Episode #62

Within the vast expanse of uncertainty, there is an infinite void of creative potential that is beckoning each and every one of us.

Asking us: who are we becoming? What do we want to create with our lives?

As the foundation of familiarity crumbles beneath our feet, we now have the privilege to plant new seeds of possibility in the fertile soil of the unknown.

We are living at the heart of a transformative era that is alive with possibility, and it’s visionary minds that are illuminating the way.

We are being called to stretch our imaginations so that we can usher once-unthinkable dreams into tangible realities.

I believe that one of the greatest gifts of being alive is experiencing the joy and beauty of witnessing our visions transmute into reality. When we embark on that deeply meaningful journey, the very thing we set out to create creates us in return and shapes us into the story of who we are becoming.

SO amidst all of the volatility of disruption and accelerating change that humanity is experiencing at this unprecedented moment in time, there is one extraordinary and multifaceted skillset that stands out as the key to shaping and influencing a future that enriches our lives with meaning and purpose: and that is creativity.

And it is no coincidence that at this moment in time more people than ever before, have access to the very substances, molecules more like miracles that fit into the receptor sites of our brain, and they strengthen our capacity to imagine, to think differently, to think more creatively, they are helping us to re-write our limiting beliefs, they are shifting our perception of reality, allowing us to look at ourselves and the world around us from a new perspective.

The psychedelic experience itself is teaching us the very skillsets and mindsets we need to elevate all aspects of creativity, despite the fact that most people aren’t even engaging with psychedelics from this perspective or with this intention.

I find it remarkable that although people seek out ceremonies and psychedelic journeys for many different reasons. Because we desire change, we yearn for deeper understanding, we pray for healing, as a *result* of our healing and inner transformation, creativity is flourishing.

This is worth paying attention to.

And I believe it’s because these medicines are awakening a deep remembrance within us, helping us come home to the truth of who we are.

At the core of our being is our innate capacity to imagine fueled by our desire to create and contribute.

Many of you listening to this podcast are cultivating a practice with psychedelics and sacred plant medicines, you are showing up at the altar to meet your growth edge, letting go of old ways of being, opening to new possibilities in your life, and exploring new ideas and expanded visions.

And you show up because you have a feeling, it’s a clear knowing you were meant to create and contribute something extraordinary with your life. And you are up for the challenge.

Choosing to wake up to our creative potential is one of the most significant ways we can inspire real change.

What seeds of possibility are you planting in the garden of your mind right now?
How far are you willing to expand what you believe is possible to create with your life? What are you feeling called to birth through your being to contribute to the blossoming of humanity?

There has never been a more opportune time to follow that spirit of inspiration.

And it is that energy of inspiration that has led me here at this culmination point in my own life, anchoring new, expanded visions into manifest reality.

**My name is Laura Dawn and you’re listening to episode #62 of the psychedelic leadership podcast and this is the first episode in a series exploring the science and ceremony of psychedelics and creativity.**

And I felt like a solid entry point into this vast conversation and the larger framework of my work, high level overview of the creative process and how psychedelics might fit into that process.

So every time I enter the conversation of creativity, when I’m teaching or speaking about this topic, I like to enter in the same way, to help keep us oriented.

Because creativity is so multifaceted and there are so many angles through which we can explore this topic, it’s helpful to orient ourselves on a map so to speak, so we have a better sense of what we are talking about.

So at a very high level, if we were to divide up the creative landscape into 4 chunks, we could use Mel Rodhes model 4 P’s of creativity.

So if we were to categorize creativity into:

Creative Person
Creative Process
Creative Product – outcome
Creative Place – the environment, like the setting.

In graduate school, I developed another model, and added a 5th P to this model, creative practices that overlaps person and process.

And in this episode, we’re talking the creative process,

And there are many different definitions of creativity, and I’ll share various ones throughout these episodes that illuminate the different facets of creativity, and in the broadest sense, especially when speaking to the creative process, we could say that creativity is the process of translating our ideas and inner visions into tangible reality. And we are actually doing this all the time, on small and large scales.

