Creativity and Self-Making: Childhood

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art, autobiography, childhood, Creativity, finger painting, Medicine, memoir, memories, Psychiatry, Psychology, self-making, Therapy

Childhood

My own journey with creativity started in Kindergarten with finger-painting. I can remember the smell of the newsprint paper and finger paint as pungent, oddly enticing, and stimulating.

The experience of putting my fingers in the cold gel paint and smearing the colors over a large piece of paper charged my young mind with a sense of freedom, excitement, and tranquility. I would go into a trance-like state, almost euphoric, during painting sessions. It was my favorite activity. Unlike other kids that form an attachment to a teddy bear for self-soothing—a transitional object—my art making tools became my way to self-soothe.

I vividly recall winning praise from my teacher, Miss Eads. She was my first ‘dream-girl’, so when she admired my handiwork, it embellished my art-making with romance. Winning her attention empowered my imagination to take risks, to be inventive, and show off what I could do. I was especially aiming to please her.

I always made art in grammar school, and I became known as ‘the class artist’ by third grade. At home, I loved spending time building plastic models and painting them—especially Knights in shining armor, and Monsters from the cinema. I began collecting the classic Horror films in 8mm and would create dioramas with the models. My creativity soared, cutting across all media. Little did I realize that each of these experiences with creativity helped my emotional self-regulation during times of personal and social stress.

My creative urges also translated into intellectual interests in the classroom. In our creative writing, I could whip up an essay out of my art imagination effortlessly—storytelling became another art-form.

We now have knowledge from developmental neuroscience that reveals the importance of cultivating and supporting our inborn creativity during childhood. Creativity is a natural human trait—the first practices of our wonderful capacity for creating abstract, symbolic, communication. As children, we begin integrating all our sensory modalities for creativity through singing and speaking, story-telling, image making, dancing, and acting-out in play.

When a child’s world feels secure, the excitement stress during creative play strengthens the capacity for a healthy sense of authenticity—a ‘true self’. We also empower our creative resilience to stresses in later life.

When the stress of life overwhelms a family’s ability to provide security, the child’s capacity for functioning and growth is compromised. The resilience to stress in the future can also be undermined.

We see this in the millions of refugee families across the globe. It is critical for societies to support families to stay connected as they go through these horrible experiences. We are amazingly capable of surviving and recovering from traumatic situations when we stay creatively connected to each other.

In future blogs, I’ll explore ‘brain/mind autopoiesis’ across the life cycle with science and my own experiences.

Featured photo of painting of handprints by Bernard Hermant on Unsplash

Photo of Dr. Romero as a child from family archives

Creativity and Self-Making: An Introduction

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art, Celebration, Connectivity, Creativity, Culture, memoir, memories, Mental Health, Mind, Psychiatry, Psychology, Reflection, Self, Story, Therapy

Creativity is one of my favorite topics for exploration, reflection, and conversation. In reflecting on my own journey as a human being, creativity has played a critical role in my own ‘self-making’—autopoiesis—the complex bio-psycho-social process of building an identity.

We human beings are endowed with the mysterious quality of consciousness, or mind, and we are embodied in an impermanent sense of self. Our brain is a creativity machine—a highly complex organ that is critical to our consciousness.

As our body grows, our brain accrues information that informs our sense-of-self by shaping the neural architecture through genes, through experience, and through memory. This marvelous process is critically linked to our awareness of life, our emotional and cognitive experiences, our attachments, and even our sense of meaning.

In this series of blogs, ‘Creativity and ‘Self-Making’, I reflect on the different phases of brain-mind-creativity that include stories from my own childhood, adolescence, early adulthood, mature adulthood, the ‘golden’ years.

Featured Photo by The Creative Exchange on Unsplash

Breathe

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Anxiety, Breathing, Cancer, Health, Medicine, Meditation, Mental Health, Mind, Mindfulness, Panic Attack, Psychiatry, Psychology, Resilience, Science, Self-help, Stress

This week, I worked on shooting my second YouTube video, Stress: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. It got me thinking about a rather stressful situation I found myself in a while back and how breathing got me through it.

A few years ago, during a total body CT scan for cancer follow-up, the power went out. Total darkness! Stuck in a coffin-like tube! The technician came in and said the power should be back up soon, then vanished. I said to myself, “I’ll nap or meditate…”

After ten minutes or so, I realized that my body was on-alert!  No napping today. I began meditating, focusing on my breathing. It calmed me for a while, but then the body took over. It was trapped! Heart rate began to increase; a scream was pushing to come out! It took every ounce of mindful attention to keep managing my breathing. I knew if I stopped meditating, my body’s PANIC would hijack my brain and body. BREATHE! So my mind carried on—at least 5-10 minutes of watching my heart rate soar, then plateau, then begin to slow down. My mind had sustained the Relaxation response and navigated through my body’s terror.

