Tea with the Muse

It’s my birthday and I’m sharing three gratitudes and three of regrets Get full access to Tea with the Muse at teawiththemuse.substack.com/subscribe

When my father and I crashed on the motorcyclewhen my family picked up hitchhiker’swhen my mother and I fled in the middle of the nightall of this shaped my nervous system to be more comfortable with discomfort. Get full access to Tea with the Muse at teawiththemuse.substack.com/subscribe

Can You Cultivate Genius?The question is: can you cultivate genius? What do you think?First, a quote from my mama, Caron McCloud. She says, “I decided early on that I mattered.”Today’s episode shares how my mom Karen McCloud encouraged me to cultivate my genius, why I think it’s important for women to learn to cultivate their genius, and how brainwave shifts can show us what we do not usually see — including a meditation to access the theta brainwave for your insights, as well as an exciting invitation that includes Amy Ahlers. Hint: it includes the genius we share about money, sex, and influence. So here we go.Let’s talk about genius, my friends, and why it matters. First, a question: What would it take to be able to say, I am genius, without qualifying or needing to prove? Most of us don’t think we are. This isn’t about other people thinking you are, but about cultivating a genius space where fresh thoughts can arise.The term genius comes from the Latin verb gignere, meaning to beget, to produce, or to bring forth. This same root gives us the words generate and genetics. In Rome, your genius was the birth spirit that shaped your personality, guided your destiny, and protected you throughout life. And I can’t help but think about the word genie being the root of genius.Very little space is given to the development of our innate genius, and this concerns me. We need more women living in the fullness of their power.But there’s a problem. We might not know this is a choice — that we get to cultivate our genius. It may never occur to us that we have a genius to access at all, really. Most of us have never spent hours, let alone days, watching what truly wants to come through us: an insight, an innovation, a worldview built to actually design our lives and relationships.The drafting table Mama gave meI want to start with a personal story that even now kind of blows my mind. Let me take off my shoes now and step onto the ground as I remember this.My mother Karen McLeod was a genius. She encouraged me to write and recite poetry. She bought me a drafting table for my 13th birthday and told me, this is where you work out your ideas. Draw here, paint here, write here. She said, I want you to think as if the thing you’re thinking about could be life-saving for yourself and for others. I want you to treat yourself as if you absolutely matter. And the world will be a different place unless you inhabit it with everything you’re carrying.She’d send me to my room saying, go write a poem and don’t come out until you have a draft. She taught me to treat my thinking as if it completely mattered — and as if I did.If she hadn’t given me that framework to explore myself, I doubt the thought would have ever crossed my mind. Because it’s audacious, isn’t it? It is audacious to devote an hour or a day to your own genius just to see what’s available to you.That is what I’m doing right now with two of my genius friends. We are in a sister mind, each quietly working on our own material, then discussing, then back to the drawing table for a 24-hour cycle. This — the cultivation of your genius — is what I’ve invited women to do for over 30 years. It’s what I’ve built a long-term business and community on.What if our brilliant ideas are in the future? And what if that future is just a few minutes in the future, and accessible — like, right now?Why We Don’t Go ThereThere are reasons we don’t create the time to cultivate genius. Here are a few.Ego. We’re taught not to have an ego. Not to get too big for our britches. Not to be too smart.Fear. We’re warned that if people knew how much sacred medicine we’re carrying, we could be a danger to ourselves or others.Worth. In the same breath, we’re told we aren’t worthy, and that there’s no real value in cultivating our consciousness. Don’t be too big — but be big enough.Those of us in the business world get another script entirely: be more masculine, hustle, grasp, win at all costs, even at cost to yourself. Experiences like hustle and win are almost a deadening place for genius. Genius doesn’t grow in the hard ground of striving. It grows in a field of wildflowers, where you lay back and gaze at the sky and ask questions of your own consciousness.And I think the most obvious reason we don’t go there, into the space of genius, is simpler. We don’t know how. We haven’t been shown. We’ve been prevented from it, and taught to devalue it.Here’s how. Access flow state within. Focused, intentional inquiry. That is how. Focused, intentional creativity. That is how.A Little Brain ScienceLet me show you why. Here’s a little of