Do you pay attention to how that process unfolds in your life on a professional level? Could you articulate it? How do you come up with compelling ideas that have the potential to inspire change and then transmute them into reality? How do you evaluate them how do you implement them? As you can see there’s really so much to explore here right?

Are you aware of what helps support your creative process and what stifles it?

And the purpose and benefit of exploring the frameworks for the creative process I’m going to introduce in today’s episode is to learn more about yourself and how you operate so you can learn to optimize your process.

And although it looks different for everyone, we are all human, so there are some generalities we can make.

## 4 Takeaways

And we are going to cover 4 key points and then I’m going to wrap up with a few suggestions.

First key takeaway: each phase in the creative process requires different modes of cognition or mental states. Creativity and the cognition that underlies creativity – what we call creative cognition – is not a single state of mind, it is multiple states of mind.

And once we cover this, we’ll explore where psychedelics fit into the equation here because of the mode of cognition the psychedelic state supports.

The third key point builds on the first two: Creative cognition is not a single state of mind *and more importantly* it’ about the fluidity of mind and our capacity to dynamically move between states of mind. So it’s not a single state of mind it multiple states of mind and it’s about the fluidity between them.

The Fourth key takeaway is that different phases of the creative process require different kinds of creative thinking skills.

And today’s episode I’ll be leading with a little more of my academic hat on, is the foundation for the next episode, where I’m going to share a framework that I developed that is built on how I actually integrate psychedelics into my personal practice.

And I’m going to share *that* framework and an introduction to what that process actually looks like for me in the next episode, but we need to cover some foundational principles and helpful. theory in this episode first.

And before we dive into today’s topic on psychedelics and the creative process, I want to offer some context for all the episodes I’ll be releasing on psychedelics and creativity.

This question: can psychedelics enhance creativity was the question that inspired me to go back to graduate school to complete a Master of Science in Creativity Studies & Change Leadership and I focused my degree on exploring the intersection of psychedelics and creativity, especially creative cognition for leadership development, I know, very heady, but oh-so-fascinating.

But far more important than any degree or piece of paper, what I’m drawing upon is over 25 years of quite a substantial amount of journeying with medicines, weaving these teachings into the fabric of my reality, everything of significance that I have created has been the result of applying these teachings, this curriculum I’ve received

and supporting hundreds of other people on their journey with medicine as well.

I want to say something about weaving science into these episodes.

If you’ve been listening to this podcast, you know that I like to bridge science and academia with ceremony and wisdom traditions, primarily tibetan buddhist philosophy, more often than not they point to the same thing, so I like to bring both perspectives to the table, to expand my understanding.

I want to acknowledge that there are only a handful scientific studies explicitly exploring psychedelics and creativity. Yes, more are coming, this is a huge topic of interest, but any study that looks at psychedelics and creativity is going to be extremely limited, for so many reasons, some obvious and others less obvious, that I won’t get into right now.

But suffice it to say, that the tapestry of our own experience is going to be the best place to draw insight and wisdom from. So I encourage you to trust yourself.

I personally don’t care that there aren’t many studies, in the sense that I don’t let it stop me from doing this work.

Because even though I have an academic background, and I believe that understanding the science is valuable, it’s informative and helpful, and I’m pro-science,

I am *also* pro intuition and common sense – and to put it bluntly, it’s obvious that psychedelics enhance creativity. And my life, and countless other lives are a living testament to how psychedelics enhance and unlock our creative potential.

And even though there are few studies directly focusing on psychedelics and creativity, I spent my years of graduate school reading countless papers and psychedelic studies, digging into the literature that is primarily focused on psychedelics and mental illness, and embedded in the existing literature we can connect these hidden dots that are hard to miss when you know what to look for, and we can make a compelling case that psychedelic medicines don’t just enhance creativity as some nice to have fluffy by-product of the psychedelic experience, it’s actually the core of their therapeutic potential. And I’m not talking about art therapy, although that’s a valid healing modality.

