What Fire Teaches Us About Creative Liberation: The Courage to Become

 You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems. Your identity is your system.” – James Clear, Atomic Habits

Autoethnography is a research method where the researcher uses their own lived experience as data to illuminate larger patterns about culture, systems, and human behavior.

It's what I've been practicing across all 22 classes I've taught at the Creative Arts Center in 2025—though my clarity about it and my fire in naming it are only now fully coming online.

I've blogged about every single class I've taught.

Sometimes I combine sessions, sometimes I don't. What's shifting now is my willingness to be explicit about my methodology: I teach through myself, and I study archetypes.

My teaching is informed by what I call substantial elder immersion—an older father who died when I was 21, a mother and her sisters who raised me, siblings and cousins a generation older than me.

I grew up between two cultures (Dominican and American), two languages (Spanish and English), which gave me a lateral view of human development.

I'm a voracious reader and writer who has spent decades studying people across books, travels, digital and community spaces. I've taught humans of all races, ages, backgrounds, languages, and life experiences—and I learn as much from them as they learn from me.

I don't just observe. I participate. And I look for patterns—what archetypes emerge, what systems reveal themselves, what universal truths surface through our specific interactions.

This Creative Liberation series has been different from the others.

In my previous iterations—two 8-part Creative Awakening series through the chakras and a 4-part series on navigating the unknown—I taught from a place of greater certainty.

I knew more about chakras than everyone in the room because I was introducing them. I knew more about AI and systems of oppression because I was introducing them to frameworks they hadn't encountered.

But this series? People signed up specifically for the elements.

They came with exposure, expectations, and their own relationships to earth, water, fire, and air. And I didn't know exactly how I would teach it until I saw who showed up.

That uncertainty—combined with having two women older than me in the class initially—shifted something in me. I taught more intuitively, less didactically.

And I felt it: a lack of confidence in my own voice. The question underneath: Do I know enough? Am I teaching it the way they want? What if I'm missing something?

One of my students—who has now taken three iterations of my classes and witnessed me teach 18 sessions total—gave me feedback after class.

She said she missed when I would "just teach" and do my "mini TED talks." She noticed I was facilitating differently this time, and she was right.

I was holding space for co-creation rather than standing in instruction.

Part of that was the container. Part of it was my own shadow: my intimidation around elders, my sensitivity around teaching liberation in a creativity space, my hesitation to claim what I've embodied.

But Fire doesn't care about your insecurity. Fire cares about what you're willing to burn.

And what I burned through in this class was the part of me that still thinks I need permission to teach what I know. The part that shrinks in the presence of people who've lived longer.

This is autoethnography: me witnessing my own process, naming my own shadows, and recognizing that if I'm asking students to become someone who no longer betrays what they want, I have to become someone who no longer diminishes what I know.

Welcome to the Fire element.

What Fire Is—And What It Demands of Us

We opened the Fire class with a debrief on creative momentum since Water: students shared about taking watercolor classes and attending book festivals, I shared about working on my book cover, and—most significantly—writing our eulogies. Because, yes, I'm participating in class too.

The eulogy assignment had been transformative for us all. 

We wrote from three perspectives: third person (cosmic/artistic, written before death), from a loved one's perspective (post-awakening, focused on what they were proud of), and a factual account of what they actually did with their lives.

The exercise forced them to see the gap between aspiration and embodiment—and to ask: Am I living in a way I'll be proud of when it's over? We were all glad to have taken the time to see our life arc in this way.

Then we turned to the core question of the session: What is fire?

The responses were immediate and paradoxical:

Fire is comforting and all-consuming. Community and destructive. Light and intense. It's transformation, purification, renewal. It's passion, ritual, celebratory. It's cooking and visionary heat. It's life-giving and terrifyingly capable of erasing everything.

Fire is paradox embodied.

Then I asked: What does fire look like within you?

Students named fire as warmth, breath, inner strength. But they also named it as anger—contained, inherited, justified if unleashed, carrying generations, bypassed, ancestral, breaking down what was passed to them. Fire as self-flagellation and tears. Fire as burning mouth, ginger, clarity. Fire as visible energy that transcends the physical.

