Creativity Consciousness...

I just finished reading yet another book about providing psychotherapy with trauma survivors. It had some fresh perspectives on conceptualizing the work... but in the end, after all the theory had come and gone, after certain examples sounded technologically "dated" only 4 years after publication(!) -- one sentence stood out for me:  that certain interventions "can be accomplished in a variety of ways, limited only by the creativity of the patient and therapist." (italics, mine)

This is one of the "gutsiest" sentences I've read recently, flying in the face of recipe-like protocols, cost-management of treatment, and what I believe to be an over-dependence on quantitative outcome measures. Creativity -- of both patient and therapist...  I hear the phrase suggesting a collaborative, mutuality of imagination; a foray into the mystical places and workings of the brain, mind, & spirit that I call the "land of no words."  It is where science meets art, inspiration, and the wisdom of the ages. It is also the way I work, as a therapist, a liturgist, a preacher.

Creativity, I think, is both movement and stillness; action and state-of-being. It is both a hallmark and a part of the birthing process of healing. Creativity enters into what now is with possibilities of what else could be. Creativity envisions what is -- and is not -- already there to be seen; the expected and unexpected, the up and the down, the inside and the outside and everything in between... it is the conjurer of paradoxes like the mobius strip, and conundrums of perspective.

Eventually "it" lands in the concrete words and behavior of the therapy room and/or the sanctuary: healing movement in sacred space, and God is present in the mists of mind, in the midst of human meeting.