Musea Member Zine – Issue No.1
Exploring Identity, the Self, and being part of the Murmuration
In this Issue…
Use the jumplinks above 👆🏽 to Choose Your Own Adventure
and access the sections your Muse is most curious to read first!
There is a lot of great content here, so enjoy the reading journey – your way!
Visit your Member Dashboard for Zoom access details and to add these dates to your Calendar!
“We go about healing the mind by healing the mind, not thinking about healing the mind. We go about healing the body by healing the body, not thinking about the body. Intentional creativity is a methodology that initiates holistic integration through active engagement between mind and body.”
~ Jonathan McCloud, Musea Co-Founder
Wednesday 1/12 at 4pm PT: Imprensiva Salon with Shiloh Sophia and Jonathan McCloud on the topic of Your Invisible Worldview Revealed.
**This event is open to our Society Level Members. Visit the Society Member Dashboard for Zoom access details** Not a member? Learn more
2/4 Magic Makers Complimentary Class with Shiloh Sophia and Sophie Michaud https://musea.org/magic-makers/ Experiential, interactive, and complimentary class on visual thinking and graphic recording!
Happening Now – MAVERICK Yearlong Painting Process Gone Rogue with Shiloh Sophia https://musea.org/maverick/ All are welcome – women, men and gender non-conforming. Only one ticket per household needed + members receive tuition savings!
Shiloh Sophia painting her Maverick Canvas blindfolded!
#MemberMusing on Intergenerational Painting with MAVERICK
“Had a productive weekend with Lincoln painting his Maverick. He was excited to get going and loved hearing the dry brush as he moved it along the canvas and then onto his face, saying it feels good. Using different sizes and a few colors. He told me he had painted a deer and a bowl. Then used both his finger & a brush to dab on dots & circles before declaring he was done after 37 minutes. Not bad for a 5 year old. I love him so much!”
~ Lauren Adorno-Weatherford, BIWOC Leader, Elder and Intentional Creativity Teacher reflecting on painting MAVERICK with her grandson, Lincoln, pictured below.
Join us for our January 19, 4 pm PT Museum Show and exhibit opening for the Dream a Nü Dream Solo Exhibit, featuring soul artist, Laura Hollick, and photographer Kevin Thom.
About this Solo Exhibit
Dream a nü Dream is about re-imagining a world in which the richness of human creativity can work in partnership with the Earth’s majesty. As we face the birth canal of these transformational times, there is a deeper call to remember our roots and grow new ways of being that honor and revere beauty, creativity, nature, and its cycles.
The colors of the rainbow guide us through this exhibition. They represent the full spectrum of human creativity and our capacity for creative expression. Color takes us through a journey to re-imagine how we can be on the Earth, honoring her majestic beauty while simultaneously bringing forth our creativity and wild imagination.
Each image in this show is a glowing portal that opens into the richness of our soul’s imagination, a way to hear the whispers and roars of the Earth’s desire for us to Dream a nü Dream.
Pictured above: Laura Hollick and Kevin Thom from their trip to Iceland. Partners in Life and Art!
Shiloh Sophia with Laura Hollick at her Studio in Ontario, Canada!
“I have been following Laura’s work since 2010 when she interviewed me for Soul Art TV and Jonathan and I even traveled to Canada to meet her and Kevin and be a part of Soul Art Day in 2013. What a joy it will be to share their work as both a couple and co-creatives with you – please mark your calendar and plan to join us!”
~ Shiloh Sophia
NEW Monthly #POP Friday Open Studio Party and Member Engagement!
“Let’s not just claim to be a community of Intentional Creatives, Let’s BE ABOUT IT! Join Us for our Monthly #POP Open Studio Party to Paint Our Projects Together!”
~ Milagros Suriano-Rivera, Vice President of Programming and Intentional Creativity Teacher
Join Intentional Creativity Teacher, Milagros Suriano-Rivera the last Friday of each month for our Musea Member exclusive #POP (Post Our Project) day in the iMusea App in concert with our #POP (Paint Our Project) Open Studio session from 12 to 3 pm PT! Our first session will be Friday, January 28. Look for access detail on the All Member Portal!