The mind-body link in the diaphragm, that great muscle that produces every breath, had prevailed. My mind—the parent of the child-like body—had reassured me that I could sustain a calm sense of self in a terrifying experience.  BREATHE.

Links on Mindfulness and Meditation:

Harvard Blog: Mindfulness meditation may ease anxiety, mental stress

https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/mindfulness-meditation-may-ease-anxiety-mental-stress-201401086967

Goldin,P. and Gross, J. (2014). Effects of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) on Emotional Regulation  in Social Anxiety Disorder.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4203918/

Mayo Clinic: Meditation: A simple fast way to reduce stress

https://www.mayoclinic.org/tests-procedures/meditation/in-depth/meditation/art-20045858

 

Image Credit:

Photo by Fabian Møller on Unsplash

My YouTube Launch

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Body, Connectivity, Creativity, Cultural Evolution, Culture, Global Brain, Globalization, Health, Logosoma, Logosoma Brain Training, Medicine, Mental Health, Mind, Mindfulness, Psychiatry, Resilience, Science, Social Media, Stress, Therapy, YouTube

I’m jumping into the streaming currents of social media to share my life work in Medicine, Mindfulness, Art, Creativity, and Cultural Evolution with a new YouTube channel!    

 

To be honest, my interest in entering such a medium was sparked long ago when I was in college. I was fascinated with the Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan’s notion of television producing a ‘Global Village.’ This inspired my curiosity and creativity: Is our single brain linked to others via the media like a single neuron is link

ed to the whole brain/body? Is media a Global Brain? How can we use it to generate Mindful Globalism?  Is social media making this even more possible than before?  

I hope to address these issues with my new YouTube channel. I also hope this will be a way for me to share with a larger group about the critical issues that I confront in my clinical practice, such relationship stress, identity development, personal creativity, and much more.  Every day, I train and coach my patients in the 3 Fundamentals of human resilience: Being, Doing, and Meaning. 

The first video I’ve posted, is a short introduction to my new channel. I discuss the origins of my Brain-Mind-Creativity-Culture systems way of thinking.  

One key experience was during a two-month externship, during medical school, at the Tibetan Medical Center in Dharamsala, India. I studied Buddhist meditation, philosophy, and art. Later, this experience overlapped with my child psychiatry fellowship and studies of attachment theory. Both of these opportunities laid the foundation of what was to become Logosoma Brain Training. 

As a private practitioner, I integrated the concepts of mindfulness, psychiatry, and medicine and developed Logosoma Brain Training (LBT). In Greek, Logos is the word for “word” and soma means “body.” Therefore, Logosoma is an integration of the word or story and one’s body. In 2010, I published a book that featured LBT, titled PHANTOM STRESS: Brain Training to Master Relationship Stress. I hope to do another YouTube video that goes into more detail about how I came up with LBT.        

In addition to working with patients, I had the honor to train young doctors for over 20 years as an assistant professor of child psychiatry at Weill Medical College-Cornell University. My life long message to my patients, students and now the YouTube audience is:  

Pain and suffering are natural.  

Pain is inevitable; suffering is optional.   

The neuroplasticity of our brains allows us to rewire our ‘suffering networks’ and learn new ‘creativity networks’ through mindfulness practice, and self-making. We have the capacity of autopoiesis! 

So, I invite you to join me on YouTube! Let’s explore the possibilities of participating in the emergence of a humanistic, mindful, social media. Perhaps a new species tribalism will emerge as the driving force of GLOBAL HUMANISM. 

 

The Phoenix Phenomena: El Fenix

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Body, Celebration, Creativity, Culture, fenix, Health, Logosoma, Mental Health, Mindfulness, Neuroscience, phoenix, Psychiatry, Psychology, Reflection, Resilience, Science, Self, Self-help, Social Media, Story, Stress

My uncle Mike ( and my dad, Mario, in front of El Fenix Bakery in Edinburg, TX

Felipe Romero, my grandfather and namesake, fled the Mexican revolution (1910-1920) and immigrated with his wife, known to me as “Mama Cuca.” I only met him once when I was very young. My dad, Mario, and his brother, Mike, were born in Texas in 1918 and 1926.

The family story is that Felipe worked as a prison cook in Edinburgh, Texas to support his family. He opened his own successful restaurant, but it tragically burned to the ground. Upon the ashes, Felipe rebuilt a bakery —El Fenix Bakery. It is still a thriving family business to this day—famous for its cakes, doughnuts, traditional pastries, and my favorite, their wedding cookies!

