Introduction

Creating anything requires two energies: Flow & Form. You may know these energies by other names: the feminine and the masculine (too tainted in patriarchy), yin and yang (not my heritage), light and dark (too easily absorbed via internalized racism).

I call them Flow and Form. You call them whatever works for you. This feels simple, as close to the essence of a thing we can get, while still relying on language to deliver the message. In her Nobel lecture, Toni Morrison describes the power of language as: “its force, its felicity is in its reach toward the ineffable”. My husband shared this quote with me in our early courtship. I feel that love is a bit like language: the beauty is in the reaching for its ultimate expression. I don’t know if we ever get there. Somehow, we must operate with the illusion that we might - be able to perfectly describe a thing, to attain a perfect union. think this yearning that therefore motivates the reaching is at its ground level, our primal desire for the union of these two energies, Flow and Form, which seem to have been split since the beginning of timespace itself.

Will we ever reach the perfect union? What happens when we do? Will we become like the molten center of the universe at its beginning - a radiant, orgasmic, champagne bottle of fireworks - St. Theresa in Ecstasy? I don’t know what happens when we begin to unify Flow and Form, but I know this is our task. My task is to share with you what I know about them, to guide you in your own relationship with your birthright as a channel for FlowForm, which is to be a sacred vessel for life itself. What happens then is between you and that Divinity.

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In our most natural state, we move from Flow to Form as easily as breathing. In fact, breathing is an elemental example of Flow (inhale) and Form (exhale). It should be the most natural thing in the world, and yet most of us are breathing unnaturally because of patterns we learned in childhood. The impact of not breathing well can fuck up our entire system: we literally aren’t oxygenating our brain, we end up experiencing pain, and that cascades into corresponding imbalances in mood and energy. This isn’t a book about breathwork, but breath is a beautiful metaphor.

The obstruction to the FlowForm channel that might be a bad physical habit that stops you breathing well is also what happens with ideas. In our natural state, ideas come to us (yes, they are entities in themselves - more on that later) and we take them in and express them out. It’s a smooth and relatively painless process: from ether to earth. We are the bridge between, and the idea needs us to give it body and get it into the real world. It is the myth of the golem from Jewish folklore: a magical being brought to life through clay. Pinocchio is a puppet who wants to be a “real boy”.

What is often overlooked is the role of the maker - the potter who shapes the golem in the first place. That’s us. Without us, the golem is indeed a sort of animatronic being: not actually alive, just living in that uncanny valley between spirit and reality. Does the golem breathe? Other things that live in the uncanny valley: ghosts, Frankenstein, and artificial intelligence. As you can tell, the uncanny valley is a space that gives life to our psychic fears. Frankenstein and AI share the fear-space of an idea that no longer needs its master (the human) to be made manifest. For all the people living in fear of AI coming up to destroy us, this book will help you understand what is uniquely human in the creative process, why ideas need us - not machines - as collaborators to come into the world.

There are three co-creators at the table. As a creative process: ether - bridge (us) - earth. As authors: source - shaper (us) - world. Ideas require all three players to move into reality. If one of those players is warped in some way, the idea will come out warped. The fear of Frankenstein or AI is at its core the fear of us, the human makers, being overrided in the tripartite partnership of creation: our agency is stripped, we have lost our power. This does happen. But the thing that overrides our agency is not the idea itself, but the unconscious parts of ourselves that an idea can just as easily latch onto to come into the world.

If we build a brand from a place of low self- worth, then the vibration of low-self worth is in the final form. If you market that brand on a social media platform whose entire monetary base has been the trading of (low) self-worth, then that vibration is amplified and will magnetize customers who also share low self-worth. Sure, the business will be successful… but at what spiritual cost? What are we really creating more of? A more sinister example: if a person dreams up a vision of a New Germany through a deep prejudice and hatred of the Jewish people, and the world around them is traumatized from a recent world war, economic instability, and simmering xenophobia - real nightmares unfold. An idea is agnostic.; it wants the quickest ride to its destination. The world is the world: complicated, changeable depending on time and place, with history and other ideas milling around and other people’s agendas, power, unconscious baggage. “An idea whose time has come”, Victor Hugo’s phrase whose time had certainly come, is an expression that refers to an idea brought into the world when the world is ripe to receive it.

It is up to us, as the makers, to create consciousness over what we are bringing to the table. What is our filter that an idea will move through? Conscious awareness is how we hold firm our power. We understand what our role is vis-a-vis the other two parties, we exercise our God-given will, and we take ownership in the process. We are not simply an empty vessel, here to serve the Divine through complete surrender of our personhood. We are not machines, here to log in and log out, carry out tasks that have been pre-determined by some external authority, with making money the pinnacle of our existence. Equally, we are not the sole authors of any work we make, Creative Geniuses who can take all the credit for the outcome, casting any result as success or failure of our personal worth. We are in relationship.

FlowForm is about taking responsibility for ourselves within this co-creative relationship. As a healing modality, it sheds light on our unconscious patterns and helps us “unclog” the filter so an idea can come through as easily as a breath. As a practice, it is about exercising our agency as creative beings: making “work” - but also love and friendships, homes, gardens, families, communities, justice, healing - also “work”! As a message, it is about wholeness: learning to be wholly ourselves in the world in order to mend what has been broken.

Welcome.