One student said: "Terrifyingly beautiful."

That phrase stayed with me. Because that's what fire is when you stop suppressing it.

When you let anger be information instead of something to spiritually bypass. When you witness the heat you've been carrying—inherited, personal, ancestral—and decide what to do with it.

Fire isn't just passion or inspiration. Fire is what happens when you stop performing calm and let yourself burn toward truth.

What We Want to Create—And What Keeps Us From It

Next, we asked: What do you want to be free to create?

The list poured out: wild dance, storytelling, imagination, children's books, salsa, rap (one student had already realized this), calligraphy, artistic makeup, photo journaling, styling, fashion, wandering, murals, painting, piano, drawing scenes that captivate, poetry, writing books.

Every person in the room had multiple creative callings. Not one. Not a tidy singular "passion." Multiple hungers, multiple desires, multiple versions of themselves wanting expression.

And yet.

When I asked, "What are the reasons you haven't created?" the energy shifted.

The board filled with a different kind of truth:

Lack of community, lack of training, lack of time. Society doesn't deem it important. Costs money. Don't value our own expression. Being hurt or criticized. Perfectionism. Being a beginner. Don't know where to start. Not productive. Not deserving to spend time on "frivolities." Not brave. Not compelled. Feels very American.

That last one—"feels very American"—landed hard.

Because it named what we all knew but hadn't said out loud: the blocks aren't just personal. They're cultural. Systemic. Built into the identity capitalism and colonization created for us.

I said this to the room:

"We all had to learn from somebody. If the people who are masters at these crafts hadn't started, we wouldn't have the exposure. We need to be the example that shows other people what's possible for people in our particular bodies."

When you say "I'm a beginner," you're not just describing skill level. You're describing an identity position that our systems have taught you is shameful after a certain age.

Children are allowed to be beginners. Adults? We're supposed to know already.

Already be competent. Already be productive. Already justify our existence through output.

But who told you that creativity is only for the credentialed? Your identities—race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, age, nationality, language, education, body size, religion—aren't neutral descriptors.

They determine what you've been exposed to as "possible" for people like you.

Your creative blocks aren't random. They're patterned by which bodies you inhabit and which systems have told those bodies what they're worth.

• If you've never seen someone your age start painting, you won't believe it's possible.
• If you've never seen someone your race become a writer, you won't believe it's allowed.
• If you've never seen someone your class background take up space as an artist, you won't believe you deserve it.

Fire asks: What would you create if you believed people like you were allowed?

The Fire Ritual: Burning What No Longer Serves

We ended the class with a ritual.

I gave each student three pieces of paper and asked them to write down three reasons, excuses, or beliefs that have kept them from creating what they want. Not all of them—just three. The ones that felt most alive, most present, most ready to release.

Then we lit them on fire.

Each student burned their papers one by one. We watched in silence as the beliefs that had kept us small turned to ash.

I went last. I wrote: "Society doesn't care."

It took ten attempts to get the paper to catch. I kept lighting it, and it kept going out. But when it finally burned, it flamed—this intense, consuming fire in the safe candle container I'd brought. We had to extinguish it with ice. The smell of burned paper and melted wax filled the room.

And I felt it: the resistance to letting go, and then the relief when I finally did.

This is why I use rituals. Why I use chalkboards. Why I insist on externalizing before internalizing.

Because you can't release what you can't see. You can't transform an identity you haven't named. You can't become someone new while still carrying the old stories as if they're the essence of who you are.

They're not your essence. They're patterns you absorbed. And fire lets you witness them burning.

The lake—your known self, your persona—might hold these beliefs tightly. But the ocean beneath the ocean, your witness self, your timeless soul—that part of you was never defined by them.

The ritual reminded us: You are not your blocks. You are not your conditioning. You are not the fractured identity the systems built.

You are the fire that burns it all away. And what remains—after the ash, after the smoke clears—is the sovereign self that was always there, waiting to create.