I’m talking about learning to think differently, shifting our perception of reality so we create new experiences for ourselves – that’s how we heal from depression and addiction, and it’s also how we come up with brilliant ideas that inspire change.

I view healing and creating as synonymous. It’s all life-force energy moving through us.

And when we understand that creativity is at the core, we start to engage with medicines through this lens, we perceive them through this understanding, and it changes everything: how we work with and engage with these medicines changes.

It shifts how we think about set and setting, how we think about integration and preparation, and how we think about the experience itself.

And when we take the time to learn new concepts and new words, a language to describe something, it offers us a new perspective, a new lens through which to perceive.

When you change the way you look at things and the things you look at will change, and concepts and language changes the way we look at things, they influence our perception.

And this content that I’m sharing in these episodes, which I consider to be more like curriculum, is helping you build your conceptual frameworks, like handing you a lens that has the capacity to change your perception of reality, and you can apply this understanding in whatever intuitive way makes the most sense for you.

Concepts help us to understand, but let’s always remember that theory is a road map and a map is not the territory.

So I encourage you to hold it all lightly, play with it, try not to grip onto anything I say or suggest as truth, these are ideas I’m putting in the table for you to pick up and explore if you choose, find what works for you. Follow your knowing and your truth. Trust that. Trust yourself.

## Legacy

And even though this is season 3, in a way this feels like my first episode,
because this genuinely feels like the start of my legacy work. I will be turning 40 this year and my very first gray hairs are starting to come in, so I’m stepping into this next chapter of my life.

And even though I’ve been teaching psychedelic related curriculum for the better part of 10 years now, each episode I’m going to be bringing through feels like a segment of a dissertation on the culmination of my life’s work, and after years of learning how to embody and apply and practice these principles, I finally feel ready to share this deeper layer of my work and my craft. And I’ve had to move through my own process around facing some of my fears around this.

And so this season I’m going to be speaking from a deeper layer of my authentic truth, and speaking from the perspective of being a student, with humility for all that I don’t know and still have to learn. I think one could explore creativity and psychedelics for many lifetimes and still just scratch the surface, and it will mean something different for all of us.

The depth and complexity of these topics are challenging to navigate, this process is truly bringing me to my own edge, and I am constantly navigating that. And I’m often reflecting on whether to lead with the language of science vs the language of Spirit and ceremony.

So this content I’m sharing is for people who want to go deep and who are open to receive the language that is simply my truth. I’m not trying to tailor myself to a short attention spanned economy or a mainstream audience.

This curriculum is not for everyone, it’s actually only for a very small segment of people who genuinely aspire to create, innovate and elevate, who want to expand what they belive is possible to create with their lives and contribute something extraordinary.

I can genuinely say that I’ve led an extraordinary life, and I’m grateful for that and I’m also proud of that.

And I’m asking for patience between episodes because each episode takes quite a lot of time to produce, I’m also writing this content for my book.

And so part of my own journey is evolving from time management to energy management and building my life around what works for me creatively, rather than building around external expectations, easier said than done.

this episode alone took me 3 weeks, so I’m moving at the pace of my creative process.

And the majority of my life is dedicated to bringing this through right now. And this podcast is one example of how I’m working with medicines to bring this curriculum through.

People listen to the end result of these episodes, which is the outcome of my creative process, (just one example) but I’m going to be peeling back a layer, offering insight as to what transpires underneath the surface, to bring something like this through, how I engage with medicines to refine my ideas, to cultivate vision, to craft my thought-leadership, and that requires space and time to integrate.

When I journey, I’m going to dimensions beyond space time, and there’s wisdom from those dimensions that I want to bring through and I need to free myself from time pressure in order to do that. And just expressing this to you is helpful, it helps to free up the pressure I put on myself to produce, that pressure stifles my creative process.

