Tea with the Muse

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

This is a reading from my book, Tea with the Midnight Muse, Invocations and Inquiries for Awakening. This one’s called Medicine Woman, and it goes way, way, way, way back to when I was 30 years old. It was at one time published inside of the Mother Tongue Publishing We Moon Calendar.And today I am painting with Havi Mandel, co-director of Red Madonna. And you are still invited to join us for a 13 moon journey in the sacred feminine where you activate your medicine woman. Okay, ready? Ready? Medicine WomanThe wild one lives within all women.She is known as Medicine Woman. She holds the tools for healing in her magic basket. She sings her prayers, you know. Medicine Woman knows stars and sums. She listens between worlds. Medicine Woman cannot be domesticated at all, ever. Even when we don’t recognize her, she is always here.She has blue butterflies and red roses in her hair and golden boots with wings. She’s at the movies with teenage girls on Friday night. She gets a tattoo of the Guadalupe on her left bicep in San Francisco’s Mission District and the Sacred Heart of Jesus on her right bicep.You may catch a glimpse of her silver striped leggings as she roller skates through New York’s Central Park. She teaches workshops on right brain, left brain, the critic and her lover, the muse, or the geometry of numbers or raw food or revolution for breakfast. She pays for everything with cash.She paints glitter on her toenails, fire engine red. Just don’t think you have her figured out. She will always surprise you. She shows up in a crimson dress sewn with a white dogwood bodice and a bay leaf hem. She is the sound of bells. She may let her armpit hair grow.She is the place within all of us that wants it all and wants to give it all up. She swims naked in the ocean. She rides motorcycles up the coast. She paints and writes and dances and dreams and she has multiple income streams. She is medicine woman. She heals the unexpressed in us.She asks the question, who are you not being? Her life is her own. She is on her own and she likes it that way. Don’t be surprised if she asks you to miracle tea and you find yourself drunk with aliveness and honeycomb cake. Shiloh Sophia Today I wish to dedicate this to three incredible members of our teamwho have shown up in extraordinary ways this week. And many weeks, but in particular, right now. The one and only Curate Kelly House. Co-leader of Sacred Echoes, Isabelle Guzman Stark. And live streamer, Vicchi “V” Oleski Thank you. You are all medicine women to me and to our community. And I love you. Get full access to Tea with the Muse at teawiththemuse.substack.com/subscribe

Making ritual conscious. First, there are three long spoons laid upon a napkin from Hawaii, handmade on top of a cutting board made by a teenage daughter. A cup from Monet’s garden and the ingredients. First, filtered water in a teapot from New York. First, smelling roses from three beautiful godchildren.Laying out the honey from where I grew up, Lover’s Lane. Grinding coffee, mold free and you beginthe whole thing I learned from a Muse by capitalizing the word Coffee and organizing the ingredients in beauty. Once the coffee has gone into the French press and the water has boiled The rest of the process begins.The scoop of honey goes into the cup. A scoop of coconut oil goes into the cup. Cinnamon and nutmeg and vanilla go into the cup and stir the little mash into a ball. When you put the water into the French press,don’t forget to set your alarm for 5.33 minutes, and only then do you froth the half and half. When the time feels right after you’ve looked out the window and pet the cats and pondered your attitude for the day, only then do you add the half and half, the milky foamy substance Into the mix in the cup. And then you stir vigorously, making a slurry of yumminess. (Resist the temptation to drink this elixir.)Make sure everything is emulsified. Look out the window again. Text that one person that you know needs to hear from you, that they are loved. Then stand around in fuzzy socks and breathe deeply as if you have all the time in the world. Smell everything. Love everything.And when the alarm goes off, smile as you gently press down the coffee. But then wait. From here, as you ponder the deliciousness of coffee. Coffee, or what we call Tea with the Muse. You set your tone for the day one more time to an outlook, not just of gratitude, like, hey, I’m grateful for that, but active appreciation, anticipation of bringing beauty and amusement. Call your Muse right then, right before the coffee is ready to pour. She is usually sitting with her group of friends cackling on the dark side of the moon. She loves this dark new moon solar eclipse energy. When you are ready, invite her!Don’t take your eyes off of her as she comes because she may slip through the cracks in the floorboards if she doesn’t quite feel your presence. The quality of your presence in this sacred in this less than 10 minute ritual that will determine whether or not the Muse actually appears.When you call her you know she’s a bit of a fickle one and a bit of a wild one. She demands a quality of presence. She demands ceremonial time. Kairos instead of industrial time and Chronos. The Muse doesn’t have any clocks but the moon. And believe me, she wants to be with you.But she will only appear and only stay if you slow down.Then, pouring it into the cup and stirring again. Then finding the perfect place for you and the Muse to sit in fuzzy socks and fuzzy blankets and recognize you began the day with making ritual conscious and every single other action in this day will be shifted as a result of the quality of your presence. Life is good. As our art matriarch used to say, being an artist is so romanticWith love, Shiloh SophiaWe start this weekend - Get full access to Tea with the Muse at teawiththemuse.substack.com/subscribe

