We explored layers of undigested trauma around creativity. The Lab provided a context to collectively presence and relate to the larger forces impacting our creativity. We looked at the ways survival mechanisms impeded our artistic activation and the ways that post-traumatic resilience can be a resource of the creative process.
We invited people who felt blocked and frustrated in their artistic expression. This lab was for people who experience; fear, freeze, despair, loss of inspiration, imposter syndrome, and at the same time a soul-calling to create. We invited people who felt called to a healing journey through the individual, ancestral, and collective trauma layers that we believed may be standing between them and their deepest creative desires.
We began by building group coherence, creative resources, and personal strengths. To create coherence we shared what helped us feel safe in this group process. We made collective agreements on our shared needs and values. We deepened the connection by then sharing our creative intentions and our blocks toward self expression. <br /> <br /> The group explored how our differing cultural homes hold creativity. We brought to light the places where we felt nourished and the places where we experienced resistance. We used guided meditations, transparent communication principles, home assignments, and triad work to gain insight.<br /> <br /> Our lab devoted time to processes around personal, ancestral, and collective trauma and how these aspects impact our creative freedom. We utilized the group dynamic to highlight the collective process and our individual movements within it. <br /> <br /> We invited participants to commit to a creative practice during the 12 months of the lab. Our lab began as a group of 25 participants and completed with 21 participants. We met for 12 group sessions from January - December 2024. <br />
We began our lab by sharing what makes a supportive space for exploring, a process in which each participant gave voice to what they needed from themselves and the group to create our container. We shared our intentions, and our inspiration to join this lab.
We named the creative resources that help us ground and shared what gives us resilience, and what strengthens our capacity to stay related to challenges.
In addition to sharing in our lab meetings, we created a Sutra page where people could share writing and images between meetings. We created triads, for participants to meet and develop the process between sessions. We utilized Transparent communication practices as a foundation for relation and presence.
We oriented around these three principles:
Slowing down to honor the pace of digestion
Commitment to notice and increase our inner and outer coherence
Welcoming discomfort and the places in us that are dark, stuck, frozen, or shut down.
We described the trauma we oriented around through the symptoms we experienced of being “cut” from our creative stream in our artistic expression. As a group, we focused the lens on times when we recognized our judgment and fears. We identified our experience of being, becoming and belonging in relation to our creative impulse. We identified the difference between the trauma state and the liberated creative movement. We then framed for the group that we would deepen this examination by walking through three different doorways; the personal, the ancestral, and the collective. As we did not have a specific geographical or historical cosmic address for this trauma, we used an exploration of how we related to our own group as a way to surface collective themes around creative loss and the cut from art.
Having framed that the group was our experience of the collective we then explored how much voice we felt we could express in our Lab group. We connected with resources here and examined how we find our way when we feel cut off. Processing individual experiences while attuning to group resonance deepened our collective understanding of meeting trauma. Hot spots stirred irritation and judgment. Facing the unknown together, we facilitators embraced vulnerability, enabling creative flow, intimacy, participant appreciation, and greater transparency within the Lab..
When we walked through the personal door to creative loss, we explored “Where do I feel less connected to creativity, where do I turn away from my creative self?”
Each participant created and shared a “creative autobiography” – watershed moments that shaped them creatively, as well as experiences where they felt hurt or cut in their creativity.
We invited participants to explore who they imagined themselves to be creatively, who they ARE creatively, and the tension between the two. We asked, do you look at yourself as an artist and a creative person through the filter of inspiration and resource, or through the cut? We looked at the ways we turn away from our creative selves and our exiled parts, and how that interrupts creative flow.
In relation to individual cultural influences, the group explored how they were shaped by what was ‘allowable’ creatively and what was forbidden. We used the collective of our lab as a tool to track in present time how participants allowed or denied creative expression and participation. We invited participants to share their voices on what felt like it was working and not working in the lab so that their creativity could become part of our process and part of the restoration in creating healthy culture.
Our second doorway was sensing our ancestral lineages. We shared our ancestors’ origins in the chat and felt into our roots—the resilience in simply being here, the evolution in our bones. We imagined visual representations of our lineages—trees, rivers, mountains—and noticed what arose while creating ancestral maps: disconnection, distraction, confusion, or perhaps vitality and connection. We attuned to our ancestors, exploring what emerged when speaking from felt connection. On Sutra, we shared food, music, and histories linking us to our ancestral roots. We gave space to ancestral aspects where energy felt blocked or unfamiliar—places of stuckness pointing to the ‘cut’ from creativity. The intimacy and honesty in people’s sharing deepened our collective connection to ancestry.