Milagros will begin each #POP Friday by posting an invitation in the iMusea App for all Musea Member to “Post Our Projects”. This is an opportunity for you to share what you’re working on, what has been arising for you in the creative process, and where you are focusing your Intentional Creativity magic! Later in the day at 12 pm PT, Milagros will open our #POP Open Studio Party where we will PAINT Our Projects together in real time. Milagros will be there to guide the session, provide witness, encouragement and answer questions. The open studio party will be co-hosted by Intentional Creativity Teacher, Sumaiyah Wysdom Yates, who will be providing Zoom support and witness in the chat, sharing Intentional Creativity wisdom, as well as putting on her DJ hat and taking us on a musical journey across the globe!
The intention of an open studio is to inspire a playful, community-supported approach to showing up to our painting practice. We know it can be a challenge at times to find the motivation, create the time to paint, or return to a project where you may feel ‘stuck’ and need some new energy to flow. Open studios are a perfect remedy! This is a place where you can schedule time in your calendar to show up to your practice, and receive the inspirational support, witness and encouragement of your Musea community and Intentional Creativity teachers. Consider it an #artistdate
Our open studio party will be held over Zoom. Each artist will come to the session ready to focus on an Intentional Creativity project that is calling for their attention. The session will open with the presence of the red thread, and an invitation to share your project and intention for the session. After our opening and connection, participants will be asked to mute themselves, the music will begin, and we will dedicate a full 2 hours to painting! Each of us will be visible painting on screen in our magical painting studios, doing that thing we do, and energetically amplifying creative energy together! We will also include a dance break and brief chat check-in at the 1 hr mark to ‘refresh’ and give you a chance to share what insights are arising for you in your painting process.
Throughout the painting session, you can post questions in chat at any time, or raise your hand to ask Milagros or Sumaiyah questions related to your painting process, technique, or Intentional Creativity approach. They will do their best to answer, and other members are also invited to provide supportive answers and witness in the chat as well. #collaborativefield
If you have a painting video you need to watch and follow along with, you can choose to have another window on your web browser open. You may also wish to access the open studio session with your phone or tablet, and have your laptop or computer as a second screen to watch painting videos.
We will close the session with a final #POPcorn sharing, inviting participants to raise their hand and share what arose in the session, any messages coming from their painting, or perhaps a poem that showed up in the process! Know that you can stay as little or as long as you like at the open studio – the aim is for you to come and paint, feel into the community support, add your energy to the creative field, and enjoy yourself!
We look forward to painting with you!
A message from Sumaiyah about MUSIC and its connection to Intentional Creativity…
Sumaiyah ‘tuning’ in and creating to some music
“Much of Intentional Creativity involves somatic science — relating to our bodies, especially distinct from our mind. Creating with intention involves the heart/mind/soul/body and including music gets the body fully engaged. I find my Self wiggling my hips unconsciously as I’m creating. It’s automatic. As Ray Charles says, “My body responds”. It affects my mood, my thoughts, my creativity. Because of the “supercharge” that music gives me as I create, I have found my Self wanting to share the beats and melodies that bring my body into full engagement, so I began DJing and bringing music to the creative masses through my radio station. We’re in community with one another and our collective energy strengthens the whole. Why not supercharge that collective energy by getting the body fully engaged? It doesn’t matter if it’s Funk, R&B, Country, Hard Rock, or drumming and chanting offered by Indigenous people. The only requirement is that I am affected and my body responds…”
You can look forward to Sumaiyah offering beautifully curated musical journeys during our #POP Open Studio Parties, to support your creative flow, invite you to connect with your body, and let both the muse and the critic take a moment to dance it out!
Art In Motion!