Join me to paint the MUSEDear One, If you happen to have a chronic stress or chronic health condition, please listen because this matters. The hours of your day are not neutral. They’re counting on your body’s clock. Hypervigilance over time wears the body down. You know this, but what you might not know is how much pleasure builds the body back. Pleasure is not a treat. Pleasure is a counterweight to pain. And here’s why I believe it. Chronos. Chronic. It means with time. So if you have chronic health and chronic stress, it means you’re living with it, inside of it. These words come from the Latin and the Greek. When it first began to enter the human language, it was not about a severity, it was about duration, the time it takes. Chronic, on its own, isn’t something bad. It’s what travels with you. But it’s not a singular event. It’s time itself. And if the condition that you are navigating is having an impact on your life. It’s impacting your time. Not just the quantity of your time, but the quality of your time. So what if the remedy to Chronos and Chronic is connected with time itself? Think about this for a moment with me. Chronos connects with the brainwave of Beta, what I call busybody beta, and hypervigilance, and also the critic. The critic lives in Chronos. Chronos is sequential, the clock, the calendar, the appointment, the countdown, the quantity. Beta is the brainwave that runs it. Hypervigilance is what beta feels like from the inside when you live in a body that communicates to you about what it is experiencing in languages that are hard to understand and so unpredictable. When you’re always scanning for what’s next, what’s going to bring on the inflammation or the flare, whether or not you feel like showing up for something that you’ve already said yes to. Small example, yesterday I spent quite a few hours feeling creative and lit up and informed. And then suddenly my computer was out of battery and I was in a public place. And I didn’t feel like expending the energy to get up and plug it in. So I just closed it and just sat there instead. I was weighing whether or not it felt worthwhile to find the socket. Because when you’re navigating chronic conditions, sometimes the simple act like plugging in a cord can feel like you don’t want to do it. Are you, like I am sometimes, weighing every move? The weighing itself, the evaluation is not free. Researchers have measured what it does to a body over the years. And this buildup is called allostatic load. The wear accumulates. And so when we stay hypervigilant and stressed and in the stressful parts of the beta brainwaves over and over and over, it accumulates. It’s a toxic load. Accumulation: Is a word that’s been changing everything for me. Hypervigilance is not waiting for a flare. It’s showing up in the good times too. When I’m doing things that I love, it’s just there in the background. And it fills up peaceful times with stress if I don’t pay attention. But there’s something else. This one has to be chosen. Chronos is Predictable. What is not predictable is Kairos. Kairos is a choice. Kairos is divine time, God timing, supreme timing, synchronicity, everything in right time. Kairos, theta brainwaves, flow state, and the Muse. Kairos is about quality, not quantity. It’s about opportunity, never too early, never too late. It’s the opening. The space to breathe in between, or what I would call Tea with Muse. Chronos is spent. It’s finite. Kairos, you enter and it’s infinite, or at least the experience of it can be when you enter a flow state. Theta is the brainwave that’s operating in Kairos. You don’t just arrive there all at once. You have to pass through other brainwaves. You begin to leave the beta and you pass through the imagination of alpha and into the spacious mystical theta. And as you go. Hypervigilance and stress dissolves along the way. This also counts, especially if you declare that it does. Flow is what it feels like from the inside. Flow is the felt sense of the Kairos state. And this is where science is on my side and the side of Intentional Creativity. The researchers have a name for what happens to time in that state. They actually call it time distortion. It’s one of the defining markers where hours go by and you can’t account for them. You’re so in the flow. You’re in your jam. There’s a theory called transient hypofrontality that says that the self-monitoring part of the brain quiets down during times of deep absorption. The part of you that is over hypervigilant, that