And this is a perfect example of how we can give ourselves permission and have the courage to build our lives around what genuinely works for each and every one of us. And that is easier said than done.

so I know this is very meta here, because I’m pointing to my creative process, so I’ll be opening up and sharing very personal aspects of my solo practice with medicines and how I integrate them into my creative process, truly as a way of life.

I’m also tending to quite a significant vision, I just bought 90 acres of land here in Costa Rica, I’m recording outside, my partner and I are designing extraordinary homes for medicine practitioners. My partner Mark Diaz is an architect and an interior designer, and I’m learning so much about the creative process through witnessing his process and co-creating with him.

And I can genuinely say that I’m here on this 90 acres of land, bordering 2 miles of river because of the miracles that have manifested in my life because of my visionary practices. I know that sounds very woo, but it’s true.

And there is something really important I need to share here:

What I’m teaching is not about journeying with medicines to generate better business ideas to make more money. That would be a false conclusion to jump to.

Yes, I’ve been financially successful and it’s easy to make assumptions about what that looks like, but my success has been a by-product of cultivating the courage to follow the spirit of inspiration regardless of where it leads me. Every time I chose to leap with courage despite the fear and doubt, I have been rewarded in ways I never could have imagined. (And I feel some of the hesitation because I have received all sorts of flack for speaking my truth)

But there’s a quote by Charles Bukowski that reads:

“If it doesn’t come bursting out of you in spite of everything don’t do it.”

It’s like that.

I was born to share this, it’s my darhma, I know it in my bones, so I am simply in service to the spirit of inspiration.

What this is really about is coming to know ourselves deeply, its about cultivating the courage to live our truth, to follow our curiosities, it’s about discovering who we are and who we are capable of becoming. It’s about healing, as much as it is about creating.

And I think we have a lot of healing to do around our value and self worth and what we feel worthy of receiving in our lives, and healing the shame we feel around money is part of that. But that conversation is for another time.

The more I have the more I have to give. The more we open to give, the more we open to receive, it’s all flow.

See if you can focus on how this content might benefit your life, so you can benefit other people. That’s a helpful frame of mind to have.

Of course it goes without saying that

## # 2 Everything I share is for educational purposes only
But I have to say it anyways.

## # 3 Safety Disclaimer

If you are going to engage with psychedelic medicines, please prioritize your safety, I have a free guide I’ve written on how to have a safe psychedelic journey at home, find the support you need. I include a guide for integration, which starts with sound preparation. – I’ll include that in the show notes.

Ok, let’s begin, shall we?

If you have questions about what I’m sharing, please send me a voice memo at memo.fm/plp – I just set this up, which is pretty cool.

I welcome all your questions, comments, if you other threads your tracking on this topic, resources you want to share, please send me a voice message.

If you want to stay tuned to my next programs and retreats, please get on my email list, I share exclusive written content that I don’t share anywhere else, not even on these episodes. I just hit 10k subscribers, which I’m pretty excited about.

all links and all resources mentioned throughout this episode can be found at lauradawn.co / 62

And just in case you’re wondering, I will still be releasing interviews and conversations with other thought leaders as well this season dispersed throughout my solo episodes and I’ve already recorded some incredible conversations that I can’t wait to share with you.

# Frameworks for the Creative Process

So as we explore these frameworks for the creative process, I invite you to reflect on how this might relate to your own creative process, which refers to anything you are actively working on.

(swap the word “work” for create and see how that resonates with you.)

And as you’re listening to these phases of the creative process, keep in mind that sometimes this process can unfold over the course of hours or a single day, but other times, we’re in this process for months, and years and when we’re bringing through our legacy work, we are in this process for decades.

