wrong way to do these lessons. They are meant to reveal themselves to you through the lens of your personal tastes, needs, and proclivities. I also recommend that you not share this work with others until you have completed the course. I m a strong believer in keeping the oven door closed when doing intensive creative inner work, so that the heat can build and the ideas can cook in the privacy of your imagination. Finally, I hope that you will join me for The Seekers Forum, my monthly teleconference and ongoing discussion group, where topics linked to creativity, personal growth, writing, spiritual practice, and ethical well-being are discussed. If you flip to the last page of this packet, you will find the registration information. I look forward to hearing from you about your experience! My contact information is listed on the last page as well. That s all for now. Enjoy yourself! Let your imagination soar. Don t be afraid to DIVE into the darker places where so much of our passion and wisdom resides. As the philosopher Martin Buber wrote, Every journey has a secret destination of which the traveler is unaware. My hope and prayer is that this writing journey delivers you to a destination you may not be aware of yet filled with inspiration, insight, and surprise. Warmest Wishes, Mark Mark s work focuses on self-realization through life writing. He provides an environment that cultivates personal insight, increased creativity, passion, purpose, and self-revelation through the art of questioning. Mark brings three decades of experience as a bestselling author, teacher, editor, reporter, survivor of illness, and spiritual seeker to his unique method of helping others achieve their artistic and personal goals. When you tell the truth, your story changes. When your story changes, your life is transformed.

3 AWAKENING GENIUS: AN EXPLORATION OF DESIRE & THE CREATIVE LIFE Each of us is born with a unique gift. Within every person exists an original spark of creativity waiting to be ignited. This creative power is our genius, a source of inherent brilliance whose dynamic potential can transform our lives once we know how to find it. Insight is key to this power desire is its fuel. Artists, seekers, lovers, entrepreneurs all innovators, in fact recognize that desire is the indispensable fuel for creative endeavor. It is desire that opens new doors, buoys us with passion, expands our horizons and deepens our minds, hearts, and spirit. Desire prompts us to transcend our limits, reinvent ourselves, and harness latent creative intelligence stifled by a shrink to fit society. Until we learn to accept our desires the genius within is beyond our grasp, as is our creative potential. When we come to understand that desire is our power source, we must learn to stay plugged in and be able to retrieve the connection without being lost for too long. The more we do this, the more awake we become to the whispering of our personal muse. We become more prolific in whatever field we re drawn to, compelled to create, connect, and fructify as individuals. We learn how to run our genius engine for the long haul. On his eightieth birthday, the late poet Stanley Kunitz --a paragon of creative self-reinvention -- concluded a poem to his wife with these lines: "What makes the engine go? Desire, desire, desire. This passionate journey will be the guide to your creative gift.

4 LESSON ONE: BEYOND WORDS Humans are a language-driven species. Our ability to articulate experience in words unparalleled in the animal kingdom has enabled us to evolve and flourish. Words become stories, and stories become wisdom in our ongoing effort to understand existence and the place we hold in the universe. We use stories to navigate inner life, too, grasping at words to illuminate the labyrinth we carry inside us, crowded with mysterious secrets and feelings we often don t understand. While language is a magnificent gift, it is also a huge limitation. In a left-brained culture where thinking is valued more highly than feeling, this paradox tends to be overlooked. We re educated to believe that reason prevails, that logic, analysis, and verbalization are the high roads to selfunderstanding. But this is only half the truth. Breakthroughs in psychology, neurology, and brain science now confirm what artists and mystics have always known: that, brilliant as the thinking mind is, our intuitive, sensory, non-verbal intelligence is even more powerful. While the logical portion of our brain processes about forty bits of information per second which is very impressive the nonverbal portion processes about eleven million bits per second. When it comes to creative insight and wisdom, in other words, we know far more than we think we do. In order to awaken personal genius, we begin by understanding how language itself can distort our capacity to feel, to dream, to play and to know what we truly want. While brilliant at calculating outcomes, weighing probable cause, and parsing experience into info-bytes, the verbal mind also hinders us from dropping into our deeper wisdom. Flashes of creativity tend to arise out of moments of stillness and silence; in this wordless place that we carry inside like the garden of an interior castle, we make contact with the source of existence the verdant, pulsating mystery of life that leads us to our highest potential. Each of us must learn to find our way to this interior garden; this is where desire lives, and desire is the lifeblood of genius. There are innumerable paths to this wordless place. Each of us has an instinctive creative temperament that is naturally drawn to one path or another. Some people gravitate toward meditation; others prefer yoga, jogging, dancing, drawing, cooking, gardening, or silent encounters with nature. Strangely enough, writing can also be an excellent path to this intuitive zone. By allowing ourselves to free-write, we re able to suspend conventional thinking and gain entrée to the flow of direct emotional experience. When we learn to follow this natural flow known in Sanskrit as the kheyala, or

