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Beginning from Within: Igniting the Imagination… of the Healer
Deborah Beckman, MS

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Ours is a healing art – a long-practiced art drawing upon the wondrous connections between mind and body. Increasingly, science supports the connections our healers have long intuited. Our art still begins within the heart and imagination of the healer. Milton H. Erickson's blending of intuition and science made him a master of the art of healing. Modern master healers are constantly challenged by Erickson's, "Create a new therapy for each client" and the responsibility to adhere to proven modalities and treatments.

As a licensed architect, I continuously balance responsibility and imagination. Architects design buildings answering function; therapists craft interventions resolving symptoms. Some buildings transcend function to become art; some interventions transcend the past to heal futures. Both solutions leap beyond straight-line logical thinking, a leap accomplished through an organic process of "ideating." Ideating is part of a larger structured sequence of creative logic used in design. This fosters the creative generation of interventions that artfully aspire to heal the mind, the body, and the spirit, inviting a whole person to embrace the future. When therapists have a greater, expansive understanding of their own imagination, they can more readily elicit this same capacity within the client. The goal is to build a collaborative and transcendent resolution. The sequential stages of creative logic with special emphasis on ideating will be taught.

More than a presentation – this is a playground for inner creative resources and provides a series of "imagination igniting" skills and experiential opportunities that respect the responsibility inherent in our art.

"I know I'm depressed when I run out of ideas," said an anonymous client. Establishing a continuing ability to respond and generate healthy solutions improves patients' responsiveness to life and all of its uncertainties.

Upon hearing the above quote, a current acutely depressed client took a few vital moments then replied, "That's it. I've run out of ideas." Instead of presenting a list of my ideas, we began by "pausing her need to know" and defining the concept for a good idea. Do we even know what a good idea looks like? How do we try it on? Criteria now includes, "Could it make my heart smile?" Many anxious clients, past and current, have developed the ability to laugh at their former, limited use of their imagination to "tell themselves scary stories." If a scary story starts, they invite their larger imaginative processes by recalling a specifically developed phrase. This post-hypnotic elicitation suspends judgment/evaluation and allows greater time (distorted and real) to thoughtfully consider multiple possibilities. "How do I get my clients to do their homework?" asked by a recent workshop participant. My reply, "Whose idea was the homework?" I then went on to explain how, once homework is their idea, "They can't not do it." Keeping straight-line logic for practical problems is useful. And knowing when to implement the larger logical processes of "feedback" or "branching" directly engages core creative responsiveness. Clients can become actively involved in the therapeutic process and carry this innate and now better informed ability forward.

At the conclusion of this session, participants should be able to…

- Describe the distinct sequence of 7 events that organize the creative problem-solving
process used in design as they apply to therapy;
- Direct their inner trance state to more fully access their imagination; and
- Employ several "imagination igniting" trance skills in collaboration with the client to
create the nature and content of an artful intervention.