Healing Through Creativity Archives - WebTalkRadio.net

Are you another undiscovered Susan Boyle? Have you been dreaming a dream, quietly nurturing a talent, a gift, or some possibility of creative self-expression for 5, 10, 20, maybe 25 years or more? Maybe the dream has not yet come to fruition? Maybe you’re thinking you were a fool to still be entertaining other possibilities for yourself. Maybe you think its too late, you’re too old, you’ve missed the boat, or you still haven’t ‘made it’ far enough up the ladder of your ‘real’ job to be considering such ‘ridiculousness’ ? This week’s Healing Through Creativity brings together host Dr. Desiree Cox and ‘Operatunity’ finalist, Bahamian born Franz Hepburn. Hepburn, a former civil servant and college business major is now a full-time bass-baritone opera singer and composer in the UK and internationally. Hepburn shares how the English National Opera’s 2003 UK nation-wide ‘Operatunity’ talent search, and the personal life-events that followed changed his life for good. The ENO’s ‘Operatunity’ call generated 2500 contestants. The contestants, all of them non-professional opera-singers submitted videotapes of their performances. One-hundred of these singers were invited for auditions; a final six singers were selected for intensive training. The entire journey – the hundred auditions and the intensive workshop training given to the finalists – was filmed for television and aired in 2003 in the show named ‘Operatunity’ on BBC Channel 4 television, PBS (USA), as well as Australian and Italian TV in 2003. Hepburn was one six finalist. He tells host Dr. Cox about the creative moment, the birth of the dream of being an opera-singer some 20 years before. Hepburn shares how this sense of music and singing was an important part of his full self-expression and fulfilment.

Franz was born in Nassau, The Bahamas and started his formal music training at age seven with the piano. He received an AABA degree in Banking & Finance for the College of The Bahamas; a BBA degree in Marketing & Finance from Acadia University in Nova Scotia, Canada; and an MBA degree from the University of Warwick in Coventry, England.

He was transferred from The Bahamas to the UK by the Bahamas Government in October 1990 to work at the Bahamas Tourist Office London. He worked at the tourist office from 1990-2004.

Franz made his operatic debut in the world premiere of Our Boys, first Bahamian opera by Cleophas Adderley with the Juilliard School of Music Orchestra in 1987. Some of his operatic roles include Sarastro (Magic Flute), Publius (La Clemenza di Tito), Trulove (Rakes Progress), The King (Aida) and Sparafucile (Rigoletto). As one of the six finalists (selected from 2,500 entrants) on Channel 4’s award winning Operatunity programme, he was interviewed and performed live on BBC Radio 3’s In Tune programme in February 2003. Operatunity was aired on PBS in America and also on Australian and Italian television.

Franz is also a composer and many of his works have been performed by choirs and soloists in The Bahamas, Caribbean, North America and Europe. In 2003, on the occasion of the 30th Anniversary of Independence in The Bahamas, a special concert of music by Franz Hepburn was performed by JoAnn Deveaux-Callender, soprano at All Souls Church, Langham Place, London. The concert featured the world premiere of two song cycles – Introspection and Four Words. On 8th June 2004, as part of the 275th anniversary of Parliamentary Democracy in The Bahamas, JoAnn Deveaux-Callender performed the world premiere of Five Pertinent Questions, another of his song cycles in a concert at St George’s Hanover Square, London. The following day to continue the Bahamas’ anniversary celebrations, Franz gave his first recital with pianist Lee Callender at St James’s Piccadilly, London where he sang Bahamian songs and spirituals.

Franz had the great honour of singing the role of Bridgetower Senior at LSO St Luke’s, London in July 2007 for the world premiere of Bridgetower – A Fable of 1807, an opera by jazz supremo Julian Joseph and writer Mike Phillips. The work was commissioned as part of the City of London Festival to commemorate the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade. He went on a UK tour with the opera in October and November 2007 with English Touring Opera. He was the Minister of War in the world premiere of a new musical interpretation of The Burial at Thebes by Seamus Heaney at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, London in October 2008. The composer was Dominique Le Gendre from Trinidad (first female composer to be commissioned by the Royal Opera) and directed by Derek Walcott (Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992).

