the intelligence of being alive

and why human creativity is so damn important.

What if the most advanced intelligence we possess is not intellectual at all?

Words are our primary mode of communication. What we say represents a large part of who we are, how we think, what we do and what narrative we give to our lives. Language and words are a powerful tool. A tool our world is built upon and our technologies now learn from. They have become one of our most valuable assets.

We consume huge amounts of information daily. The amount is arguably unmanageable and discerning what information to consume even more challenging. But how do we evaluate, decide and control what information and stimuli we do digest (away from an algorithm telling us), and why might this be the most important question to consider?

Lisa Barrett Feldman writes about how our brains and minds work in relationship to our emotional worlds in the book ‘How Emotions are Made’. She says, the brain runs as a predicative system based on sensory data our bodies have previously signalled and neurologically code as “concepts”. These become data sets stored and programmed from experiences, later recalled when a similar sensory and external stimulus takes place. If a sensory response and a thought matchup well with a concept we have a pleasant experience. When they don’t match well we can trigger an emotional state that doesn't accurately reflect the experience. When this happens, how much awareness we have of our thoughts and bodily response dictates whether this concept gets updated more accurately or continues to miss fire in the future.

If our thoughts are predictive and based on our body’s sensory experience, we have a loop that can be interrupted at any moment. We can become aware of the thought and decide to change this by actively reinterpreting the story or we can change what our body is feeling through the senses (heart rate, temperature, rest, exertion, food and water etc.) by making adjustments to breath, tension, heat, exertion and rest.

When what we consume informs our concepts, and those concepts shape our experience and reality, awareness becomes life-forming. What we choose to think and feel determines the world we inhabit reminding us, as ancient wisdom long understood, we have far more influence over our reality than we believe.

But what is even more affirming is that what we feel in our bodies has a much bigger impact than we are consciously aware of in how we experience our world. If sensory information is a major part of what codes our brains to create the thoughts and emotions we have, then learning and paying more attention to what our body senses is vitally important.

In the wake of Artificial Intelligence, built from our language and intellectual data, interpreting our sensory, emotional and relational worlds is paramount to our evolution alongside the technologies we are creating. Unlocking a much deeper human intelligence to give precedence.

So how do we learn to understand our sensory, emotional and relational worlds more deeply?

Through embodied awareness - to be fully present in the body. To consciously notice the sensory and emotional signals from our inner and outer environment.

To be in your body is exactly like noticing your breath. It requires a stillness that draws you to where you are in one instant moment, to make sense of something. That sense might be a taste, a smell, a pressure or softness, a sound, or visual perception.

Noticing when your body tenses to when it relaxes around certain people or spaces. A held breath when trying to make an important decision or how the light in a room might affect how inspired or overstimulated you feel. These signals go unnoticed because we don’t pay attention.

When we practice noticing these energetic signals, even on the basic five-senses level, taking a moment to ask ourselves how we feel, we’re accessing valuable human data that has potential to guide our experience. That awareness allows us to adjust, recalibrate, and choose environments aligned with the reality we want to create.

The very act of feeling and sensing is energy moving through the body. That movement creates change because of its very motion.

Energy at its fundamental core - is the possibility of change. The potential to transform into something else.

Human’s have the unique ability to move energy, transform it and use it to imagine - to create. To be human is to be creative.

We are essentially conductors of energy, channellers of creativity, and we deeply need to remember this potential. What we conduct, move through our systems, from what we have the ability to feel is what can determine what life and world we create.

We all know the systems we have built and are part of. The systems that value above all else money and power tipping our balance towards extraction, destruction and disconnection.

Where we place our attention, noticing how this makes us feel, is what will realign us with what we truly value. To look at regeneration, reciprocity, interconnectivity, community, cultural legacy and above all else the value of human creativity.

To be human is to be embodied.

To be embodied is to be creative.

And that is the intelligence we cannot afford to forget.

The future will not be shaped by how much we compute, but by what we can feel - and what we choose to create from that aliveness.