Celebrating the ‘moving’ multimedia art in our membership community!
today’s featured member
Amber Samaya Gould
President, Intentional Creativity Teacher + Guide
British Columbia, Canada
Amber working with her watercolor journal out in the woods and waters of the BC Coastal Forest
Journeying through the woods and to the lake today to spend time creating, in creation, as a creative being. Exploring identity in this context is powerful, as I am so much more than the sum of my parts. I am this water in front of me, I am this air that is filling my lungs, I am this fallen tree that is now holding me as I sit here and paint. I am inextricably woven. I also acknowledge that I am a unique combination of energies and essences that makes me, me. I did a watercolor wash lakeside, using water from a small tributary moving to the lake, and nontoxic watercolour paint. I chose to add my thumb print in watercolour all over the page. I painted my thumb with the brush, and added my marks watching as the unique lines of my thumbprint faded out and expanded into a watery everythingness. It was kind of perfect actually. Identity. Me. Making my mark. My colorful essence, blending into the overall picture.
Member Focus on Cassandra Lee and Drew – partners going rogue with Intentional Creativity!
Cassandra and Drew’s ‘studio’ set up painting Apothecary together in 2021
Today we are celebrating members Cassandra Lee and Drew for having been with our Intentional Creativity community for 1 year now! They have made a practice of painting together, and regularly show up to witness, encourage, and show their appreciation for our community.
Below is a beautiful posting from our iMusea App shared by Cassandra to celebrate the magic of having found Intentional Creativity and the impact it has had on both her and Drew’s lives.
Cassandra shared with us that her heartfelt post received quite a few comments that expressed other member’s hopes to be able to paint Intentional Creativity with their partners – specifically male partners – and she had this to say:
“I hope this inspires others. I want to suggest to others that any session with Johnathan is a great time to invite your partner as both dynamics of male/female, yin/yang, science/art are represented with Johnathan and Shiloh, making way for anyone to find something to connect to. I would suggest that the Quantum Creativity class is timely as we begin this new year (it’s in the Member Library!) and a great exercise to share with your loved ones. Or the complimentary offering coming up this Friday I am sure will be great as well!”
We have seen that Intentional Creativity is a powerful medicine for couples to practice together, and are starting to notice more and more people of all genders and identities begin to enter our community and join our collective of artists. It has been wonderful to welcome more men into our iMusea App and witness their creative process. At Musea, we are creating space for EVERYONE to be an artist, to be self expressed, and truly believe in the emotional benefits Intentional Creativity practice can bring to families.
Thank you Cassandra and Drew for bringing your love to the canvas and to our community!
Being part of the Murmuration – a reflection from Guild Member, trish o’malley
a murmuration #wip by trish o’malley
The above painting is a work in progress created by trish o’malley to honor her chosen word of the year – M U R M U R A T I O N. This word choice was partly inspired by a walk beside a stream, on a beautiful fall day, when trish and Guild member, Amber Samaya Gould, had the fortune of being in each other’s company while Amber was visiting California in November of 2021. On this walk, speaking from heart and truth, a most beautiful murmuration appeared in their view. A continuous vast swath of interconnected birds, dancing to a music they could only hope to one day hear.
trish will continue being with this painting over time, and has been working on a way to connect with the full breadth of the word M U R M U R A T I O N by creating an acronym, each letter holding an essential part. She is also sitting with the inquiry…
How can i offer more grace in solitude, in flight, and with others?
Below is a creative video sharing trish’s words, produced by Amber to honor this energy coming through!
Dear Musea Members and readers,
We are so grateful for your presence in our community and hope that you are getting creative as we continue forward in this new year energy! Last week we shared with you our Monthly Relationship Inquiry on the topic of IDENTITY. This is about how we relate to ourselves, and what we notice about the persona we project to the outside world. Examining our relationship with our sense of self, and who we are being in the world provides a valuable opportunity to observe if we are really being who we desire to be, or who we truly feel we are on the inside.
We want to share a beautiful reflection written by Shiloh Sophia in 2015, related to this topic that provides deeper insight into how we develop or create our ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ persona and why!
When we are children we know how to see with our inside eyes and our outside eyes. Somewhere along the way that connection can get lost and damaged. Often we cease to develop this on-going capacity for true vision, which always sees both inside and outside.
What if we lived in a world where children were raised
to listen to what they feel and see inside
and were given a safe enough container to express it?