The story of El Fenix has been a personal myth for me since childhood—inspiring my attitude that tragic loss, setbacks, and disappointments are not an end, just an opportunity for transition and making things new. Thank you, Grandpa Felipe.

In the spirit of El Fenix, I am embarking on a career step into social media and internet teaching. The mission is to translate the clinical tools I created for my patients—Logosoma Brain Training—to detoxify relationship stress. I developed these tools from my training and practice in mindfulness, my studies in social neuroscience, and my personal experience with creative resilience—my Art = Survival project. I will explore my life-long passions for brain/mind science and art, consciousness, mindfulness training, clinical psychiatry, creativity, family health, cultural evolution, and much more.

Having faced many adversities across my life, I want to share my experience, strength, and hope with a wider audience outside my practice. Here are a few of my most memorable life challenges:

As a freshman in college and pre-medical student, I worked as a firefighter with the Port Arthur fire department. During this time, I had my first near death experience. While putting out a house fire, I fell through the floor. It was terrifying, and I thought my life was over, but my fellow firefighters pulled me up and out, saving my life.

In medical school, I struggled with my fledgling art career and keeping up with my studies. However, Dr. Torres Theorell, a visiting cardiology fellow from Sweden who was studying the mind-body links during stress, become my mentor. Thanks to his support, I found my calling for my medical career—the study and treatment of stress in families.

As a doctor, with years of success in my medical practice, starting a family, and developing my artist life with many one-man shows, I stressed myself into burnout at age 48. Divorce soon followed. With the tremendous support from the Physician Health Program, I was able to recover, return to practice, and begin my writing career to make sense of what had happened to me.

The greatest challenge of my life came as tongue cancer in 2005. For the next year, I endured arduous treatments: chemotherapy, surgery, and what felt like endless radiation. The type and intensity of treatment was such that I could no longer take in food or water orally for 6 months. During that time I had a tracheostomy and a feeding tube was surgically inserted into my stomach. My thanksgiving meal that year, was a can of liquid food supplement poured down a tube. Despite these tough times, and even moments of wanting to give up, I survived. I couldn’t have done so without the help and support of my family and a great team of healthcare professionals who saved my life.

Each of these instances, I was aided by help and support of others to be reborn anew and continue living life.

The next incarnation of my Phoenix Phenomena came in the form of writing—in 2010, I published two books: The Art Imperative: The Secret Power of Art, and Phantom Stress: Brain Training to Master Relationship Stress. For the first time I was able to put into words the work I had been doing as a clinician and artist and share it with a larger audience.

In 2009, after fully recovering from tongue cancer, regaining my ability to eat and drink, despite some loss of sensation in my head/neck area, I lost my father. He remained a charismatic and caring man until the age of 90-years-old. During the grief period, I felt so depressed and drained of all energy and during my annual visit to the oncologist, I found that I had a second cancer—a lymphoma of the bone marrow. This condition depleted my red-blood cells causing severe anemia. Luckily, I responded well to treatment, and I continue to receive maintenance therapy to keep this illness in remission.

My most recent trauma was in 2015 and came in the form of aging hips with resulting hip surgeries. As if that wasn’t enough, I had an accident after completing my second hip surgery, which resulted in breaking the new hip and also my wrist. This lead to more surgery. But since then I have been going to physical rehabilitation, and with the help of a trainer, gaining greater confidence in my strength, despite my aging body.

Throughout these darkest of times, my daughter continues to be a pillar of love and support. With her help, she reminded me of my own personal El Fenix to renew my mission to help others and take it public via social media.

I look forward to the challenges ahead in launching my projects on the Global Brain circuits of the internet. I hope to spark your own personal “Phoenix Phenomena” to help your creative resilience guide you through the global stressors of our time.

Acceptance and Gratitude: 2018 Horizons

In the final days of 2017, I returned to the cancer suite where I go every 2 months for Rituxin infusions that take about 6 hours to destroy my lymphoma. It’s a great time for a two-fold mindfulness practice: acceptance and gratitude.  

First is Acceptance—a work in progress. In Logosoma Training, the most critical mindful practice is to focus on the present as it is—the ‘what is’. I am living with cancer. My body is impermanent. The two facts are impossible to truly accept without stress unless one takes a ‘gratitude inventory’ for the ‘what is’. 