the brain science, because it’s worth understanding. Our brains move through different electrical rhythms, and each one gives us access to a different kind of thinking.Most of our waking day runs on beta — the busybody, alert, task-managing state. This is the ground of usual day-to-day being. Beta is where we answer emails and cross things off lists. It’s useful, but it’s narrow. It can only show us a certain number of things, and we can come to think beta is the only place there is — just like we think we are only so smart, and that’s how we’re born. The issue isn’t beta. It’s in not knowing how to get out of it into new territory.When we soften and let the mind open, we can visit the bridge to alpha — the relaxed, imaginative, daydreaming state. This is the bridge. It’s the gentle threshold between doing and receiving, the en route that takes us into possibility. We can feel the change in our body as our brain loosens its tight grasp on what there is to do and moves into presence.And just past that, theta — the slow, intuitive, dreamlike rhythm we touch as we fall into deep meditation and self-expression. Theta is where the subconscious becomes available to us by choice, where we can even dip a toe into the unconscious. This is where the eureka lives: the vision, the aha, the change we want to make in the world. It’s so often conceived here, in expanded possibility.But can we get it back into beta? That’s one of our questions.Here’s the curious catch. That brilliant idea is conceived in theta, and then we have to carry it all the way back to beta — back to the day-to-day world of action steps. Many people cultivate a vision for years and never find the steps to ground it. So in our community, we travel into theta on purpose, and then we consciously bring that realm of information back into beta, so we can take decisive action on behalf of the vision.As Gertrude Stein puts it, being a genius takes a lot of time sitting around doing nothing. I just call that tea with the muse. It’s the pause that makes the cultivation possible.A Ritual to Try TodayIf you want to try it today, here’s a ritual.Sit quietly and look out a window. Pick a point as far away as you can see, and fix your gaze there. Pretend you can travel to that spot while staying exactly where you are. Let your breathing deepen and lengthen. Feel your belly soften, and the space between your eyebrows soften too. Let loose the grip, smooth the worry lines, and begin to listen to your inner world.Then state your intention three times: I am here to cultivate my genius. I am here to cultivate my genius. I am here to cultivate my genius.And then you pause. You just be. You just listen. If nothing comes, say, show me one thing I need to know today. And wait. It may take time. You may need to return to this for a week or two.Mama McLeod says this: keep looking at the stories that we tell, and the stories that we don’t tell, and take responsibility for them. Create a context that’s big enough to live a big life — and then live into that context. Context provides a theme, and it provides a perspective: a way of going about living our lives as a great adventure, and making choices about what we want that story to be. A context defines, and provides an identity to occur from.So the answer is yes. You can cultivate genius by choice. I do. You can too. Let’s do it, and teach the others around us. I’m right here with you — in the heart, in the field, in the quantum now.P.S. — Keep your eyes out…I have exciting news. If you’re a woman looking for a breakthrough in midlife — in money, sex, and influence — watch this space for an emergent invitation from me and Amy Ahlers, my incredible coach and BFF for the past 16 years.Amy and I have been working on a project behind the scenes to serve women entrepreneurs and those in corporate spaces, to claim their superpowers of prosperity, sexuality, identity, leadership, and intuition. It is a hybrid of virtual private one-on-one coaching and in-person gatherings — the ultimate mastermind, a council for powerful women. This is a dream of ours, and we’re bringing it to you. We’ve been teaching together since 2012.Applications for Powerhouse are opening soon, and we begin in September.Thank you so much for tuning in to Tea with the Midnight Muse.Much love, Shiloh SophiaThis is a video from 10 years ago where you can hear Caron McCloud speaking about mattering. Get full access to Tea with the Muse at teawiththemuse.substack.com/subscribe

Get full access to Tea with the Muse at teawiththemuse.substack.com/subscribe

What are the steps you can take to uncolonize your mind? I’m obsessed with this sacred form of activism. I’d like to share with you why and how I learned what I learned. AND the 9 areas that are so impacted even when we don't realise it! Get full access to Tea with the Muse at teawiththemuse.substack.com/subscribe

