The Sacred Conversations That Live Only in the Moment: Creative Awakening

This is the final installment of my Creative Awakening summer series. You can read Part 1: Deconstructing the Systems Stifling Creative Liberation and Part 2: Four Lights on the Path - A Meditation for Awakening Creatives to catch up on our journey together.

There's something sacred about the conversations that happen in my Creative Awakening classes—the ones I deliberately don't write on the board, don't capture in notes, don't try to preserve for later consumption.

These are the moments that can only exist in real time, in the living breath between teacher and student, in the collective energy of souls brave enough to show up and lean into the unknown together.

If you're there, you get it. If you're not, you miss it. And that's by design.

This intentional ephemerality creates space for the kind of vulnerable truth-telling that transforms us.

It's where the real work happens—where we break apart not just the external systems of oppression, but the internalized patterns they've carved into our very beings.

It's where we explore what embodying disruption actually looks like, not just in our art, but in how we move through the world.

For this final summer series, only two students were able to make it.

But what unfolded in that intimate container was nothing short of profound.

I'm continually amazed by how my students set the energy and create space for me to step into the most flexible, responsive facilitation—meeting them exactly where they are, allowing the work to emerge organically from their needs and readiness.

One of these students had been with me before, bringing a depth of familiarity that allowed us to dive deeper, faster. Even though this was an abridged three-class series compared to our usual eight-week journey, it became a powerful laboratory for me to test concepts I've been developing around navigating in the unknown—ideas that would later find their way into my speaking work.

When AI Becomes a Mirror for Systemic Oppression

Our third session began with a debrief of homework that had asked my students to engage with AI in a radically different way than most people use these tools.

Instead of asking for productivity hacks or creative inspiration, I had guided them to use artificial intelligence as a mirror—a way to examine how systems of oppression had disrupted their energy centers, their chakras, their very capacity for creative leadership.

The assignment was specific: Ask the AI chat how systems of oppression, given the identities you've already shared, have disrupted each of your chakras.

We had already explored how these energy centers relate to our creative and leadership capacities, and I wanted them to see—really see—that so much of what they had internalized as personal failings were actually systemic violations.

What emerged in our debrief was a web of revelations that left us all breathless.

• Women were told to be nice—a throat chakra disruption that silences our authentic voice and truth-telling.
• Pleasure should be eschewed in women—a sacral chakra wound that disconnects us from our creative and sexual life force.
• The grief of culture loss, even as white women—the recognition that they had been severed from indigenous wisdom practices, leaving them spiritually rootless.
• One student shared a quote from her AI conversation that stopped us in our tracks: "The market will never validate your soul."
• Another revelation emerged around whiteness itself: Whiteness disrupts ancestral roots because there's no cultural identity to anchor to besides the color of skin. This led to one of my students asking a question that hung in the air like incense: "What is white culture that wasn't stolen from others?"

This is the conversation I find myself having often with folks who are American with no connection to their European roots—how the assimilation of those ancestral ways for survival has left them culturally orphaned, and how that orphaning shows up in their creative and spiritual lives.

The awareness was dawning that they now had language for systems most people don't even recognize are operating in their lives.

They were seeing how worth is tied to output—a solar plexus disruption that turns us into productivity machines rather than creative beings.

How capitalism teaches us that safety comes from money and status—a root chakra disruption that keeps us trapped in survival mode.

How capitalism sees pleasure as distraction unless it makes you money—another sacral wound that commodifies even our joy.

Perhaps most poignantly, they recognized their deep craving for sacredness while feeling unsafe about where and how to place their reverence.

This orphaning is a direct result of colonization's systematic destruction of spiritual connection.

What unfolded in that room was the recognition that they were so much more than their identities, while simultaneously understanding how those identities and their ancestors' histories had contributed to the very struggles they were experiencing.

The personal became political became spiritual became creative, all woven together in the complex tapestry of liberation work.

This is what happens when we use technology not to escape ourselves, but to see ourselves more clearly.

When we turn AI into a tool for decolonization rather than just productivity. When we're brave enough to ask the hard questions and sit with the uncomfortable answers.

The Gut Check: Where Are We Now?

With about an hour left in our session, I knew I needed to pause and check in.

This wasn't just any Creative Awakening class—this was something new I was birthing.

While I typically teach these sessions moving through the chakras with established frameworks from my Queen Mindset Leadership® work, this abridged version was laser-focused on creative liberation and how domination systems disrupt every aspect of our being.