My Gratitude inventory starts with this wonderful immunotherapy that has provided me with a robust response in my battle against lymphoma—my blood is perfect, and I’ve never felt better since my first diagnosis with cancer in 2005. I practice giving daily gratitude to my body, with all its sensations, painful and pleasurable. And perhaps most importantly, I am grateful to be a human being endowed with consciousness. Some of my greatest joys arise from letting my mind wonder, explore, learn, play, and connect with others. 

For each of us, we do our best when we recruit our imagination in a creative response to stress. Wish driven action in a story of personal meaning holds a future of exploration and healing to the adversities of daily life.  

I wish for everyone to refocus on their own consciousness, in acceptance and gratitude for the ‘what is’, at least for a few moments each day, as a healing practice for the continuous negative emotional stream that barrages us all. 

Everyday Mindful Stress Regulation with TV—From Syria to Rio

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Ahn Kyuchul, Arts, Body, Creativity, Culture, Current Events, Logosoma, Mental Health, Mindfulness, Olympics, Resilience, Rio, Rio Olympics, Story, Stress, Syria, Television, TV

Last weekend, as usual, I was watching the morning news channels with my coffee—not the best formula—coffee increases heart rate and wakes me up to all the negative stories and images of a world in chaos. My mirror neurons and emotional centers naturally get triggered and increase my ‘freeze-fight-flight’ response that cascades the powerful emotions of fear, anger, and confusion.

Playing on another channel are the Rio Olympics. In a moment of mindful, wish-driven action, I refocused my attention to click my remote button and transport myself from the bloody battle ruins of Syria, the floods in Louisiana, the wild fires in Portugal to the start line for the 100 meter trials and watch Usain Bolt, the world’s fastest man, take an easy qualifying sprint. Next came my favorite, the discus throw—watching Christoph Harting (Germany) win the event with a lofty heave of 68.37 meters (224+ ft) was amazing. I was a track and field athlete, specializing in the discus throw, as a high schooler—and for a moment my mirror neuron system allowed my brain/body to re-experience winning the Gold Medal for my district in Texas and taking 5th at the Regional meet.

After that very brief mindful input of positive stress in sport—watching human bodies that have trained so diligently win their competitions—my freeze-fight-flight physiology was switched to excitement, motivation to do better, and wonderment at the human miracle.

Our brain craves novelty, challenge, and is driven by curiosity. The ‘voyeur’ brain is easily drawn to destructive action—hence the popularity of War Gaming and the motive for news media to stream endless hours of human destructiveness and misery.

The consequences to the brain for chronic consumption of stress imagery on TV loaded with negative emotions can result in toxic stress—a hormonal imbalance that compromises virtually all of the vital organs, especially the brain.

Transforming negative stress to positive stress is literally a brain circuit switch that requires mindful input to refocus away from the negative stress toward a positive stress.

Another way I protect my brain/body from the TV’s mindless stream of political negativity and conflict is with a store of recorded programs on art, nature, food, culture on my DVR. After Rio, I turned to a program I had recorded, ‘Brilliant Ideas,’ featuring Ahn Kyuchul , a brilliant Korean artist-author-philosopher, who inspired the artist in me to write this blog post.

Art and sport offer us creative ways to use human stress hormones and mindful practice for global connectedness. The ranting politicians, mindless terrorists, and destructive use of our inventiveness to hack each other demonstrates that more attention is given to human destructiveness than to human creativity.

There is little doubt that the future of our individual bodies and our global culture is teetering at the tipping point between mindless toxic stress and its emotional twin—anger, fear, confusion—and mindful positive stress with its radiant glow of excitement, connectedness, and creativity.

What state is your body in? With your mindful effort, you can always flip the switch!

Reclaiming Independence Day!

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4th of July, Celebration, Creativity, Culture, Globalization, Health, Independence, Independence Day, Mindfulness, Neuroscience, Psychiatry, Psychology, Reflection, Science, Self, Self-help

The Fourth of July is one of my happiest holidays. Fireworks, hot dogs, and cold watermelon—what’s not to love?

Last year around this time, I was preparing for my second hip surgery. Little did I know that it would lead to a third surgery in September after falling and breaking my wrist and the brand new hip. I lost my physical independence!

Recovering my ability to walk has been achieved steadily through regular physical therapy, however my mind-body coordination has taken even more effort to regain my sense of self.

The fear of losing our independence, whether physical, mental, emotional, financial, political, etc., is a continually present—mostly nonconscious— experience for us all.

Today our media channels propagate daily ‘terrorist reports’—are we living in an Age of Terrorism? Is our Independence really threatened by small packs of zealots bent on creating anarchy? Are mega banks, owned by a wealthy few, holding us hostage in a rigged system?

Millions of people would answer “yes,” but I say that our fears are hijacking our brains— we are losing our sense of self.

