29: The Power of Metaphor to Unlock Creativity and Inspire Breakthroughs with Kim Hermanson, PhD

My guest on the podcast this week features Kim Hermanson, Ph.D. who is a transformative coach, author and shamanic intuitive who is known for her skill in quickly shifting people out of spiritual and psychological difficulties into a place of profound beauty, healing, and creative flow. A series of intense mystical experiences forcefully yanked her out of a conservative Midwest upbringing and profession as a corporate computer scientist and led her to develop Doorway sessions. Kim works with creatives, pioneers, visionaries and mystics to help them integrate their own experiences of non-ordinary reality and to connect with deep shamanic creative energies that urgently want to be expressed in our world. Kim currently serves as adjunct faculty at Pacifica Graduate Institute. She has taught at the University of California Berkeley, Institute of Transpersonal Psychology, Sophia Center at Holy Names University, Meridian University, and Esalen Institute. She is the author of Getting Messy: A Guide to Taking Risks and Opening the Imagination and Sky’s the Limit: The Art of Nancy Dunlop Cawdrey. In addition to her own publications, she has co-authored several articles with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the author of Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience and other books. What you’ll hear in this episode: • How Kim began her work with metaphor • Her background coming from a very conservative family • Her traumatic experience of being in a car crash, injuring her back and not being able to walk • Experiencing a different energy through a vision of floating on a cloud • The power of shamanic energy through images and metaphor • Her journey into metaphor through education and spirit • Examples of metaphor • Understanding images from the metaphoric realm and their meanings • How the body needs energetic shifts and attunement • The feeling of stepping into or being the image • How we have dismissed the creative and the feminine • The similarities and connection to intuition • The difficulties the external world presents when try to connect this part of ourselves • How the modern world has pushed us away from the natural world • How anxiety is connected to the process of becoming more comfortable with the third realm • Exercise advice and an example from Kim creating an image of water • The use of fairytales within metaphor • The meaning of being attracted to certain symbols Resources http://kimhermanson.com The Sacred Power of Simple Images (PDF) For a session with Kim at the special discounted rate for Women In-Depth listeners, send her an email (kim.hermanson@gmail.com) with “Women In-Depth” in the subject.