Queen Mindset Leadership®: A Map for Navigating Your Spiral of Self

 In the modern world, completing a doctorate in your mid-20s is a monumental accomplishment. But it's only a one-time thing, and although there's a headiness that comes with earning the title of "doctor," I preferred being an artist instead.

My mind is one of my favorite places to be. I love thinking, mulling over existentialism as a daily habit, and imagining different scenarios in both past and future (sometimes the present). But the mind is not a place to live.

Albert Einstein, one of my all-time favorite scientists and artists, is quoted as saying, "The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift."

Despite the fact that I'd been mark-making years before I ever learned how to speak and write (because humans begin as artists before we forget), I was blind to my artistry. Gifted academically from a young age, my parents, classmates, teachers, extended family and more encouraged me to excel academically. Honors classes, gifted programs, early graduations, top of my class, first in my family—I had all the accolades.

But as the years passed, I lost touch with my artistry, rendered it to a hobby, deemed it not as important as the money, title, travels, and experiences I was accumulating.

To become an artist again meant changing my entire identity, my entire life, clearing out systematically anything or anyone that kept me silent, past or present.

That is where Queen Mindset Leadership® entered the chat.

The Inherited Life and the Chosen Life

Queen Mindset Leadership® came for me as something to hold onto after I'd completed all the "milestones" of the first half of my life and wanted to design a wildly different path in accordance with my own voice and values, not the ones I'd inherited.

Second-half leadership is not about age. It's about psychological stage. It begins when someone realizes: "I can no longer live on autopilot."

Common triggers include burnout, divorce, children growing up, career plateau, spiritual dissonance, mortality awareness, or success that feels hollow.

First-half leadership is about building identity. Second-half leadership is about revising identity.

For many of us, our human journeys will take us through this arc from the inherited life to the chosen life. And many of us never get there. We stay performing scripts we didn't write, living in homes we don't feel at home in, working jobs that deplete us, maintaining relationships that require us to be smaller than we are.

Queen Mindset Leadership® is a systematic map for not just knowing the self, but for creating from the self.

What Queen Mindset Leadership® Actually Maps

I've spent the last two years asking: Is this just a corporate model? Can it be taught locally, colloquially?

The answer is yes—because Queen Mindset Leadership® doesn't map your career or your business. It maps the underground journey from inherited identity to sovereign self.

Think of it this way: You start living according to default patterns—what your family expected, what society prescribed, what seemed like the "right" path. Then something ruptures. A layoff. A loss.

A moment of clarity where you realize you can't keep performing this life.

You go underground—into what feels like dissolution, confusion, or chaos. And if you have a map, you eventually emerge as your sovereign self.

Queen Mindset Leadership® is that map.

It provides structure for three distinct phases of the underground journey:

Creative Awakening: Discovering Your Layers

This is where you realize you're more than you thought you were. You're not just your job title, your relationships, your accomplishments. You have dimensions—physical, emotional, mental, spiritual.

The 4 elements ground this awakening:

• Earth teaches you that your body holds wisdom
• Water shows you that emotions are intelligent guides
• Fire reveals your capacity to transform
• Air clarifies your thinking and communication

Creative Awakening answers the question: "Who am I beyond the scripts I've been performing?"

When I was in this phase, I was chaotic. I'd left corporate America without a plan. I'd broken up with my entire friend group. I had time and freedom but no structure. I was dissolving the old identity—high-achieving consultant, corporate climber, "successful" in traditional terms—but hadn't yet integrated what was emerging.

The elements gave me something to hold onto. Earth reminded me to get back in my body through yoga and painting. Water taught me to feel without apologizing. Fire showed me what needed burning. Air helped me think clearly about what I actually wanted.

Creative Liberation: Connecting to Something Larger

Once you know you have layers, you need to connect those layers to something beyond your individual ego. This is where ancestors, cosmic cycles, and your energetic system come in.

Creative Liberation invites you to:

• Honor your ancestors—both the gifts and wounds they passed down
• Align with cosmic cycles—moon phases, seasons, your own rhythms
• Embody your chakras—understand how energy moves through you and where you're blocked

This phase answers: "How do I stop feeling so isolated and untethered?"

For me, this meant returning to the Dominican Republic repeatedly. It meant studying my father's complicated legacy—20+ children, infidelities, brilliance, and pain. It meant understanding that my marriage-free, childfree choices weren't rejection of family but integration of everything I'd witnessed about what marriage and motherhood cost women in my lineage.