It was the first time I had facilitated this particular approach for more than just one-off conversations, and I wanted to make sure I understood where my students were—what they were feeling, thinking, where they were trying to go—so we could finish in a way that felt right for them.

The energy in the room had shifted. We were operating more like a live discussion board than a traditional class, with my students having rich internal dialogues between moments of sharing.

This practicum approach allowed the work to integrate in real time.

So I went around the room and asked them to share three things they were noticing as a result of our three weeks together.

What they shared stopped me in my tracks.

The first student said she was noticing patriarchy more in daily life, that she was happy to have language for these systems, and that she was becoming fire in her actions.

I loved that last phrase so much that I reflected it back to her, connecting her movement past fear to the element of fire itself.

I wanted her to see herself as inherently connected to the planet, to understand that this richly designed earth offers us four elements that are fundamental to our existence—and that learning to channel these elemental energies that already exist within us is itself a decolonizing act, a return to our inner nature.

The second student shared that she was noticing capitalism and work expectations everywhere now, seeing how individual symptoms were part of larger systems, and asking herself the profound question: "What is it like to be rooted?"

That question opened a door I knew we had to walk through together.

E = MC²: A New Formula for Creative Liberation

When my student asked about being rooted, I felt the conversation shift into something even deeper.

I wanted her to understand what it means to be deeply connected to your roots and ancestors—to know where you've come from, the names of the people who shaped your lineage as much as possible, the land that birthed your bloodline and its significance, even the family dynamics that formed you.

Because when you understand your roots this fully, you can be solid even when you weren't given perfect circumstances to exist in. And none of us were given perfect circumstances. That's not how life works.

This conversation naturally led us to my own version of Einstein's famous equation—one that had been percolating in my work around navigating the unknown.

One of my students hadn't heard of E=MC² before, and while I was a bit rusty on quantum physics (having spent this summer diving deep into domination systems and creativity rather than my usual physics studies), I knew this was the perfect moment to bridge science and spirit.

Einstein's equation is beautiful because it reveals that there's an immense amount of energy hidden within matter—within mass.

You have to multiply mass times the speed of light squared to discover the potential energy contained within something.

That means there's incredible capacity and energy we haven't even begun to tap into within the physical world around us.

But what if we applied this same principle to our inner work?

E = Embodiment: The becoming of the virtues we analyze and consciously select as the ones we want to embody in this world.

M = Magnetism: The inner and outer alignment that comes when you work from the inside out. When you achieve this alignment, you can say no and yes more easily and readily because you know exactly what you're standing for—and everything that doesn't align simply falls away.

C² = Courage Squared: Not only do you continually take action, but you share those actions with others, becoming a beacon for those who are still finding their way.

What moved me most was watching my students really think about how these systems showed up in their daily lives, how they were beginning to notice the patterns everywhere around them.

They now had language to continue their deconstruction efforts long after our time together ended.

The fire was lit. The roots were being explored. The equation was in motion.

Finding Your Voice in the Unknown

As we moved toward closing, one of my students asked me a question that stopped me in my tracks: "What does it look like to find your voice? What is that process?"

Both students had shared earlier that they hadn't seen themselves as creative before this series.

I wanted them to understand that they had already been creative by the very act of existing, of surviving, of showing up as themselves in a world that constantly tried to diminish them.

But rather than just tell them this truth, I wanted them to experience it.

I had done an exercise in our second class where I asked them to pair up—first walking across the room with their eyes open, then with their eyes closed while being led by their partner.

They had shared what that felt like, the vulnerability and trust required.

For our final exercise, I walked them through their visions myself.

I asked them to reconnect with the dreams they had shared at the beginning of our series—the different roles they wanted to step into, like being a systems organizer or a disruptor in film, the ways they wanted to impact how communities are built.

They already had visions of what they wanted to disrupt; they just needed to trust themselves to walk toward those visions.

As they closed their eyes, I guided them across the room, my hands lightly positioned underneath theirs—not holding, but present.

Every time I took a step back and they took a step forward, there was just a touch of contact so they knew I was there with them, but they were walking at their own pace, by themselves.

It was a beautiful exercise in having them walk through their vision with their eyes closed, trusting themselves completely.

This was our wrap-up to the entire series theme: having soul stability in the face of the unknown.

As they opened their eyes, I saw it—that recognition that they had been walking toward their dreams all along. They just needed to trust the ground beneath their feet and the vision calling them forward.