5 divine whim we are moved by Life rather than struggling to fight (or explain) the river. Creating a path to this sacred silence, we meet our deepest self and free the creative genius inside us that wants to give its gifts to the world. This week, I would like you to practice locating, and spending time in, the garden of your own interior castle. Using whatever technique most appeals to you, spend at least ten minutes a day in silence, in the company of your non-thinking self, and see what arises. Pay special attention to your body what it feels, where it hurts, and the messages it is sending you. Listening to this wordless self is the first step on our journey toward creative self-fulfillment. I encourage you to do at least two of the following exercises: Exercise 1: After doing your chosen practice for two consecutive days, describe the experience as vividly and precisely as possible. What did you notice about your inner landscape? What emotions arose in you? Was there fear? Curiosity? Pleasure? Obstruction? Did your body revel or revolt? Did you hear anything new in the silence? Or did the silence elude you? Exercise 2: What do you believe about intuition? Is it easy for you to follow your instincts, trust your gut, and remain open to what you don t understand? Or does uncertainty frighten you? Do you enjoy mystery, discovery, and surprise? Or do you guard against the unknown? How does your attitude toward not knowing affect your creative life? Exercise 3: Experiment with the following technique of putting the mind in a state of sacred silence: 1. Take a few deep full breaths. 2. Exhale completely and pause before inhaling. 3. In the space before you need to breathe in again, focus your attention on your heart until you can feel it beating. 4. Take another breath and exhale. Along with your heartbeat, find the sensation of your pulse moving through your hands, feet, scalp, and entire body. Stay focused on the feeling of your entire circulatory system as it channels your lifeblood to your head and extremities. See if you can feel it moving through your organs as well. 5. Perform some simple task, walking, washing the dishes, making your bed, while continuing to feel your heartbeat and overall pulse. You may find that the activity becomes strangely blissful.

6 Dear Friend, I hope you are enjoying and finding the lessons inspiring. I suggest that you keep these exercises together in a journal, and add additional thoughts, feelings, and insights to this journal as a map for tracing your own development over time. Remember that insight always focuses on the journey not the destination; there is no wrong or right way to take this journey, only your particular path with its unique twists, cul-de-sacs, and vistas: the earned wisdom of your personal effort. Taking a journey empowers you to use muscles of perception and creativity that may be new to you. This is the purpose of life writing. I also welcome you to join The Seekers Forum, my monthly teleconference and ongoing discussion group. This monthly series focuses on topics linked to creativity, personal growth, writing, spiritual practice, and ethical well-being. The Seekers Forum is an interactive discussion group for like-minded seekers designed to ignite personal wisdom, develop intimacy, and create lasting change in your life. Send an to contact@markmatousek.com with Please register me for The Seekers Forum in the subject line. We will sign you up and forward all of the necessary information. More information on The Seekers Forum in addition to a complete list of my Personal e-study Courses, books, podcasts and other digital products can be found at There you will find a calendar of workshops, online classes, speaking engagements, and events where I do hope to meet you soon! Until then, keep asking questions, Mark Mark Matousek is the author of two award-winning memoirs, Sex Death, Enlightenment: A True Story (an international bestseller) and The Boy He Left Behind: A Man's Search For His Lost Father (Los Angeles Times Discovery Book), as well as When You're Falling, Dive: Lessons in the Art of Living. A featured blogger for Psychology Today and the Huffington Post, he has contributed to numerous publications including The New Yorker, O: The Oprah Magazine (where he was contributing editor), The New York Times Magazine, Harper's Bazaar, Yoga Journal, The Chicago Tribune, Details, AARP, Tricycle: The Buddhist Review (contributing editor), and many others. A popular lecturer and writing teacher, he is the Creative Director of V-Men (with Eve Ensler), an organization devoted to ending violence against women and girls. His latest book is Ethical Wisdom: The Search for a Moral Life.