Hi EveryoneI hope you can get just as excited about this research as I am. It has been around a while but I am just putting the peices together. References are below.I want you to EXPERIENCE THIS for yourself. Here are three ways NOW!Shiloh SophiaBook a call to explore our 9 month training called Stardust Initation starting in JuneJoin me for my NEW class, called Threshold - we are gonna paint aiwth power!Come along with me and my BFF Amy Ahlers to explore navigating this wild wild worldThe Neuroscience of Self-Expression: Why the Brush Knows Before We DoI want to speak to you about something I am so passionate about — the neuroscience of self-expression. It comes from my root system, because I come from the Stardust Lineage, and we are creative, spiritual, magical women who pass tools of Intentional Creativity from hand to hand and heart to heart. This isn’t a woo-woo idea, and neither is it entirely scientific. It’s a hybrid. Sometimes the brush knows before we know what’s actually going to happen.I want to tell you about a researcher at Drexel University who has spent a decade strapping near-infrared sensors onto people’s foreheads and watching what happens when the human brain is firing and wiring the moment the paintbrush touches the paper or the canvas. Do you know how long I’ve wanted to do this? Her name is Girija Kaimal — Wow. I would love to have a cup of tea with her. Of course, she doesn’t know me. She probably will at some point, because I’m going to reach out. And she’s probably never heard the words medicine painting — one of the terms we use for our work, because it’s an approach to painting that’s healing. Her data has been confirming what the women in our lineage have known since the 1930s. Self-expression is healing. Painting for us is a spiritual practice. It is not just a hobby. It is literally a neurological event. And guess what? When you paint with intention, the event begins before the brush ever touches the canvas. If you’ve worked with me, you know I talk about this all the time as energy equals matter at the speed of light — your energy as thought, expressed through your physical body, the equal sign, manifests matter at the speed of light on the canvas. Are you kidding me? Yes. The neurological awakening of what’s going to happen happens before the brush touches the material.You may also be aware of another piece of research that adds to our point, by Audrey van der Meer, a Norwegian neuroscientist who has proved that writing by hand wakes up the brain in ways that typing cannot. Imagine how many kids these days are no longer learning to handwrite?! Her work is finding something so incredible about what happens when people are actually handwriting — she’s measuring how the brain encodes the writing of letters into memory, and the brain is lighting up. When Kaimal’s team did their research, they put 26 people in headbands — the kind that read blood flow inside the prefrontal cortex literally in real time. (Gosh, I wish it were here.) They were given three minutes to color in a mandala, to doodle around a circle, and to free-draw whatever they wanted. The results were published back in 2017 in Art Therapy. Guess what? All three activities lit up the medial prefrontal cortex. Wow. Wow. That region is part of the brain’s reward pathway. Are you picking up what I’m putting down? That’s the same circuit that fires when someone you love walks into the room. This is when you get to have tea with your best friend and you’re jumping up and down. This is when your lover winks at you and you know what’s coming next. This is when those of us in Intentional Creativity know that I’m going to do a power-packed livestream that’s going to knock our red striped socks off. We feel love.The people she studied were not artists — most of them. And their brain did not care, in a literal way. Their brain didn’t care if they were an artist. Their brain rewarded them anyway, for the simple act of creating color across a page with their hands. What’s interesting too is that working inside of shapes — as in coloring — really does something powerful to the brain and to memory. It’s just so exciting.In a separate study, the same researchers took 39 adults, gave them 45 minutes with markers, clay, and collage materials — nothing structured — and measured the cortisol in their saliva before and after. I kid you not. Cortisol in the saliva. Cortisol is the hormone your body produces under stress, the one that keeps so many of us awake at three in the morning, especially those of us going through midlife. Seventy-five percent of the participants showed lower cortisol after making art. No skill required. No talent required. No making it pretty. No perfectionism required. It is not an act of performance. It is an act of self-expression. The brain is responding to the act itself. It’s in a way metacognition — becoming conscious of becoming conscious, while being intentional about what you’re creating.There’s something else I want to add, because when you’re coloring and your brain doesn’t have to make decisions, you can actually break a psychotic loop. This comes from nurses at Stanford who use my coloring books, Color of Woman. If they could get patients to