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May 23 • General discussion
Neuroscience of Self-Expression
This beautiful read is courtesy of The AMAAAZING Kisma Reidling... Absolutely love her and her beautiful space. Definitely tap in. Also, this piece from her is a primary reason I am so passionate about creating, expressing, and using our voices. Creating and expressing is incredibly healing even when you just share it with yourself.
For months, I did what I call Voice Expansion work where I just recorded myself singing melodies that came up for me naturally and I would play them back and found them incredibly healing for me.
Definitely Check out this piece and Kisma's space:
The Neuroscience of Self-Expression: Why the Brush Knows Before We Do
Breaking NEWS from the Stardust Lineage:
I 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. 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.
For those of you who don't know I am married to a scientist, who is a Project Scientist at the Institute for Memory Impairments and Neurological Disorders (UCI MIND). So, I've been exposed to all kinds of phenomenal studies over the last 37 years and so becoming excited about anything related to art and metaphysics causes me to sit up and take notice. However, back to this topic.
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. Nurses at Stanford who used coloring books, were interested to see if they could get patients to color, could it cause a break in a psychotic loop. Yes, was the answer.
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.) So, I'm adding a coloring book page right here for you to download and work with if you have a loop you know you need to break.
I have been working with creating with intention, and since 2013 and since 2018 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 there were 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. However! The reward pathway still lit up.The body still received a measurable gift — and the “able to experience it” part is super important.
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 artists
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 .
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.
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.
You already have everything you need inside of you -- just like the Fool of the Tarot, and what artists are doing is creating a condition in the field that allows it to be expressed.
June is going to focus on intentional creativity and I have a lovely surprise to give you. Hold on to your horses! 😝 BUT get ready for our June Smashbook Sanctuary and Hands-on Art Journaling! AND open for a painting on canvas (or paper) experience and I want ALL 12 of you to explore, experience and feel what I'm talking about regardless of whether or not you've EVER painted, let alone on a canvas.
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Neuroscience of Self-Expression
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