The Inner Studio - Riverside Architectural Press

THE INNER STUDIO
knowing voice that can guide decision making and problem solving.
This knowing voice is the basis for creativity and wisdom and
is completely portable–equally at home with any circumstance we
may face. The purpose of awareness is to put us directly in touch
with the unified response of our minds and bodies.
We have all heard the advice that we need to “listen” to
ourselves. But what exactly does that mean–and how do we learn
to do it effectively? What part of ourselves are we supposed to
listen to? Do I listen to the messages of my body or my mind? How
do I learn to read the signals and interpret these messages? How do
I turn inner resources into creativity and wisdom?
Again, awareness is the key. Like any skill, awareness can be
learned and improved upon with practice, and comes to us with
many years of testing already performed. Meditation is the traditional
practice for training ourselves to develop awareness, but
anything we do repeatedly has the potential to serve as a meditation.
I always see the creative process as having the potential to be
an object of meditation. But the greatest benefit of awareness is that
it allows you to do something about your own circumstances. It
allows you to use your own circumstances to grow and turn
anything into a creative resource. In this section, I want to look at
body, dreams, and psychological shadow as resources that can
become the sources of creativity and wisdom when we bring awareness
to the act of design.
Our ability to connect to the symptoms, messages, and signals
of our bodies, dreams, and shadow offers us three doors to the
unconscious. Each has its own unique voice and each offers us the
opportunity to bring to the built world a wise part of ourselves that
is often ignored. Body, dream, and shadow are with us all the time.
This chapter is not only concerned with developing our ability to
listen to “inner messages” about design, but with the very real
possibility of designing spaces and artifacts that support these
explorations for others. My hope is that we are able to bring more
of the richness of the inner world to the built world by bringing
these dimensions of the psyche into our work. The reality of the
unconscious has been a cornerstone of Western psychology, but the
actual capacity to make the unconscious conscious as a reality of
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