What are Creative Invitations?

In this course, we offer opportunities to engage more deeply with the MSC material via multiple modes of expression. While we primarily engage group discussion and some presentations, we also move beyond the verbal, analytic, linear ways of understanding of MSC concepts. We do this through providing optional opportunities for creative expression via journaling, art, photography, music, movement, and poetry. We share and witness these experiences with one other as a way to rest in the comfort of common humanity with our fellow coursemates.

There is absolutely no experience required to participate in these optional Creative Invitations, as our focus is on what emerges during the making, not the physical outcome of the making. If you arrive here feeling intimidated by the blank page or with a discomfort of creative expression, we acknowledge that that is true for many. We offer the salve of kindness and understanding to any self-critical voices as they emerge, remembering that self-compassion is the quality we wish to cultivate during this course.

Questions we can ask as we do our Creative Invitations: 

• What is happening in my body right now?
• If my inner critic has emerged, how am I relating with it?
• What internal resource have I called upon if faced with my inner critic?
• Is there a difference between how I felt at the beginning of the Invitation and the end?
• At what point is there resonance during the experience? Dissonance?
• What did this experience have to say to me?
• Did this art form evoke a different inner experience than another art form I’ve tried?
• Was there a time during which I found flow? Or, did I reach the limits of my tolerance?

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