Creative Awakening: Deconstructing Systems Stifling Creative Liberation

I’m back in the circle again—for the third time—teaching Creative Awakening.

But this summer, the series is abridged. Three sessions. Three doors. A sacred container carved intentionally to double as a laboratory for something larger: the keynote I’m crafting for the upcoming Lean In Latinas Conference in California, titled “The Throne is Yours: Soul Visibility in the Face of the Unknown.”

Kicking off the Summer Creative Awakening Series

This time around, I approached our gathering not just as a guide, but as a witness.

I let the women arrive first. I let them shape the space with their longings, hesitations, and quiet sparks. There’s one returning student. The rest are new—but deeply familiar.

Their lives span across high school education, art teaching, accounting, real estate, ceramics, sculpture, and the hungry curiosity of becoming an empty vessel.

Some have been swimming in the Artist’s Way for years. Others are just now toeing the water, wondering if they even have a creative pulse.

Before I introduced myself, I listened.

Because I know what it means to be a mujer of color guiding a group of white women. I carry both privilege and marginalization, and I do not hide either.

Instead, I name them. With reverence. With responsibility. With rhythm.

And when one student spoke the word decolonization, something in me exhaled.

A door opened. And I stepped through.

I moved to the whiteboard and shared myself the way I teach: non-linear, poetic, embodied. I drew a mind-map—my map. Stream-of-consciousness style. I began at the top and worked my way around:

• I am a polymath.

• I am marriage- and child-free.

• I’m a recovering Catholic, a grief guide, and a twin flame holder.

• I’m yoga certified, a lover of quantum physics, astrophysics, and AI.

• This is my third time teaching this class, and every time, it transforms me, too.

• I teach through four core systems of domination: patriarchy, colonization, white supremacy, and unconscious capitalism.

These are not side conversations. These are the bones of my curriculum.

Because Creative Awakening is not just about making. It’s about unmaking.

It’s about peeling back the layers of what you’ve been told creativity should look like, who gets to claim it, and why so many of us forget our artistry in the first place.

It’s about recognizing that creative blocks are often not personal flaws—but symptoms of a larger system.

"What Would You Do As An Alternate Profession?" 

As we moved deeper into our Creative Awakening circle, I invited the group into a playful-yet-powerful prompt: What would you do as an alternate profession?

A remix of a question from The Artist’s Way, this wasn’t just about dream jobs or fantasy lives. It was a sacred inquiry—one that asked: What would your soul choose to do if it hadn’t been shaped by capitalism, colonization, or conformity?

Now, with my background—ten years steeped in Industrial-Organizational Psychology, a decade of researching and evaluating job design, workplace behaviors, and human complexity—I couldn’t help but bring a layered lens. I’ve spent years writing resumes and decoding how people move through work.

So I listened closely to how my students responded —not just to what they said, but also to how they said it. The hesitations. The heat. The longing underneath their words.

Some women imagined roles they’d never said aloud. Others were unsure, and I offered reflection, adding flavor based on the patterns I heard in how they spoke of themselves. That’s how we landed on titles like:

• Liberation Systems Creator – for the one who creates structure with heart and longs to architect equity.

• Collaborative Artist – for the woman craving community after too long creating in solitude.

• Community Revitalization Visionary – dreaming of erasing food deserts, bringing access, and making service sustainable.

• Amplifying Studio Owner – because legacy and representation matter.

This was also the first moment I introduced Queen Mindset Leadership™, my signature approach rooted in liberation, multidimensionality, and the chakra system—not just as an energy map, but as a leadership framework.

The chakras, I told them, aren’t just spiritual centers. They are invitations.
They offer both the space to shed the internalized debris of domination and the power to manifest new realities. They help us rebalance the divine masculine and feminine within, each essential to co-creating new systems—ones that don’t just resist oppression, but actively regenerate wholeness.

As I shared my own list of alternate professions—dancer, writer, artist, astrophysicist—I ended with the one I’ve ultimately claimed: Liberator.

And when we looked back at the themes of their responses—legacy, impact, regeneration, emotion, human connection—it was clear. They weren’t just dreaming of jobs. They were remembering their callings.

Queen Mindset Leadership® and Creative Liberation

We closed the class with something quietly radical.

While one student stepped out, I found myself in an unexpected pocket of intimacy—with two others, one grieving a quiet loss, and another who casually mentioned using AI. That opened a portal.

There’s so much fear around AI these days. And understandably so—especially when we witness how systems of domination replicate themselves through technology at scale.

But what I’ve come to learn—and what I teach through Queen Mindset Leadership®—is that tools, like systems, reflect the hands that wield them.

And when held with discernment, creativity, and truth-telling, AI can become a mirror—one that helps us unearth our layered selves. So I pivoted, as liberators do.

I introduced them to the Wheel of Power & Privilege, a tool to help name the nuances of our identities: our bodies, our histories, our access, our ancestral arcs.

I shared how I’ve used this wheel with AI—not just to say, “I am a citizen”, but to tell the fuller story: “I used to be undocumented. I now hold U.S. citizenship. I carry both.”

That’s where real self-awareness lives—not in a static label, but in the movement between identities.

Then, I offered them an experiment.
A 5-part prompt to begin their own AI-powered liberation archive:

1. Name your ChatGPT thread (Creative Awakening, Creative Liberation, etc.)

2. Introduce yourself, this class, and why you’re here—ideally via voice note.

3. Share the layered truths of your identities using the wheel.

4. Fold in the four systems of domination: patriarchy, colonization, white supremacy, unconscious capitalism.

5. Finally, feed it the creative path you dream of, and ask:
   “Based on what I just told you, what has kept me from pursuing this path?”

That was it. One question. No pushing for more.
Because clarity doesn’t come from quantity—it comes from resonance.

I didn’t know what they’d receive. I just knew it would move something.
And that's the essence of Creative Liberation: trusting the process, the prompt, and the person.

I’m deeply grateful to the Creative Arts Center for giving me complete freedom to teach this work as it lives in me. And to these students, for being the first to walk this new terrain with me.

Because this is only the beginning. They are remembering they’ve always been artists. And I am remembering that liberation can be taught—and caught—when we create brave space to let it unfold.