Hello, loves!
We’re back with another podcast episode, and you’ll want to tune in. Promise! We’ll be welcoming guest Esther Loopstra to the pod today to talk about reclaiming creativity through the lenses of intuition, neuroscience and flow. That’s right, it’s a science and art combo meal! 😉

Esther is a brilliant creative mind, holding degrees in Counseling and Illustration, and has taught at Kent State University and Cornish College of the Arts. Her obsessive study of neuroscience, creative process, intuition, mindfulness, and flow make her a pro at connecting individuals to their intuition and creative spark.

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We cover a wide range of topics in this hour-long episode. You can look forward to hearing about the following:

• Connecting creativity to intuition
• Exploring your inner wisdom
• The art of flow: heightened consciousness influenced by creativity
• Curiosity and lifelong learning
• Open mode thinking
• Brainwave states
• How spirituality and science work together
• Trusting yourself in mind and body, embodying intuition
• Journal prompts to get in touch with intuition
• Redefining trauma
• Bringing compassion to ourselves
• The benefits of creating a morning process

“I think all of us have these points in our life where life asks us to go deeper. Let go of those layers, go deeper, to the authentic. So I just got to this point where it’s like, you know what? I am just gonna listen to my intuition.”

Read on for a couple of quote highlights and our shout-outs from the episode! Hope you love it!

Pull Quotes:
“I grew up in a very dogmatic religion and church, and there was, like, abuse and trauma there. And so, you know, I think a lot of times people think that artists are very driven by their intuition, very flowy, you know, very connected to themselves. And that just wasn’t the case. For me, I was, I knew I was always intuitive, but I was always driven by either what I should do, my logical mind, or what other people wanted me to do, or what God wanted me to do, things like that. I had all these voices in my head, but none of them were my inner voice.”

“Our intuition really, most of the time speaks through the body. If we are detached from our bodies, if we’re like, really in our head, it’s really hard for us to get into flow. So when we connect to our intuition, we’re able to sense our body. They call it introspection. So feeling like what it feels inside your body, then we’re able to get triggered into flow.”

“If you’ve worked in corporate America, or, you know, you’ve taken any classes about how to brand yourself, or whatever, you know that we’re taught that we need to kind of just use our logical mind to create, like a pretty package of what people want. We just have to figure that package out, right? Most of us are going into the creative process, whether it be a project or whether it be our own business, using your logical mind… It’s based on slavery, on industralization, on consumerism. So we have to flip the model.”

“When you are looking at things from that very narrow, analytical point of view, you’re actually using the analytical brain, which actually bases all of its information off of what it’s experienced before. So when you open up to open mode, you actually can tap into more of your brain, more of your subconscious, and that’s where your intuition lives. Turning that to neuroscience, we now know that with 95 to 98% of our knowledge, approximately 90% of that is subconscious. That’s where a lot of this knowledge lies. So when we can actually tap into that open mode, we’re starting with all these possibilities first.”

“it’s just really, really fascinating to me. How, you know, how all the science is kind of coming together and showing us all these things. And some of them are really connected to deep spiritual truths that have been around for a long time.”

“You have the answers within you. I think one of the hardest things is for people to trust, or begin to trust their intuition, because all of your life, you’ve been told that you need to look outside yourself, for answers for permission. It’s not your fault. You know, it’s hard to trust ourselves. But it’s so worth it.”

“We’ve been so conditioned to ignore our needs and our bodies, even as babies. We cry? We get reprimanded. We pull hair? We get reprimanded. We say what we mean, and we get pushed down, right? So we’ve been taught to kind of push our feelings down and ignore the things that our body needs. So, I say: just begin to listen to those impulses. And maybe write about how that feels.”

“What has your intuition been nudging you to do?”

“My whole process starts with curiosity, exploration, play, and that broader expansiveness, and then funneling down into focus.”

Mentions and More Info:

• Esther’s Instagram
• Esther’s Website: Flow Into Authenticity
• Esther’s art shop
• Artist Flora Bowley
• Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
• John Cleese and “open mode thinking”
• Brainwave states
• Dr. Gabor Mate – The Wisdom of Trauma
• Resmaa Menakem
• Scott Barry Kaufman
• And Bloom by Denise Boomkens
• Kevin James Thornton