The issue is a brain-mind problem— Fear and Anger vs. Mindful Creativity.

The feelings of Fear, Anger, and Confusion take our brains hostage in a cascade of stress hormones that can literally drive us out of our minds. We find ourselves worrying more about What If? than living in the ever-miraculous world of What is!

Like all animals, our brains have an innate resilience to stress. However, we have a unique mind that produces a sense of self! This mysterious self can focus attention that actually regulates our brain and rewires the neural circuits through experience and mindfulness training. We can transform our ‘selves.’

When we recruit mindful creativity by focusing our mind’s power to calm the brain, we allow for the emergence of creative problem solving. Science has revealed that daydreaming activates inter-network communication—the essential ingredient for creativity.

The perception of danger triggers the brain to recruit its innate resilience to stress. When we focus our minds power to calm the brain-mind system, we boot up our creative mindful problem solving. We empower our hardwired ability to peacefully connect with each other and coordinate efforts for survival and cultural development. With mindful creativity we have survived the ice age, the fall of the Roman Empire, plagues, averted a global nuclear holocaust, travelled to the moon, and decoded our own DNA!

Independence is not a political, financial, emotional or even physical state.

True independence cannot be given. It is a mindful daily practice that is driven by a true-self motivated to work each day to sustain liberation from suffering—a state of chronic fear, anger, and confusion.

The great liberation starts within true human selves and spreads through culture as a natural dynamic of compassion and creativity.

Inspired by my miraculous body’s recovery, and the gift of a human mind, I plan a mindful celebration of my personal independence from pain, fear, anger and confusion that accompany all human trauma. A focused, calm mind cannot be hijacked for long. And the natural, spontaneous return of feelings of acceptance of the hardship and gratitude for all the things that give meaning to our lives defines our true independence.

 

Recommended reading:

Self Comes to Mind. Antonio Damasio, Pantheon 2010.

The Creating Brain: Nancy Andreasen, MD. PhD. Dana Press, 2005.

Anxious: Joseph LeDoux, Viking, 2015.

 

Intensive Logosoma Brain Training – A Personal Account

With my body in intense pain from a broken wrist and hip, it would be easy for me to fall into, what I call, the “victim script” of suffering and blaming myself or the world for this traumatic experience.

It is frustrating that something as simple as sitting and standing has to be relearned. When I tried to stand in my own style, my knee was in so much pain that I could barely tolerate it.

As Logosoma Brain Training states: the body follows the story. My brain was telling my body a story of anger, fear, and confusion. A story that would only end up hurting myself even more, but luckily with the aid of the physical therapists I have given my body a new story to follow.

By listening to their guidance, my mind was able to calm my body and follow their instructions on how to sit and stand with a broken hip. And I was able to do it easily with minimal to no pain! Standing and sitting became a smooth and gliding movement rather than my initial rocky and stressful experience.

Throughout this week as I follow this new story, my bones are mending, my immune system is robust, and my attitude is very positive.

Practicing Logosoma Brain Training is a lifelong process and is always helpful.

It also goes to show that you can teach an old dog new tricks!

I look forward to going home next week and continuing to recover my strength, flexibility, mobility, and eventually to getting back to the office.

Cross-cultural Experiences

Today’s writing is kindling memories of 1976 when I spent three months in Dharamsala, India where I studied Buddhism, meditation, Thanka painting, and ancient Tibetan Medicine for three months. I met H.H. Dalai Lama, who introduced me to my teacher, Thrangu Rinpoche of Bodha Nath in Kathmandu, Nepal. On return to University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, I wrote my second award winning essay for the Chauncey Leake Essay Contest in the History and Philosophy of Medicine—“Tibetan Medicine: And Ancient System Struggles to Survive.” My interest in writing started as a medical student fascinated with cross cultural medicine. UTMB sponsored a one month study for me to study and write about Curanderismo (Mexican folk healing) at the Mexico/Texas border towns.
During these same years I met my art-mentor, Thomas Downing, a world renowned Washington Color School artist. We began to link the healing power of art as a rudimentary mindfulness practice, predating meditation and yoga by 35,000 years. In 1979, I wrote “Thomas Downing: The Way of the Dot” during my study of Chado (The Way of Tea), the Japanese Tea Ceremony. It was with Tom Downing that I came to see Art and Healing as a singularity—like matter and energy. Tom also introduced me to Andy Warhol in 1976 in New Orleans. Andy invited me to visit him in the Factory when I arrived in New York in 1977. Andy became a friend and inspiration in writing my book THE ART IMPERATIVE: The Secret Power of Art.