Find out more about how you too can open new worlds for yourself, how to shift your perspective and more fulfilling life for yourself. This week’s show is sponsored in part by the International Futures Forum. Find out more about the International Futures Forum on (www.internationalfuturesforum.com). You can also find out more about Dr. Desiree Cox on her website www.desireecox.com

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“Is it possible to change the structure of the brain, and alter how we think and feel?” In 2004, leading Western scientists joined the Dalai Lama at his home in Dharamsala, India to address this very question. This week’s Healing Through Creativity Show brings together host Dr. Desiree Cox with Sharon Begley, a New York Times bestselling author who was at that 2004 event. Cox and Begley talk about The Plastic Mind, the new science that reveals our extraordinary potential to transform ourselves.

Sharon Begley, the senior health & science correspondent at Reuters, was the science editor and the science columnist at Newsweek from 2007 to April 2011. From 2002 to 2007, she was the science columnist at The Wall Street Journal, and previous to that the science editor at Newsweek. In addition to The Plastic Mind, She is the co-author (with Richard J. Davidson) of the 2012 book The Emotional Life of Your Brain, and author of the 2007 book Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain. She is the recipient of numerous awards for her writing, including an honorary degree from the University of North Carolina for communicating science to the public, and the Public Understanding of Science Award from the San Francisco Exploratorium. She has spoken before many audiences on the topics of science writing, neuroplasticity, and science literacy, including at Yale University (her alma mater), the Society for Neuroscience, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the National Academy of Sciences.

Find out more about how you can rewire your brain in ways that open new worlds for yourself, how to shift your perspective and create new possibilities for yourself and your life. This week’s show is sponsored in part by the International Futures Forum. Find out more about the International Futures Forum on (www.internationalfuturesforum.com). You can also find out more about Dr. Desiree Cox on her website www.desireecox.com

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Stories shape the way we see ourselves. They can influence how we act too. Many a ‘good marriage’, ‘successful career’ and ‘comfortable life’ has been torn to shreds by that old and familiar cultural story, affectionately known as ‘the Midlife Crisis’. In this week’s Healing Through Creativity show, host Dr. Desiree Cox talks to one of today preeminent essayists, cultural critics, and translators, Professor Ilan Stavans. Professor Stavans is the Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino Culture and Five College-Fortieth Anniversary Professor at Amherst College. Stavans shares how he spun this ‘the middle-age crisis’ tale into a creative opportunity. Stavans has been finding this phase of life to be about opening new worlds. And with this has come a new sense of aliveness.

A native from Mexico, Ilan Stavans received his Doctorate in Latin American Literature from Columbia University. Stavans is Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College. His books include The Hispanic Condition (1995), On Borrowed Words (2001), Spanglish (2003), Love and Language (2007), and Gabriel García Márquez: The Early Years (2010). He is the editor of The Oxford Book of Jewish Stories (1998), The Poetry of Pablo Neruda (2003), the 3-volume set of Isaac Bashevis Singer: Collected Stories (2004), Becoming Americans: Four Centuries of Immigrant Writing (2009), The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature (2010), and The FSG Books of 20th-Century Latin American Poetry (2011). His forthcoming titles are, as translator, Juan Rulfo’s The Plain in Flames (Texas, 2012) and Pablo Neruda’s All the Odes (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2012), and, as author, Return to Centro Histórico: A Mexican Jew Looks for His Roots (Rutgers, 2012), the graphic novel El Iluminado (Basic, 2012, with Steve Sheinkin), ad well as a biography of Isaac Bashevis Singer (Princeton) and a biography of the novel Don Quixote (W.W. Norton).

