27 Tuesday Oct 2015
Posted in Artist, David Snapes, inspiration, near death experience, Radio
Listen to David Snape’s Radio show today, Tuesday, October 27 8 – 10pm GMT, Thursday’s 1-3pm GMT and Saturday 8-10am GMT: www.southwavesradio.co.uk Continue reading
27 Thursday Aug 2015
Tags
art, art as path, authentic self expression, Beauty, butterfly, clarity purpose, connect, consciousness, creative, creative midlife change, creative spirit, creativity, growth, intuition, joy, joyful living, near death experience, passion, personal development
My imagination went wild this morning when I read this quote by physicist Richard Feynman, “science is imagination in a straitjacket.” Transported into visionary bliss, while reading my new favorite book Hieroglyphic, Stories and Visions for a Better Future, I recalled a vision I had 35 years ago in a near-death experience:
I saw the earth from space and colorful images moved in enormous atmospheric rainbow rivers between separate lands. Then all creatures merged into the fabric of one alive being. I realized I was only a single pore in this global organism. Breathing. Belonging. Blissfully grateful.
Imagining this phenomenal world vision inspires me to help create our upcoming image-based Digital Renaissance. How funny that this beautiful vision was ignited in my imagination this morning by the thought of a straitjacket, confined and limited, yet it took me to a place beyond boundaries. Our new frontier.
No matter where you are today, I would love to know what images are swimming in your imagination this morning and where they are taking you.
11 Saturday Feb 2012
Posted in Uncategorized
Tags
connect, creative, Jonas Salk, near death experience, personal growth, psychological, transform, transformation, transition
BY LINDA MCINTOSH
Lisa Longworth was 19 years old when she found out she had a brain tumor. After seeing 17 doctors in four months, it looked like she would spend the rest of her life in a wheelchair, at best. But instead, she walked away. She was left with a scar and the vivid memory of a near-death experience, where she saw her life in black and white. She tried to tell people about the experience, but they couldn’t understand.
“It took five years to find a language to express it,” Longworth said. That language was art. Art was not new to Longworth. She had designed jewelry since she was in junior high school and ran a successful business selling it.
But when she returned to study art, she had a different goal. “I was lacking that deeper fire within, but then I found that the symbols in art were like a language and I was on fire,” Longworth said. “Art is a language that can help people stay connected with who they are.”
Longworth wanted to pass along what she learned and help others tap into their creativity. After graduating with a degree in fine art from UCSD, she earned a masters and doctorate in psychology and started her career in counseling.
Now 25 years later, Longworth has a private practice in Solana Beach, and has counseled thousands of patients using a program she calls, “Cocoon to Butterfly” that combines psychology, creativity and spirituality.
Longworth will provide a taste of the program at a workshop June 12 at Earthsong Bookstore in Del Mar. The free two-hour mini-workshop, “Reclaiming Creativity in Midlife,” will focus on why it’s important to tap into one’s creativity when going through midlife challenges.
“Midlife is a juicy time-a ripe time,” Longworth said. “Just because our bodies might not be the same as in our 20s, doesn’t mean we are going downhill-this is a time we can stop and pursue a deeper spirituality.” Longworth compares it with getting lost and then figuring out a new way to go. “We sometimes get lost in midlife and ask, “Where am I going?”
Longworth’s cocoon-to-butterfly analogy comes from the idea that one has to shed old ways of looking at things to get a fresh perspective on where one is going. “Sometimes we have to shed the way we’ve done things before and shed things we’ve become attached to,” Longworth said. “We are continually moving from cocoon to butterfly-it’s like an awakening,” Longworth said.
Her goal is to guide people in the process. Longworth tells people to trust their intuition and let that guide them, which is one of the ideas she carries from her conversations with Dr. Jonas Salk, who developed the polio vaccine and founded the Salk Institute in LaJolla. Starting in the mid-1980s for five years, Longworth mentored with Salk and talked almost daily by phone with him about creativity and intuition.
“One of the things I’m most passionate about that I’ve taken away from our conversations is the power of creativity in humanity’s survival,” Longworth said.
During the workshop, Longworth will offer exercises so participants can tap into their own creativity and intuition as they interact with some of her small sculptures and Floating Paintings, which combine silk, acrylic and mixed media.
“This will be a way for us to clean our lens of perception and open ourselves to creativity,” Longworth said.
25 Tuesday Sep 2007
Posted in art, Uncategorized
“Cocoon ” Mixed Media, by Lisa Longworth
Sometimes do you feel your life change from “Cocoon to Butterfly”? Can you feel something within yourself going through a subtle gestation process? Where changes are occurring, perhaps a new direction your life-yet it is unseen?
This morning I feel myself in a cocoon phase. Though my outer life and career is full, I sense within my inner world, a slow transformation occurring. Like an organic cocoon process, it is elusive and mysterious. I trust my “Cocoon to Butterfly” process as I witnessing my life art unfolding.
Action to Inspire, Connect & Transform:
1. Do you sense a subtle part of your essential self gestating now? 2. Do you have clarity about what it is? 3. Are you trusting the natural “Cocoon to Butterfly process of your life?
