Episode Details

“I decided early on that I mattered” Caron McCloudOn Cultivating Your Genius

Very little space is given to the development of our innate genius, and this concerns me. We need more women living in the fullness of their power. But there’s a problem we might know this is a choice to cultivate our genius: it may never occur to us that we have a genius to access at all. Really.

Most of us have never spent hours, let alone days, watching what truly wants to come through us — an insight, an innovation, a worldview built to actually design our lives and relationships. I want to start with a personal story that, even now, kind of blows my mind. Let me take off my shoes and step onto the ground as I remember this. My mother, Caron McCloud was a genius. She’s an ancestor now. When I was young, she encouraged me to write and recite poetry. She bought me a drafting table for my 13th birthday and told me, “This is where you work out your ideas. Draw here. Paint here. Write here.” She said, “I want you to think as if the thing you’re thinking about could be life-saving — for yourself and for others. I want you to treat yourself as if you absolutely matter, and the world will be a different place unless you inhabit it with everything you’re carrying.”

She’d send me to my room: “go write a poem, and don’t come out until you have a draft.” She taught me to treat my thinking as if it completely mattered and as if I did. If she hadn’t given me that framework to explore myself, I doubt the thought would have ever crossed my mind — because it’s audacious, isn’t it?It is audacious to devote an hour or a day to your own genius just to see what’s available to you. That is what I am doing RIGHT NOW with two of my genius friends, we are in a sistermind, each quietly working on our own material, and then discussing and then back to the drawing table, for a 24 hour cycle.

This, the cultivation of your genius is what I’ve invited women to do for over thirty years. It’s what I’ve built a long term business and community on: the idea that when I position myself to receive my ideas, those are the ideas worth pursuing — but they don’t just come from the ordinary brain and my experience of the past.What if our brilliant ideas are in the future, and what if that future is just a few minute in the future and accessible - like - right now? There are reasons we don’t create the time to cultivate genius.

* Ego: We’re taught not to have an ego, not to get too big for our britches, not to be too smart.

* Fear: We’re warned that if people knew how much sacred medicine we’re carrying, we could be a danger to ourselves or others.

* Worth: In the same breath we’re told we aren’t worthy, that there’s no real value in cultivating our consciousness.

Don’t be too big — but be big enough.

Those of us in business world get another script entirely: be more masculine, hustle, grasp, win. At all costs, even to yourself.Experiences like hustle and win are almost a deadening place for genius. Genius doesn’t grow in the hard ground of striving. It grows in a field of wild flowers where you lay back and gaze at the sky and ask questions of your own consciousness.AND I think the most obvious reason we don’t go there is simpler: We don’t know how.We haven’t been shown.We have been prevented from it and not taught to value it.

Here’s how - Access to flow state within focused intentional inquiry, that is how. Let me show you why.

Here’s a little of the brain science, because it’s worth understanding. Our brains move through different electrical rhythms, and each one gives us access to a different kind of thinking. Most of our waking day runs on beta — the busy-body, alert, task-managing s