People brought forward what was present—whether clear or murky—and we held it all together. We reflected on whether we were truly allowing space for individual voices to land. Healing happens when all voices are heard and included. By slowing down, we listened for the mute and frozen parts—fractures, divisiveness, othering. We noticed how collective processes touch younger parts in us, sometimes hijacking creativity. We met these parts with curiosity, gently integrating them into our awareness and the ancestral field we were building together.
We explored how, as artists, we bring our vision to the collective and what that evokes. We noticed how collective processes can land in younger, unintegrated parts that sometimes hijack creativity. This awareness opened a path toward integration. In individual processes, we observed how managing strategies interrupt creative flow. One performance artist noticed the energy spent on self-judgment and fear of others’ perceptions. Held by her triad and the group, she experienced relief, deeper self-contact, and greater creative expression.
Participants discovered ancestral patterns behind their ‘cut,’ offering relief and understanding. Some connected with creative ancestors who brought encouragement and new resourcefulness. One participant regressed into an early self-state where words failed and sensemaking dissolved. The group’s presence and support allowed a cut-off part to emerge, bringing slow relief and nervous system settling. We haven’t yet explored the ethical upgrade explicitly, but sensed creative energy moving through the group, released and contained by our new awareness. The desire to continue as a group suggests a movement toward this upgrade—toward collective integration, deeper creativity, and healing.
Many participants reflected on experiencing inner change—becoming friendlier with shutdown or numb places, feeling more connected to creativity, and bringing their full selves to the group. New understanding with ancestors also emerged. Through the ancestral doorway, one participant recognized familial projections she had placed on team members and became aware of her lens. Another, who left early due to family needs, gained insight that enabled new conversations with her mother.
A participant who had expressed frustration with the group process realized that ‘feeling you feeling me’ was absent and, by sensing that, became more relationally resourced. This growth extended into her artistic conceptualizations. As the Lab ended, participants and team members noticed new and energized creative output. Internal and external pressures lessened. The energy, once stuck, had begun to move more freely. This shift led many to sense that this was a powerful first step in addressing the Collective Trauma Field. The desire to continue the process was strong. Participants felt inspired, open, and hopeful—ready to take what was started and deepen it further, collectively and creatively.
"My perspective on what had been unexplained began to change as I was able to see these frozen and numb places in myself and see them as the result of a natural response to trauma. I've learned to be with the numbness while also allowing myself to act on creative impulses instead of sinking into overthinking and self-doubt. It was a slow and uncertain process however (…) rather an extended opportunity to attune to myself ."
"I have surfaced parts of myself that have been hidden from my conscious awareness for my entire life! And I have felt safe enough to open up and explore these deeply held insights that I was not ready to see before."
"Through the group's exploration and sharing, I have been connected with my Paternal lineage, a missing and vital part of the picture because of the very powerful frozenness and silence that threads back through many generations…I feel these threads spreading and awakening from a deep sleep. I feel a thaw in my body happening and as part of my daily life, and as the project has progressed a growing sense of love and connection to the group, myself and my ancestors."
"My current healing work has been leading me through an exploration and integration of the frozen, stagnant, and blocked waters surrounding my own creative work. As I tune inward and connect with some of these frozen areas, I also notice a deep longing to more fully embody my purpose through my central channel. When I first saw the invitation to participate in a collective exploration of creativity, I felt a huge wave of excitement."
"A highlight for me was bringing my own numbness into contact and feeling my belonging/visibility in the group. Understanding the GDR past as a deep cut in my healthy self-expression and feeling the fear that was everywhere in me/around me (rigidity, stiffness, coldness). Almost every [meeting], healing happened in me or there were moments in which I came out of rigidity back into the system and energy flowed to me."
"I have been exploring my Anglo-Indian heritage through my work as a live artist and I am fascinated with how the tides of my creativity are informed by my growing awareness of the intricacies of physical/emotional flow in relation to my maternal ancestral history, which was repressed and hidden for many years until now, how these elements influence and impact connection with what wants to come through me."
Crisis Trauma Relief
Trauma-Informed Practice
Collective Trauma Integration
Community of Practice
Raising Awareness
Overview
What we do
Who we are
Підпишіться на наші інформаційні листи. Допоможіть нам зцілювати колективну травму та зменшувати негативні ефекти для нашої глобальної культури.
Jennifer Krier 
English