‘Good grief Stavans’, says Cox, ‘You’re an eminent professor, you’ve written many books; you’ve written plays, hosted your own PBS show. People hearing this might be saying: ‘What’s this guy have to be in mid-life crisis about’.

Stavans laughs out loud. Then he shares about his journey. In particular he tells of how the summer camp he started for reading and rediscovering the classics has been invigorating, life changing even.

Stavans has also written plays. His play The Disappearance, performed by the theatre troupe Double Edge, premiered at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles and has been shown throughout the world. His story “Morirse está en hebreo” was made into the award-winning movie My Mexican Shivah (2007), produced by John Sayles. Stavans has received numerous awards and honors, among them a Guggenheim Fellowship, the National Jewish Book Award, the Southwest Children Book of the Year Award, an Emmy nomination, the Latino Book Award, Chile’s Presidential Medal, the Rubén Darío Distinction, and the Cátedra Roberto Bolaño. He was the host of the syndicated PBS show Conversations with Ilan Stavans (2001-2006). His work has been translated into a dozen languages. His forthcoming titles are, as translator, Juan Rulfo’s The Plain in Flames (Texas, 2012) and Pablo Neruda’s All the Odes (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2012), and, as author, Return to Centro Histórico: A Mexican Jew Looks for His Roots (Rutgers, 2012), the graphic novel El Iluminado (Basic, 2012, with Steve Sheinkin), as well as a biography of Isaac Bashevis Singer (Princeton) and a biography of the novel Don Quixote (W.W. Norton).

Find out more about a creative moment can open new worlds, and how opening new worlds and inviting changes that shift your perspective helps us to experience ourselves has ‘whole’. Find out about all of this and more in this week’s Healing Through Creativity conversation. This week’s show is sponsored in part by the International Futures Forum. Find out more about the International Futures Forum on (www.internationalfuturesforum.com). You can also find out more about Dr. Desiree Cox on her website www.desireecox.com

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Are you a doodler? Studies show that doodlers actually remember more than non-doodlers when asked to retain tediously delivered information? Did you know that there’s even a national doodle day in the UK and USA? In this week’s Healing Through Creativity show, host Dr. Desiree Cox talks to breast cancer survivor and now author and artist, Carol Edmonston about healing through doodling. Edmonston began doodling by chance while anxiously sitting in a medical waiting room shortly after being diagnosed with breast cancer. Since then doodling has become a creative and meditative practice and the spring board for a new beginning for her life.

A long time meditator and former physical therapist, Carol Edmonston is a native of California, USA. Born and raised in Los Angeles, she now lives in Fullerton, CA with her husband, a retired orthopaedic surgeon. Up until 1995 when she was first diagnosed with cancer, Edmonston would have described herself as a perfectionist, a left-brain person but never an artist. She began her career as a physical therapist, having received her B.S. in Physical Therapy from the University of Southern California and worked in that profession for many years. She was also the former Orange County Coordinator for the National “Just Say No” Club program, a drug prevention program for youth, supported by Former First Lady Nancy Reagan.

‘I’m a recovering perfectionist,’Edmonston confessed to Dr. Cox. ‘I still don’t see herself as an artist. It took me years to see that what I was doing wasn’t just trivial’.

Cox and Edmonston talk about how Edmonston uses her process of Sacred Doodling, her upbeat interactive workshops at Sacred Space in the UK and in the USA, and the story of her healing journey through doodling to inspire anxious children and adult cancer patients to connect with their creativity as part of their healing journey.

Diagnosed with breast cancer in 1995, when the doodling began Carol has authored two books since her journey began. In her first book, Connections…the Sacred Journey Between Two Points (self-published, 2000) she shares her personal story through prose, interwoven with sacred ‘doodles’ created during that time. Her second book Create While You Wait…a Doodle Book for All Ages (Self-Published, 2004) is a hands-on doodlers book for people waiting- at airports, before meetings, before exams. Her story also appears in Chicken Soup for the Breast Cancer Survivor’s Soul and she has been profiled in the New York Times, Woman’s World, ElleGirl, Women’s Health & Fitness, among other publications. Her new DVD, Sacred Doodles, is a visual and auditory meditation where the doodles come alive, woven with the Celtic harp of Lisa Lynne.

