I came to understand creative blocks related to art making through an injury that left my spine frozen from the middle of my ribs to the base of my skull. While visiting neuromuscular therapist Dyal Singh Khalsa, my hands started moving involuntarily. He assured me it was excess energy my conscious mind couldn’t contain and instructed me to shake my hands above my head while chanting "Sat Nam" until I regained control.

This experience of excess energy moving through my whole body was my first exposure to embodied energy - which led to embodied knowledge - and abstraction was the only discipline that could contain all of what I learned. A creative block IS an energy block and there are tools to help you release them - read more in the Decoding Abstraction: Energy Embodied journal.

I was always on the move, pushing boundaries, teaching at Parsons and Yale—until burnout hit. I needed a quick, effective way to re-boost my creativity, so I created ‘no-time-needed’ exercises to reignite the mind and body. My students at Parsons, Columbia, etc felt it too—and asked for more. That’s when the Decoding Abstraction journal took shape—22 embodied Creative Exercises designed to jumpstart anyones creative flow in 60 seconds. And no, you don’t need to be 'fixed.' This journal doesn’t fix you—it uncovers the creative energy you already have, just waiting to be set free.

14 Creative Exercises for adventurous art lovers and 8 rejuvenating Business Exercises for professionals ready to boost their creative edge. A lot of these words feel weird to me, but they are literally what my students have said to me...so I'm putting them here out of respect. The exercises target 8 critical business skills—problem-solving, adaptability, communication, connection, and more.

Click here to try them out!

I also studied with Lillee Chandra, a Somatic Experiencing® Practitioner and Clinical Orthopedic Massage Therapist and dear dear friend. She taught me yoga and I taught her drawing. Together, we developed Body Creative Immersions—body-oriented creative experiences. (Let us know if we should run these again!?) Through these workshops, we learned that attention directs intention, but often, our attention subconsciously wanders, leading our intention astray.

How do you bring your attention back under your protection? Try this Exercise: sit in a chair or on a couch, and push down hard on the arms or cushion beneath you. Slowly—slower than you think—release the push. Notice the sensations. Repeat, but this time focus on your feet. Most people feel lightness in their feet while pushing and heaviness when releasing. This simple awareness exercise shows that only what we give our attention to exists in our awareness - and the now is the only place you can affect change.

We also applied the science behind studies at Harvard in the field of neuroaesthetics (the cutting-edge science that digs into how your brain fires up during those gut-level reactions to art—breaking down the exact biological wiring behind beauty) that prove embodied visual stimulation while learning helps build new neural pathways enhancing cognitive functions and overall brain health by 30% .

Still working on it, as I get feedback, stay in touch and always feel free to send me drawing!

Be well, Tom

"The now is where the magic hums,

Where dreams take shape and time succumbs.

No future waits, no past to bind,

In this quick moment, change is signed."