About Us

“We do not have a body in a world of things. We are a body in a web of beings.”

Creative States is a production company developing creative content for designers and decision-makers that inspires and integrates the rational with relational, more full-bodied ways of knowing to move us beyond a self-serving into a life-giving world.

Imagining the World as More Than a Machine for Living

From the Scientific Enlightenment to the Industrial and Digital Revolution, our species has steadfastly cemented us within a Rational Worldview. We objectify, mechanize and quantify almost every aspect of our daily existence and treat the world as inert and expendable. While the world we built has enriched many and enabled incredible progress, it comes at great cost: disconnection. When we treat life as transactional, we deplete the relationships between our feeling bodies, our fellow humans and our fuller ecosystems.

Integrating Rational and Relational Worldviews

We can learn to relate differently. Creative States offers a framework that helps designers and decision-makers integrate Rational and Relational Worldviews by merging transaction-based thinking with our long-forgotten capacity of full-bodied knowing. A Relational Worldview treats us not as separate actors in an inanimate world, but as bodies within an interdependent web of sentient beings that inform our perception, choices and experience.

Attuning to Our Full-Bodied Felt Experience

Our Felt Sense

“Most of us see ourselves as thinking creatures that feel, but we are actually feeling creatures that think.” – Jill Bolte Taylor

We now know there is a strong neurophysiological basis for our ability to communicate and interact with other beings. Evolved as a means of survival millennia ago, our bodies constantly scan and process cues in our surroundings to alert the brain of danger, safety or symbiosis. This process of neuroception, or our Felt Sense, is far more important than conscious thought in perceiving what is around us. We in fact feel the world before we think about it.

Our Felt Sense combines:
Physical Senses – sensory receptors in the body that process what is present around us
Intuitive Senses – attunement to energies, signals and flows that nurture or protect us

By designing ways to ground people in Felt Sense perception, we invite them to see themselves as participants of a living world, rather than abstracted and separate from it.

Our Feeling States

“All things change according to the state we are in.” – Robert Henri

When our bodies feel threatened, we retreat and shut down connection. Yet when we feel safe, we open ourselves to the aliveness of interconnection. Expansive Feeling States are emotions known to release neurochemicals in our bodies that foster generous integration with others and our surroundings.

Expansive Feeling States include:
Wonder – cultivating a state of reverence and offering to our wild, imperfect and precious web of lived experience
Curiosity – exploring the uniqueness of local cultures, past histories, time horizons and spirits of people and places
Honesty – communing from a place of humility, with respect for all backgrounds, boundaries and experiences
Compassion – extending past judgement and artifice to create connections from real acceptance, courage and vulnerability
Joy – uplifting one another in buoyant momentary inspirations of warmth, beauty, clarity and delight
Play – encouraging us to explore together in a light-hearted, child-spirited, invitational and generative manner
Sensuality – honoring our animal yearning for intimate, arousing and grounding connections with our world

By designing for expansive Feeling States, we orient people away from defensive and distrustful positions toward valuing others and what they offer. We hold space for reciprocity and mutual care across species, disciplines, perspectives and belief systems.

Encouraging Life-Giving Possibilities

Designers and decision-makers who foreground our Felt Sense and encourage expansive Feeling States in their designs and enterprise decisions not only help us to integrate the rational and relational. They engage all living beings and inspire growth within the natural limits of our interwoven, immersed and sensuous world. Imagine our potential when we reawaken to the wholeness of our selves and the aliveness surrounding us.

Join us as we share explorations, conversations, tools and publications for designers and decision-makers interested in moving beyond the narrow aim of self-serving toward life-giving possibilities.