color, they could break a psychotic loop. Wow. Why are we not talking about this more? Whether you’re in a psychotic loop or not, wouldn’t it be helpful to know that you could sit down and color and you would start to go into a different brain state? This is so important. (And it doesn’t work if there’s a blank page — for that psychotic-loop piece.)Now, our part in this. For close to 30 years I have been working with creating with intention, and since 2008 I’ve been training others to work with Intentional Creativity. I have not been teaching people to become brilliant artists — though some of them are. I have not been teaching people to make perfect paintings, though some of them do. I have not been teaching perfection technique to make a painting that would hang on the wall of a gallery. No. We’ve been into self-expression — to see what happens inside when you express yourself.Painting like this is a way of * Exploring our inner world. * A way of coming face to face with the often hidden identity within ourselves. * A way of activating the inner healer and the energies that go with that. * A way of catalyzing the brainwaves to move from beta to alpha to theta, so we can cross over into that state of the imagination and reach the subconscious domains. * A way of allowing the canvas itself to be a portal — to hold what the body carries* To express into form what was once inside and didn’t have anywhere to go. * A composting of energy, now expressed onto the canvas. We call it medicine painting. Tens of thousands of people in our community have painted with it, and before I started doing it, we had two generations of artists who did it before me.Here’s what the neuroscientists have not measured — but I would bet my brushes and my striped socks they would receive incredible results. The study in Kaimal’s lab gave people markers and said, Go. There wasn’t an intention set. Of course, the intention was that they were being measured. BUT. There wasn’t an invocation. There wasn’t a prayer. There wasn’t a lighting of a candle. There wasn’t a moment of asking what the piece of paper or the canvas wants to express to us. There wasn’t a moment of what message are you receiving. And the cortisol still dropped. BOOOM DIGGITY. The reward pathway still lit up. The body still received a measurable gift — and the “able to experience it” part is super important to me. Because when we do this work and invite people to experience and acknowledge that it’s happened, it creates more reward and more bliss and more affirmation and more faith that we could do it again and again. Which is why the science matters to me — because I want us to be able to do it again and again, in risk groups, in affinity groups, in groups of children, with people who need it. We need to bring this work everywhere.Imagine what the data would look like if the people being measured were bringing an intention. An intention to heal an illness. An intention to repair a marriage. An intention to pray for the end of war. Do you know how much power comes into the field, into the body, when one of us places our hand on the canvas and the other hand on the heart and says, What wants to be revealed? When a woman holds the red thread with other women in her circle, when she blesses the water and the cup of rain with holy water sprinkled from the places that matter to her, that brush is then charged with all of that energy. When we set an intention to alchemize trauma and wounds from years ago, patterns stuck in the body — then, when the brush expresses lightning, because we are daughters of lightning, it gets moved.In Intentional Creativity we say that the intention sets the field. This comes from Einstein’s theories “the field is the sole governing agency of the particle”. The energy around us is what’s creating what goes on the canvas. The thought we have and the intention we set will impact what shows up on the canvas. Then we observe it with our eyes, and the material goes back through the brain and translates back through the hands again. The moment you choose what this experience is for, the body has already started doing the work of translating the thought through the body, and the brush is just the place where the choice makes the inner vision possible — and then visible.What the neuroscience is beginning to show is that this is not metaphoric. Self-expression is not just a great idea. The state of the nervous system, before this act of beauty, this act of devotion — I’m so humbled by this. You can tell I’m just all lit up. When we come to the canvas, our nervous system is firing and wiring in a particular way. When we bring intention to the canvas, the nervous system shifts and becomes more regulated. The heart and brain can come into coherence. A brain and a mind that has been communicated with — that this sacred act will enable you to receive different signals — will receive messages you can’t even imagine. Intention is a neurological primer of possibility. All meditation teachers know this. Our grandmothers who blessed the