Find out more about Carol Edmonston, and Sacred Doodling as a way to healing and creativity in this week’s Healing Through Creativity conversation. You can also find out more about Dr. Desiree Cox on her website www.desireecox.com

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Dov Baron, the Accidental Guru. In this week’s Healing Through Creativity, host Dr. Desiree Cox talks to the personal and professional leadership coach, bestselling author and radio host Dov Baron about transformation, creativity and wellbeing.

Before the fall, Dõv had spent years building a reputation as a dynamic speaker and teacher in the field of human development. It wasn’t until awhile after this event that Dõv began to see the beauty and elegance of what had happened: The return to his own CORE, what he calls his Soul-Center.

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What do Al Gore, David Abrams and Jeffrey Pflaum have in common? In this week’s Healing Through Creativity, host Dr. Desiree Cox talks to former inner-city New York elementary school teacher Jeffrey Pflaum about returning passion, meaning, fun, imagination, curiosity, wonder, and magic to adolescent reading. After 30 years as a school-teacher at a tough school in New York, Pflaum has written a book that shows parents and young readers how bring the joy back into reading. Cox and Pflaum talk about how his inquiry and passion-based strategy helps teachers and parents to empower their kids to discover, understand, and appreciate reading beyond the current testing culture.

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What makes a social enterprise a healing enterprise? In this week’s exploratory conversation about imagining the future of being human Dr Desiree Cox and her guest Andrew Lyon from the International Futures Forum (IFF) explore the connection between culture and social enterprises and what we might learn about creating meaning and creative self-expression in this Change of Age leading up to 2012.

Andrew Lyon is a convener at the International Futures Forum (IFF). The IFF is a non-profit organisation established to support a transformative response to complex and confounding challenges and to develop the capacity for effective action in today’s powerful times. The IFF is developing a body of ideas and philosophy about how to make sense of today’s complex world.

The IFF shares that thinking widely as a contribution to the global intellectual commons. The organisation holds events to exchange ideas and experience, and members of IFF’s international clan meet in plenary session as often as possible.

‘The social enterprises that do the best work are the ones that recognise ‘wholeness’ when they see it and then create the conditions for life to flow,’ says Lyon.

Lyon who studied Sociology and Economics at Edinburgh University is well versed in the ways in which meaning is created through culture. After completing his PhD, he led a community oriented health programme at Polaroid UK Ltd, before moving to Glasgow to lead the Healthy Cities Programme. He has also worked for the WHO in Bangladesh and Europe. With Forward Scotland, he lead on a Scottish approach to Sustainable Development from 1996- 2001. Now with the International Futures Forum, he leads on programmes designed to restore effectiveness in times of rapid change.

Cox and Lyon continue this powerful and inspiring conversational journey exploring how we can imagine a new future of being ‘whole’ as individuals and at a species level.

Find out more about the International Futures Forum and you can also find more about Dr Desiree Cox on her website www.desireecox.com

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Culture – the patterns of relationships we are embedded in – shapes us. And, in this week’s exploratory conversation about imagining the future of being human Dr Desiree Cox and her guest Andrew Lyon from the International Futures Forum (IFF) look at dance to see what treasures this form of cultural expression might teach us about creating meaning in this Change of Age leading up to 2012.

Andrew Lyon is a convener at the International Futures Forum (IFF). The IFF is a non-profit organisation established to support a transformative response to complex and confounding challenges and to develop the capacity for effective action in today’s powerful times. The IFF is developing a body of ideas and philosophy about how to make sense of today’s complex world.