It meant slowing down. Following lunar cycles instead of productivity calendars. Tracking my energy instead of forcing output.

Art slows cognition. It removes productivity urgency. In that spaciousness, unconscious scripts float up: "There must be one correct audience." "There must be a final outcome." "If I don't scale, I'm small." "If I don't define it tightly, it's unclear."

Painting doesn't obey those scripts. It confronts them gently, through practice. You sit. You mix color. You wait. You adjust. It retrains your nervous system to tolerate ambiguity, repetition, and non-finality.

Creative Sovereignty: Expressing Your Integrated Self

Once you know yourself and understand your connections, you're ready to express. This is where vision, vitality, and voice emerge.

Creative Sovereignty asks:

• What do I see that wants to be created? (Artistic Vision)
• Do I have the energy to create it? (Vitality)
• Can I communicate it without apology? (Whole Voice)

This is the phase I'm in now. I married myself in a white dress at a waterfall in the Dominican Republic. I wrote 100 pages of my memoir in 14 days. I teach Creative Liberation classes where I blend quantum physics, chakras, and community action. I live as an artist first—painting, writing, playing piano—while building a business that funds that life.

This isn't the "arrival." It's simply the next arc of the spiral.

How to Use This Map

Here's what I want you to understand: Queen Mindset Leadership® is not prescriptive. It's not a twelve-step program where you do A, then B, then C, and emerge transformed.

It's a navigation system.

You can enter through any door:

• Maybe you start with Creative Awakening because you need to rediscover who you are
• Maybe you start with Creative Liberation because you're already doing the work but feel disconnected
• Maybe you start with Creative Sovereignty because you know what you want to express but feel blocked

You can use any tools:

• Intellectual study (read about koshas, chakras, elements)
• Physical practice (yoga, dance, painting)
• Emotional work (therapy, shadow integration)
• Creative expression (write, paint, create first and discover yourself through making)
• Spiritual exploration (meditation, ceremony, ritual)

All the materials that can be learned intellectually can be artistically expressed, and you get to choose how much, if at all, of each piece you involve.

The Layers of Artistic Awareness

There's a progression many creators move through:

Layer 1—Consumption: "I love this." Murals. Graffiti. Dance. Writing. Beauty.

Layer 2—Identification: "I wish I could do this." Envy. Admiration. Longing.

Layer 3—Permission: "What if I try?" Ordering the graffiti book. Signing up for class.

Layer 4—Practice: Showing up. Not performing. Not producing a masterpiece. Just practicing.

Layer 5—Embodiment: "I am someone who paints." Not because it's your job. Because it's your practice.

Layer 6—Transmission: Others feel permission because you are practicing visibly.

Queen Mindset Leadership® helps you move through these layers—not just in art, but in LIFE.

Because your life is your art.

The way you organize your time, your home, your relationships, your days—that's all creative design.

Your Life as a Spiral

I want to invite you to think about your life not as a linear trajectory but as a spiral. You're not climbing toward some final destination. You're circling through themes, returning to questions at deeper levels, revisiting challenges with new wisdom.

The spiral doesn't require you to figure out the entirety of your life or predict what will happen if you follow the immediate next steps. It only asks: What direction do you want the next arc to move? What intentions do you bring?

Maybe your next arc involves:

• Reclaiming creativity you abandoned in childhood
• Healing ancestral patterns around money, relationships, or worthiness
• Expressing something you've kept quiet for decades
• Designing time around your rhythms instead of capitalist productivity
• Building community in your actual neighborhood instead of online
• Making art just because it feels good in your body

Queen Mindset Leadership® doesn't tell you WHAT to create.

It gives you the systematic framework to excavate what's already there, blocked by inherited scripts, unhealed wounds, or disconnection from your body and lineage.

You already know what you want to express. You already have vision, vitality, and voice inside you. Something is just blocking access to it.

Queen Mindset Leadership® is the map for removing those blocks.

For knowing yourself deeply enough that expression becomes inevitable.

For creating a life that's yours—not inherited, not prescribed, not performed for approval.

A sovereign life. An artistic life. A chosen life.

The spiral continues. Choose your direction. Queen Mindset Leadership® will help you navigate.

Dra. CarolLaine M García is the creator of Queen Mindset Leadership®, a decolonial framework integrating ancestral wisdom, cosmic consciousness, and embodied creative practice. She teaches Creative Liberation classes in Dallas and is currently writing her memoir, Alma Soberana: A Memoir in Seven Orbits.