bread while kneading it, know this. Our aunties who sew the quilts know this. Every woman in our community who has ever painted herself back into her own body and told her own story — we know this. We’ve crossed a threshold into another way of being, and there is no way to step back from it, because once you know, you know.More studies are coming, and they will demonstrate what we have already been practicing. They will catch up to what we’ve already been doing. Consider what this means for us — for women in midlife, who have been carrying grief and rage and trauma and versions of ourselves we’ve tried to leave behind in those old relationships. We’ve worked it. We’ve gone to therapy. We’ve used our journals. And yet something still isn’t moving. Painting with intention opens the door to a healing that most of us could never imagine was possible with something so simple — something that does not require talent. The data from these researchers shows us that the brain rewards the act of self-expression, having nothing to do with skill.You do not need to know what’s going to happen. You do not need to control the outcomes. In fact, if you try to do that, your brainwaves will change and perhaps constrict. Intention does not require a known outcome. It requires inquiry and a willingness to show up and to not be in control. You don’t even need to believe it’s going to happen for it to work. You just need to show up. Your cortisol is going to drop anyway. Somewhere in the medial prefrontal cortex, lights begin to fire and wire. The reward begins to spark. Your nervous system registers that something on your behalf has begun. And then there’s the craving — the craving to do it again.The handwriting research showed us that we lose something when we are just typing. The painting research shows us that when we bring ourselves to the canvas, we actually create wellbeing and bliss. But I want you to hear that you do not have to be talented. You do not have to know what you’re called to. If you will pick up a brush with us and cross a threshold and set an intention — if you will ask the questions you’ve been afraid to ask in the good company of other powerful women — then we can cross the threshold together. The canvas reveals an answer. Our paintbrush is less like a brush adding color, and more like an archeologist revealing something that’s already inside. Our vision is that you already have everything you need inside of you, and what we’re doing is creating a condition in the field that allows it to be expressed.And so, with my heartfelt invitation and my emphatic hand motions — which you cannot see — I invite you to join me for Threshold, a brand-new class that is going to rock our world, because that’s what I’m intending is going to happen, and it happens every time as long as people show up. Plus, there’s a money-back guarantee. Or if you’re ready to dive into the big mama codex of our work, it’s called Stardust Initiation. You can find everything at musea.orgThis is Curate Shiloh Sophia, and I’m looking forward to gathering with you and transforming our brains and hearts and hands as we fire and wire together. As we say in the Stardust lineage: with our feet on the good red earth and our hands in the stars, our hearts on our sleeve and our hands in the medium, we create — and we become the oracle that we are seeking. It happens in real time. It happens right now. And it happens every time1. Van der Weel, F. R., & Van der Meer, A. L. H. (2024). Handwriting but not typewriting leads to widespread brain connectivity: A high-density EEG study with implications for the classroom. Frontiers in Psychology, 14, 1219945.https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1219945/fullOpen access. The 36-student EEG study referenced in the opening of the piece. Note: the lead author is Van der Weel; Van der Meer is corresponding author and the public face of the work.2. Kaimal, G., Ayaz, H., Herres, J., Dieterich-Hartwell, R., Makwana, B., Kaiser, D. H., & Nasser, J. A. (2017). Functional near-infrared spectroscopy assessment of reward perception based on visual self-expression: Coloring, doodling, and free drawing. The Arts in Psychotherapy, 55, 85–92.https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S019745561630171XThe fNIRS study showing medial prefrontal cortex activation during the three art tasks. 26 participants. Doodling produced the strongest signal.3. Kaimal, G., Ray, K., & Muniz, J. (2016). Reduction of cortisol levels and participants’ responses following art making. Art Therapy: Journal of the American Art Therapy Association, 33(2), 74–80.https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/07421656.2016.1166832Open access. The cortisol study. 39 adults, 45 minutes of art-making, 75% showed lower cortisol afterward, no correlation with prior art experience. Get full access to Tea with the Muse at teawiththemuse.substack.com/subscribe

Thoughts from Café with love With love ❤️ Shiloh Sophia Get full access to Tea with the Muse at teawiththemuse.substack.com/subscribe