The IFF shares that thinking widely as a contribution to the global intellectual commons. The organisation holds events to exchange ideas and experience, and members of IFF’s international clan meet in plenary session as often as possible.

Cox notes that in traditional cultures dance is used both to teach and express social patterns and values and helps people work, mature, celebrate festivals and funerals, compete, learn and encounter history, proverbs and poetry; as well as connect with the supernatural. Does dance play such a different role today in Western cultures? She asks.

Lyon who studied Sociology and Economics at Edinburgh University is well versed in the ways in which meaning is created through culture. After completing his PhD, he led a community oriented health programme at Polaroid UK Ltd, before moving to Glasgow to lead the Healthy Cities Programme. He has also worked for the WHO in Bangladesh and Europe. With Forward Scotland, he lead on a Scottish approach to Sustainable Development from 1996- 2001. Now with the International Futures Forum, he leads on programmes designed to restore effectiveness in times of rapid change.

Cox and Lyon continue this powerful and inspiring conversational journey exploring how we can imagine a new future of being ‘whole’ as individuals and at a species level.

Find out more about the International Futures Forum and you can also find more about Dr Desiree Cox on her website www.desireecox.com

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2012, A ‘Change of Age’. Tom Evans continues on from last weeks show with Andrew Lyon from the International Futures Forum in this series of exploratory conversations on the Healing Through Creativity show imagining the Future of our species with host Dr. Desiree Cox

Tom Evans is 21st century renaissance man, a serial entrepreneur and engineer now author, poet, musician and mentor of other authors on how to banish writer’s block and tap into their creative muse. After taking a degree in Electronics, he embarked on a career as a broadcast engineer with the BBC. He has also had his own company manufacturing innovative widgets to broadcasters worldwide and has received two Royal Television Society awards for his inventions as well as having several patents to his name. Evans is a trained hypnotherapist and specialises in past life and intra-life regression as well as future life progression. He has written three books: Blocks, Flavors of Thought, and his latest book, The art and science of Light Bulb Moments (published by O books, 2011).

Cox and Evans continue on from the powerful conversation begun with Cox and Lyon in part 1 of this series. In this weeks inspiring conversational journey Cox and Evans explore how as individuals we can convert ‘light-bulb’ moments into real live products, as well as how to create work environments where individuals and teams are empowered to be ‘whole’ at work and collectively dream new futures for their businesses, and ultimately, for our species as a whole.

Find out more about the Tom Evans, his books, talks and workshops from his website. You can also find more about Dr Desiree Cox on her website www.desireecox.com.

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This run up to 2012 marks a significant period in this ‘Change of Age’. Andrew Lyon from the International Future’s Forum is this week’s Healing Through Creativity, guest with host Dr. Desiree Cox in a series of conversations and explorations imagining the future of ‘human beings’ as a species in this ‘Change of Age.’

The International Futures Forum (IFF) is a non-profit organisation established to support a transformative response to complex and confounding challenges and to develop the capacity for effective action in today’s powerful times. The IFF is developing a body of ideas and philosophy about how to make sense of today’s complex world.

The IFF shares that thinking widely as a contribution to the global intellectual commons. The organisation holds events to exchange ideas and experience, and members of IFF’s international clan meet in plenary session as often as possible. Andrew Lyon is a convener at the IFF.

Lyon studied Sociology and Economics at Edinburgh University. After completing his PhD, he led a community oriented health programme at Polaroid UK Ltd, before moving to Glasgow to lead the Healthy Cities Programme. He has also worked for the WHO in Bangladesh and Europe. With Forward Scotland, he lead on a Scottish approach to Sustainable Development from 1996- 2001. Now with the International Futures Forum, he leads on programmes designed to restore effectiveness in times of rapid change.

Cox and Lyon begin a powerful and inspiring conversational journey exploring how we can imagine a new future of being ‘whole’ as individuals and at a species level.

Find out more about the International Futures Forum and you can also find more about Dr Desiree Cox on her website www.desireecox.com

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