Accessing the Subconscious Through Poetry
A Community Consciousness and Brain Health Essay.
Our subconscious mind is recognized as a center of creativity, intuition, and inspiration. Dreams, symbols, and archetypes are the language with which we can communicate with our subconscious and those messages of creativity, intuition and inspiration can float up to the surface. A friend once said, “If you want to know what your subconscious is thinking look at your life. Poetry can give a heightened sense of life. In order to write a poem about life, a particular experience, or a moment in time, one must really look at life. As the words roll around in the mind and on the tongue, creativity percolates.
Sometimes an insight or an inspired thought pops up when I start to write a poem about a particular experience. I see the past experience in a new way as I turn it over trying to find just the right word to capture the feeling or ambience of the moment. I am using symbols tiny black smudges on the paper to capture, hold, and share a particularly poignant feeling or perhaps a terror I once felt so strongly.
One exercise to facilitate communication with the subconscious is the creation of a sigil. This exercise was first described to me by Richard Bartlett, developer of Matrix Energetics. A sigil is a symbol and can represent many different things like a family crest or magic rune. One way to create your very own sigil is to write a phrase like, “I want to be creative.” Take your sentence and cross out any letter that appears more than once. In this case it would look like, “WNOBCRV.” You then draw, rather than write these letters on a sheet of paper, preferably in color with crayons or colored pencils. The letters can be different sizes and upside down or sideways. They can be connected or surround each other. Once you have all the letters on the paper be creative in your coloring. Create a beautiful design or image out of the letters. Once you are done fold the paper and tear it up. This sigil’s job is done. The ideas, request, or desire is already floating in the subconscious mind getting ready to pop into reality in the most subtle or spectacular ways. Notice what changes in your life.
Visual poetry is another way to communicate with the subconscious. One way to create a visual poem is to take a page from a book, magazine or brochure and circle words that jump out at you. Color around those words, which form the poem to create a beautiful image that may or may not have anything to do with the words but are a reflection of your creative mind coming to the surface.
Acrostic poems are another type of symbolic poem where the first letter or each line forms a vertical word. One famous one is:
False
Evidence
Appearing
Real
Here is another one:
Lusciousness streaming from the sky
I
Go to sleep in darkness
Hearing the day breaking
Tinkering with life begins a new each morning
As Avia Venefica says, “Life is symbolic. Start interpreting.”
