Indicators that historical trauma could be undermining your teams effectiveness
What is a historical trauma?
A historical trauma is a trauma that either happened in your earlier life or happened to your parents or ancestors that was never dealt with or healed. It can also be in the form of traumas that happened in the past and had an impact on culture that continues to traumatise future generations. When you experience one of these forms of trauma your energy/mauri/prana flow can be disrupted.
How do historical traumas impact creativity?
Creative work requires a free flow of energy through the body and this helps to move from a vapour of an idea into manifested reality. There are clues left in our behaviour that let us know if energy is flowing well through an area or blocked.
How should creative energy flow in the body?
In our work, we have identified seven embodied behaviours that demonstrate free flowing creative energy.
- Ideation (Crown) - The point where you sift through and find the best idea.
- Creative Problem Solving (Head) - The point where you devise a best starting plan.
- Charismatic Communication (Throat)- How you take your idea from inside your head and clearly communicate it to others on the team.
- Building Creative Community (Heart)- How you get your team rallied around the idea.
- Courageous space holding (Guts)- This is where leadership really lives. How do you respond when the kaka hits the fan?
- Nervous System Regulation (Sacrum)- Are you able to find and support the needs that sit underneath the big emotions that come when challenges arise?
- Shipping (Grounding) - Can you give birth to the idea and release it into the world?
The Effect of Trauma on the flow of creative energy in the body
When we experience trauma it comes with an emotional charge. If we don't feel that emotion all the way through to its conclusion it can get stuck in our body. The more we surpress our emotions the more likely we are to develop blocks at certain levels of our body which act as energy "shorts" taking the energy we need for the creative process and diverting it.
The workshop explains the 14 ways you can divert your energy but leaves you with tools to get back on track.
Educational Trauma on Creativity
Modern education tends to focus only on developing the intelligence of the brain but misses the intelligence held in the rest of the body. The Heart, Guts, and Ground. The result is in effect a decapitation of us from our holistic wisdom.
Recent research in NZ has even shown that the 11 markers of creativity decline instead of rise as students progress through the NCEA system.
What participants come away with:
By the end of the workshop, the participants will have a personal map of where historical traumas are showing up in their bodies, actions, and lives. They will also be taken through 12 anchors that can help them to understand what is their creative essential self and what is a trauma formed "part" acting out in them. They end up with a map to return to their Self with a capital S that they were born to be before the weight of the world hid the best of them away.
There is no need to air dirty laundry or share deep and meaningfuls during the workshop. It is a personal journey with LOTS of "Aha" moments linked with incredibly useful tools for proactive personal action.
This program can be delivered as either a keynote speech, a full-day workshop, or as a coaching program for creative teams/leadership teams.
Please reach out to mandi@mandi-lynn to organize a strategy session to figure out how the framework could best support your team or students.