guards, that worries, goes quiet, measurably quiet during Kairos. So when you’re in self-expression, particularly things like drawing or painting or singing or weaving or digging in the dirt or cooking food, things that require intention you go into Kairos. When you’re sitting with the Muse and letting her have her way with you. Two hours go by and you don’t even know where they went. That happened just this morning. Coffee with two people I adore. We read poetry from my book, Tea with the Midnight Muse. We did the Mother Mary Oracle Deck and applied it to our health. We talked to the kitties. We talked about the roses and the tomatoes. I made a soup of everything from the garden. And the hours were gone and they couldn’t even believe it. And I said, that? That’s Tea with the Muse. That’s what I want to talk about today. We traveled out of beta and we stopped guarding the parameter of our consciousness. We stopped listening to the Chronos critic who told us we must be productive. We entered the place where there is no clock. Instead, there’s a cuppa.Here’s the interesting thing, is that this time wasn’t about healing something completely, not about overcoming something. When we come back out of it, the same conditions are waiting for us, but our perspective is shifted and we can bring magic out of Kairos into the Chronos. Let me tell you this, the pleasure time, the Muse time, that also is accumulative, just like the stress. The body, the heart, the mind, and the identity, they begin to fill up with a different kind of energy. This is why my entire day is filled with little bursts of chosen micro-pleasure. Chronos, Beta, Hypervigilance, Critic, Finite. That one writes by itself all day long, whether we consent or not, where Kairos, Theta, Flow, and the Muse, and the Infinite, that one only writes in us when we choose it, and also choose to be conscious of it. Kairos offsets days of bracing and worry for the worst. What if Tea with the Muse Is this life-saving as I’ve been saying it is all these years? You might ask yourself, why does Shiloh spend so much time on pleasure when the world is on fire? Because I know what’s possible, because I’ve seen it for myself. I’ve seen people move out of chronic pain and into practices of pleasure that change our world. You know what? Chronos gets the clock. It’s operating all day long. Kairos only gets what we choose and appoint. While you might think that 15 minutes of Tea with the Muse against the rest of the hours spent just fighting the onslaught of overwhelm and chaos: I challenge you to consider this is not just a lovely invitation. For many of us, it’s life-saving. Pleasure is our activism. Kairos, like the Muse, must be courted. Kairos doesn’t just arrive on its own, usually. The only times I’ve seen it come are through falling in love or worshipping at the altar of the Divine. Every other time, I need to choose it. Pain is inevitable, but pleasure is chosen. Kronos never has to be chosen. Kronos is chronic, just like the critic is chronic, keeping you scrolling and reminding you that time is running out. Kairos is a ritual. And while many of us in our community do prefer a giant canvas, in addition, take a walk and let the flowers speak poetry to you. Look out the window at the farthest point you can find and ask what color that is, if you were to paint it. Talk to the part of your body that hurts and ask what it wants. One of the people I was sitting with this morning is navigating a health condition and I asked her to ask that part of her body what the message was. Only one small thing came. But for me, as I sat with her and listened to the space in between the spaces, I heard a very clear instruction about a particular form of rest and I invited her to take that rest today - and she did and she’s doing it right now while I do this. Information comes when you’re having Tea with the Muse. So open the page and give the Muse of Kairos the pen. Ask What wants to reveal itself to you today? Do you believe me that a practice of pleasure could be the counterpoint of a lifetime of pain and could actually be, not just a coping mechanism but a practice to deal with states of chronic health and stress? I know it works. The only question is how much? Will you try? I will. I’ll see you with the Muse. This is Curate Shiloh Sophia for Tea with the Muse podcast and I’m grateful to be in your life. Let’s choose the Muse.Amber and Shiloh Sophia Get full access to Tea with the Muse at teawiththemuse.substack.com/subscribe