As we grow up, increasing significance is placed on outside eye seeing as superior, preferable and intelligent as a growth pattern. Children pick up on this immediately and begin to make the shift to outside seeing and being as a primary behavior connected with survival and fitting in.
Qualities like being a dreamer or an imaginative child, are often snuffed out. As we grow into teens, these qualities once thought of as novel daydreams, are now thought of as hinderances to our success in the world.
As children if we express what is inside, we then may have a sense of our inside self being seen, and not honored, therefore not safe, and so we learn to hide the inside self. Instead of learning to live the skills of one who sees and lives in alignment with both worlds. Both worlds in this case being our inside self, what we feel and sense, and the self we live out loud, what we say and do.
When we focus on only outside seeing, our own image of ourselves is often diminished in comparison to others. We do this to ourselves eventually – no one needs to enforce it, is just happens as a part of the prevalent culture of our community and condition. This importance of ‘outside self as primary’ is emphasized by value systems created by establishments that don’t always honor the unique self expression of each individual being. (Perhaps you have already had this experience if you are a divergent thinker or sensitive soul.)
All of this fragmentation will continue to get acted out in our relationships to ourselves, our loved ones, authority, the planet and Source. And in our worldview, how we think, feel and act about what is. When the fragmentation begins to be stitched back together with tender hands, the threads reconnect quickly, and powerful information becomes available about what happened during the time when the inside self and outside self were not in clear communication.
Often we are adults before we have a chance to heal this divide of the inside/outside paradox. We can bring them together in many modalities through committing acts of intentional creativity designed to guide the divide to be healed. The amazing thing is, through the act of creating, the divide begins to be healed automatically without the child or adult knowing it is even happening, or being conscious of it. They only know that they are creating as a kind of listening to what is occurring – witnessing their own process and reflecting on it.
The healing begins, because it wants to, and is more of a natural state for us to inhabit. The body, mind and spirit know what to do given the proper tools and environment and some context. Then, the language of the soul will begin to be heard again in the mind of the child/adult. Yes it takes practice, but less than one might think as the healing begins almost instantly…and if continued can result in a sense of wholeness and peace within.
What if we lived in a world where children were taught
to develop inside and outside eyes?
What if as adults, we modeled this by learning
how to do this ourselves, now, and live it?
We might not achieve world peace but we may be able to achieve inner peace. Perhaps world peace will arise from our having inner peace and presence.
I will light my candle for that kind of peace, one created in consciousness, guided by love.
~ Shiloh Sophia
As we continue to explore what IDENTITY means to us, we encourage you to consider the ways in which we are shown what ‘identity’ is within our respective cultures. We may need to look a little deeper – perhaps consult our child self, talk to the trees, watch the birds in flight, like the murmuration spoken about by trish o’malley, and ask some bigger questions about what really constitutes identity and what we’re really made of? It may be the case that our inside and outside ways of being are aligned, or we may discover that there are parts of our identity we keep hidden, or are just discovering the truth of, that are calling for our awareness, our creative action, and our witness in this season.
We encourage you all to engage with these inquiries and ideas in your 2022 Journal, bring it to your canvas, and share it with us at our monthly member circles. We want to know what is arising for you, and see the creativity that follows.
Wishing you all a beautiful week,
~ The Musea Collective
Become a Member today of one of the world’s largest and most well established Art Movements – MUSEA : Intentional Creativity!
“Gather with us. Be a part of our movement. While we can’t yet be together in person, we don’t need to be isolated from one another. Every place a MUSEA Member is, a MUSEA IS, so we are all over the world! Being a member is something to feel good about and connected to as a part of each of our individual stories, as well as our collective story.”
~ Shiloh Sophia, MUSEA Curator
Curator, Shiloh Sophia (center), with Musea Guild and Staff Members at the Vivid 2021 Gathering!
Love the Zine Format!! Especially love the video – Murmeration!
I enjoyed this so much.
Thank you!
Wonderful Cynthia! Thank you – we are thrilled that you enjoyed it!