In 1925, Graham Wallas presented one of the first models for the creative process, in his classic work The Art of Thought, it’s still a great name a hundred years later,

And in that book he presented 4 stages of the process:

1. Preparation
2. Incubation
3. Illumination
4. Verification

And like most models, they evolve, and adapt based on other people’s experience and interpretations.

James Taylor created a 5-phase framework, and these 5 stages of the creative process are commonly referenced. He took the 4th phase – verification, in Wallas’ model – and broke it into 2 phases, evaluation and then implementation.

So instead of verify, let’s evaluate and then implement – makes sense to me.

So he outlined

1. Preparation
2. Incubation
3. Illumination
4. Evaluation
5. Implementation

1. The first phase **Preparation**: is about gathering and exploring information, we are actively learning the subject matter. Preparing by equipping ourselves with knowledge and information. We’re focused and more goal oriented. (so this can span hours but we can also be preparing for years and decades)
2. **Incubation:** And then after we experience those intense windows of concentrated focus and effort, we step back and take a mental break, and disengage from actively thinking about whatever it is we’re working on, and we incubate on it.
3. **Illumination:** And when we create the space to relax and open the mind, allowing it to wander, which is what happens when we incubate, that’s usually when we experience those very special “Aha” moments and insights – and sometimes very profound insights come to us.

*This is also why research shows that people rarely get their best ideas while they are actually at their desk working and more often their ideas flow in those in-between moments, when we are flowing, like walking, or driving or while in the shower. (**There are some flow principles embedded here, which I’ll be highlighting later.)

I actually don’t consider illumination as a phase as much as I consider it a peak moment that we spend time preparing ourselves for (and this is important, we’re going to come back to this).

One other thing I’ll say about illumination – people often associate these flashes of insight to being a creative genius, but we just don’t see the years that go into the years of preparation and incubation. Creative genius is mostly the result of enormous amounts of dedication and devotion to the craft. Like when Eisntein said genius is 1% talent and 99% hard work – it’s like that.

(so we have preparation, incubation, illumination)

5. **Evaluation:** And then once the insight arises, we need to evaluate it. Is it a good idea? Has this been done before? Would it be beneficial for other people? Is this an original and novel idea that also serves a useful function? And you might notice that this was the definition of creativity, and there are many ways to help you ideate and develop ideas to help them become more creative (but that’s for another time). Will it be financially viable? What is it really going to take to bring this idea to fruition? And depending on what field you’re in, the questions you ask yourself to evaluate the idea will be different. For me, I know the feeling in my body, I can feel it in my bones when I know this idea is worth pursuing.


6. **Implementation:** So if you decide, yes, this is a great idea, I’m going for it…you then need to create a strategy to bring it to fruition, which might take days, months, years or in some cases an entire lifetime.

(So again, think about how you might relate to this on a shorter time frame, like within a day, and then zoom out to some of the much bigger projects you are bringing through.)

When I was first learning about this framework in graduate school, I found baking a chicken in the oven to be a helpful analogy. Also helpful for feeding me while I was studying.

You prepare the chicken, you put it in the oven where it incubates, you turn on the light to see if it’s ready, then you evaluate it, and if it’s ready you take it out of the oven and eat it, thats implementation.

So that’s a high level overview on a pretty surface level, but hopefully by learning this model you’ll learn more about yourself, which is really the whole purpose here.

and that’s just one model. and many other people have outlined phases of the creative process as well.

And I’ll just mention Rick Rubin, who is arguably one of the most creative people alive, and he wrote about the creative process in his phenomenal book called the creative act, I highly recommend reading this book, it’s so well written and he speaks my language when it comes to creativity, so it just – it deeply resonates, and I’ll link to the creative act in the shownotes: and he divides the creative process into 4 phases:

**The Seed Phase**
**The Experimentation Phase**
**The Craft Phase**
**The Completion Phase**

Hubberman also interviewed him on his podcast, which was also a great episode.

And by looking at his outline, you can kind of get a sense, there’s a similar arc there, seed, experiment, craft, completion.