Fire as Identity Transformation—Becoming Someone Who No Longer Betrays What They Want

In Atomic Habits, James Clear teaches that underneath any major behavior change is an identity shift. You don't change by trying harder—you change by becoming someone different. Your identity is your system.

But here's what I've learned through studying systems of oppression (unconscious capitalism, patriarchy, colonization, white supremacy):

These systems don't just shape behaviors—they fracture identities.

They build selves rooted in restriction, not expansion. So when someone names a desire—a dream, a creation, a next level—they're not just trying to start a new habit.

They're trying to become a version of themselves that the system never prepared them to be.

That identity shift is always the real work of fire.

The Four Fractures: How Domination Systems Attack Creative Identity

Each system attacks identity at a different seam, but together they create one profound rupture: a person becomes disconnected from their inherent worth, their creative agency, and their right to desire.

Unconscious Capitalism

• The fracture: A self reduced to output, productivity, accumulation. Identity becomes transactional: I am what I produce. I am what I earn.
• What it steals: Intuition. Rest. Desire for its own sake. Creativity without ROI.
• The healed identity: "My being generates value. Spaciousness is strategy. Desire is resource."

Fire here becomes alignment—shifting from extraction to creation.

Patriarchy

• The fracture: The internalized belief that power is something you defer, accommodate, or prove. That sovereignty must be negotiated or softened.
• What it steals: Agency. Boundaries. The right to want more. The right to say no—and yes.
• The healed identity: "My desires are sacred. My body is truth. My intuition is authority."

Fire here becomes self-trust—the light that refuses to dim.

Colonization

• The fracture: A rupture from land, ancestors, ritual, indigenous ways of knowing. Identity becomes linear, obedient, disconnected.
• What it steals: Cosmic context. Ancestral technologies. Nonlinear wisdom. The understanding that identity is cyclical and evolving.
• The healed identity: "I come from people who shaped stars. I move with seasons. My life is ceremony."

Fire here becomes remembrance—the flame that reconnects you to origin.

White Supremacy

• The fracture: A coerced identity of unworthiness, invisibility, comparison, perpetual deficiency. A severing from ancestral memory, brilliance, and belonging.
• What it steals: The belief that your expression is valid. That you can take up space. That your desires matter.
• The healed identity: "My existence is proof of worthiness. My lineage is brilliance. My voice is a continuation of survival."

Fire here becomes reclamation—the heat that melts inherited shame.

The Fire Shift: Identity First, Then Action

Fire is not about action first. It's about identity first.

To act differently, you must be differently.

To create differently, you must see yourself differently.

To liberate yourself, you must confront the old, system-shaped identity that says:

• "I'm not allowed"
• "I'm not ready"
• "I'm not worth it"
• "I should be grateful with less"
• "Who am I to want that?"

Fire is the portal through which you declare: "I am someone who desires. I am someone who creates. I am someone who trusts my power."

This is why Creative Liberation feels catalytic. Why students feel heat—not pressure, but awakening.

I'm guiding a shift from:

• Fractured identity → Sovereign identity
• Survival self → Creative self
• Socialized self → Liberated self

And from that place, the doing becomes natural. The having becomes inevitable.

Because you've become someone who no longer betrays what you want.

Reflection Questions for You

• What does fire look like within you right now? Warming? Contained anger? Inherited heat? Where do you feel it in your body?

• What do you want to be free to create? List everything—don't edit, don't prioritize, just name.

• What are the reasons you haven't created? Write them all. Then ask: which are about skill/time/resources, and which are about identity ("I'm not the kind of person who...")?

• Looking at your identities—what have you been exposed to as "possible" for people like you? What creative expression have you never seen someone with your identities pursue? What shifts if you become the example?

• Choose one fracture (white supremacy, capitalism, patriarchy, colonization). Write the healed identity statement for yourself. Practice saying it out loud. What changes if you believe it?

Fire showed us who to become.

Air, our final element, will show us how to move as that self—how to breathe, speak, and circulate the liberated vision we’ve been building across earth, water, and fire.

After transformation comes expression.

After the burning comes the breath. If fire cleared the path, air is the flight.