Born in the place where the Rocky Mountains meets the Great Plains and currently living in the West Coast Mecca of creativity, the San Francisco Bay Area , Austin Hill Shaw has been drawn to creativity and creative pursuits throughout his life. Professionally, he has worked as an artist, architectural designer, and writer. In his spare time, he has sought out a wide range of creative pursuits, including dancing, singing and guitar, sketching, even activities such as rock climbing, which requires creative intuition to move through difficult sections. Like many of you, he has been drawn to creativity in its seemingly infinite forms, the varied expressions of creativity found in all fields and disciplines including art and architecture; science and technology; religion, ritual, and spirituality; and in the teeming abundance of the natural world.
Austin has also experienced the challenges and frustrations that sometimes accompany creativity. He’s struggled to come up with seed inspirations for design projects. He’s had powerful insights that he was unable to actualize. And, like all of you, he’s found himself stuck in creative ruts, questioning himself and his perceived inadequacies as he struggle to emerge, berating himself as he compared himself to others, others who seem more creative than himself.
These very personal experiences with both the life enriching aspects of creativity and its shadow side have lead him to study the creative process itself, developing a bird’s eye view of the creative process while deep in the throws of it, all with very specific intentions in mind: What might it look like to have a deeper understanding of creativity itself? What might it look like to become a creativity expert, an authority on the process through which creative insights enter into the minds of individuals? What might it look like to understand how creativity is thwarted or enhanced through the process of converting those creative insights into concrete realities?
In 2004, after insight gained during a three-month meditation retreat, he began a long and exciting journey, studying creativity and creative expression throughout the pages of history, across cultures, and in the various professions. How has creativity and creative expression changed over time? Are there periods in history where it has appeared to flourish and others where it has waned? How does the coveted mystical experiences expressed in religious texts differ from the experience of the inventor at the moment of insight? How does artistic creativity differ from scientific creativity? How does the bodily expressions of a high performance athlete on the playing field differ from the numerical expression of a accomplished mathematician on the blackboard?
Or are there more fundamental themes running throughout these diverse expressions of creativity, themes that might allow for a deeper sense of meaning, purpose, and joy in the individual, themes that perhaps could open unforeseen dialogues across all the various disciplines, themes that might ultimately lead to greater creative expression in all fields?
In pondering these questions and in posing them to innumerable others, Austin has become a creativity expert, one who has come up with an exciting, timely, and incredibly effective understanding of creativity and the creative process, an understanding that unifies the best of what art, science, and religion has to offer, an understanding that sheds light on the nature of insight and unveils the causes and conditions that lead to insights, an understanding that outlines powerful ways to give form to those insights, and, most importantly, an understanding that unifies and revitalize all aspects of our busy, and sometimes disjointed lives.
For further information, including speaking engagements, or to stay in touch regarding his new book scheduled to come out in December, 2012, The Shoreline of Wonder: The Path of Genuine Creativity, please write him here.
TESTIMONIALS
“Sitting with Austin is a practice of sitting with your own creative potential. He holds such a space that I find myself expounding upon the genius of the cosmos. The chaostrophy of all the universe’s creativity is easily utilized while sitting this man, and pours forth from anyone who sits in conversation with him.” — Mykael David Lazzeri, Master Stone Shaper
“Austin Shaw is a kind-hearted light being blessing all in his presence with solid but flexible feeling. A renaissance man with talent and wit, and patience and wisdom.” –Steve Taylor, Singer, Songwriter, Multi-Instrument Performer