And as I mentioned, I built a different framework, one that I think is really helpful for understanding how to integrate medicines into your creative process.

And I’m going to share *that* framework and what that process looks like for me in the next episode, but before we get there, we need to cover some foundational principles to build on, and I’m going to use the 5-phase model because it’s simpler and it will be easier to understand those foundations, so we can expand on it later.

So we’re talking:
1. Preparation
2. Incubation
3. Illumination
4. Evaluation
5. Implementation

Baking the chicken, and I don’t mean to alienate my vegan friends, we could call it a potato.

So there are 4 key takeaways I want to cover and I’m going to highlight all four of them…

and then we’re mostly going to spend time unpacking the first two points.

1. First key takeaway: each phase in the creative process requires different modes of cognition or mental states. Creativity and the cognition that underlies creativity – what we call creative cognition – is not a single state of mind, it is multiple states of mind.
2. And once we cover this, we’ll explore where psychedelics fit into the equation here because of the mode of cognition the psychedelic state supports.
3. The third key point builds on the first two: Creative cognition is not a single state of mind *and more importantly* it’ about the fluidity of mind and our capacity to dynamically move between states of mind. So it’s not a single state of mind it multiple states of mind and it’s about the fluidity between them.
4. The Fourth key takeaway is that different phases of the creative process require different kinds of creative thinking skills. These are cognitive skills. So if we are talking about improving your creative process, you will benefit by knowing what cognitive to reach for depending on what stage of the process you’re in. And this becomes incredibly relevant when we start talking about the framework I’ve developed, because a bit part of that is learning cognitive tools that you can bring into medicine space with you. This is really a huge topic in and of itself, it’s really the core of my work, so we’re only going to touch on it here, I’ll be speaking to some of this in my next episode but if you want to go much deeper into, come join me for my next retreat.

So that’s a brief overview of the 4 key takeaways and all four of these points are very intricately connected.

So let’s unpack the first takeaway, and again this is going to be the foundation for next episode:

# 1. Different phases require different modes of cognition

And I’m going to make some generalized statements, and what I’m offering here are signposts, pointing toward what we’re trying to understand, because in reality, it’s very challenging to draw a hard line and say it’s either this way or that way, especially when it comes to the mind.

So we’re exploring the different kinds of cognition that underly the different phases of the creative process.

So when we look at the 5 phases:

1. Preparation
2. Incubation
3. Illumination
4. Evaluation
5. Implementation

If we were going to group those into just 2 different groups, or categories, we would put

Preparation, evaluation and implementation in one group,

and then incubation and illumination in another group.

So when you think about what kind of state of mind is most effective for when you are gathering information, or evaluating ideas, and you need be discerning and use good judgment for making sound decisions. Or think about when you’re implementing, writing the book, writing very succinct copy for your pitch deck, working on your website, pitching the idea in the boardroom, or you’re shooting the video. I’m implementing my idea for this podcast episode right now.

So we have preparation, evaluation, implementation, and when we group them together,

I’m going to describe this mode of cognition by using the words:
Narrow focus
Spotlight consciousness
Deliberate Mind
Goal-oriented

And then after I’m done recording, I’m going to step away from my computer, and take a walk down to the waterfall to give my mind a rest and move my body.
And walking is always incubation time for me.
You might take a break and go biking, or workout, or dance, or get in the garden, play music, or journal, doing dishes or laundry is also incubation for me.

When we’re in incubation, which is the pre-phase for illumination:
We’re in open focus
Lantern consciousness.
Mind wandering
Spontaneous Mind

Now those two terms Spotlight consciousness vs lantern consciousness might sound familiar, especially if yo’ve read Michael Pollan’s book How to change your mind, he mentions them when referencing alyson gopniks work.

If I was to add a few other labels onto each groups, just to point towards what we’re getting at here: I’d also add words like:

Efforting vs relaxing
Swimming vs floating – that’s another way I like to think of it.

An