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Dear Ones, This Sunday - paint flowers with me and the Muses. A daylong paint and sip in Sonoma and virtually. No experience needed - really. Just come. You will have so much fun - there is still time to get cake and rose’ or sparkle water and brushes and a canvas a big as you choose. ~ Shiloh Sophia The Muse May Speak in FlowersMy muse usually shows up in leather, lace, and feathers with rhinestone sunglasses, glinting in cowgirl boots with gold wings. This is how I've come to know her since she made her company available to me. The first time she spoke to me, her language was red-winged blackbird, and pomegranate seeds the color of moon blood on white sheet red. She didn't come with platitudes. She came with instructions and keys. Oh, so many keys to so many doors I know nothing about. And she only occasionally allows me to try one to fit in the lock. She doesn't let me try if I am good. She only offers them if I am willing to be bad. Not bad as in bad versus good, but bad as in badass. Because my Muse is a badass. Yours is too, most likely. She won't offer us her gifts if we stay safe. She always wants a bigger canvas. She always wants a bigger brush. She always wants too much water. Because she told me sometimes size does matter and it would be much better if I painted naked and barefoot. She walks me to my edge and then tips me over Into that muse place where all the colors bend and come alive in me. The place where I remember who I was before all of this heart-breaking open stuff of life. Today, she showed up differently. I haven't seen her quite like this before.She tempted me with an old lure, lightning for breakfast. But then she added soft, full-hipped orgasms in the sunny afternoon, the ones that start at the top of your head and shimmy down to the tips of your red toes. Today, she brought me pain à chocolat. A chocolate croissant from Paris where she dreams me alive. You see, I was there for weeks and now every dream I have is taking place in the streets of Paris where we're all having Tea with the Muse. You see, I haven't been feeling so well. You see, this life has been too busy for me. But it's not her who abandons me. It's me. Who abandons me. Then I can't hear her voice so clearly. The tones, they are muffled. The colors, they are muted. And the riddle is that I cannot hear her if I abandon myself. I cannot hear her speaking in sunflowers speak. For a minute, just a minute, I resisted. I protested. Haven't you seen what is happening in the world?Isn't having Tea with the Muse a frivolity? She rolled her giant eyes, of course, and as she did, I swear dragonflies flew all around her, their wings glistening. Where had they been hiding? Then I started to court her. I courted her when the stars still shone on the waters. I sat in the deep well waiting and looking until the sun shone on my freckled shoulders. When I saw her, of course, I was dazzled. She flirted with black-eyed Susans on her nipples, a star jasmine crown of white, oh, the scent of her, coral-colored roses blooming around her hips, a peony at her vulva, pink with magenta strokes. In her hand, she carried ripe peaches from the tree just right there, and the first pears of the season. There was a long train of geraniums trailing behind her of every color. Hummingbirds hovered around her head and the bees, I could hear them singing as she approached and pulled me from the water and that was whenthe ravens began to sing and cluck. She took my hand and in my hands the seeds of foreign flowers flowed, perhaps flowers from France. She told me that flowers are the language of poetry and that I better get used to hydrangeas that speak in periwinkleand gladiolas that hum in yellow and rhododendrons that talk too much. She warned me: Get your ass to the canvas or else, biatch. I know she threatens when I'm in danger of losing some deeper sense of self. It's just been slipping between the cracks. Or I have been slipping through them.So here I sit, having this Tea with the Muse, feeling the fog depart and the numbing soften. Her hands are on my hands now, clicking and clacking as I attempt to tell you about a visitation from La Muse and I invite you to call upon your own. Hint: She may speak in flowers or ravens or dragonflies. Do not take this visit lightly. Take it from me that without her the well dries up, the colors fade and the belly clenches and the heart moans of longing. The Muse She isn't always right on time. You can't just expect her. She has her own timing.I feel like today I got really lucky. As she took her leave, I could swear I saw Dogwood from last season dancing around her wake. She looked back, winking, her job well done, and I began to laugh. And now to the page. And now to the dance floor. And now to the canvas. Today I shall wear the pink dress and go barefoot, hot pink lip gloss, and I too will be winking right at you.Shiloh Sophia Tea with the Muse is a reader-supported publication. It is free and contributions are lovely for the MUSE! Get full access to Tea with the Muse at teawiththemuse.substack.com/subscribe

Here's what's been on my heart: this is no time to stop creating what matters to you. When the world feels like it's coming apart — when the causes we've worked for our whole lives seem to be coming undone before our eyes — it's so easy to abandon ourselves. To decide that beauty, abundance, a voyage de rêve to Paris, is somehow selfish or beside the point.I'm here to tell you it isn't. We are Co-creators with all of creation, and we must continue to o-create. That is the power we have.In this episode I talk about the difference between the things we can't control — the traffic, the news, who puts their name on an airport — and the one thing we can: our approach to the day. I share why I treat my morning swim as a sacrament, not an indulgence. Why self-expression isn't just nervous-system regulation but a creative spiritual practice. And why, right now, we're going to need to practice pleasure and manifestation right alongside everything else.You're going to have to book it, baby. You're going to have to book the pleasure in.Come take the ride with me. Press play, and I'll see you in circle. Get full access to Tea with the Muse at teawiththemuse.substack.com/subscribe

Here’s the beautiful tree I’m looking at in France 💗 Get full access to Tea with the Muse at teawiththemuse.substack.com/subscribe

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

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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