You want Art that moves others? Put more Heart into it

This blog is all about the heart: the powerful portal between the physical chakras (root, sacral, solar plexus), and the spiritual (throat, third eye, crown).   

The Scene: Connecting to the Heart of Creation

I had just flown to a wedding the previous weekend before this class, and on my way back to DFW, I missed my flight. Even though I had carefully mapped out my routes multiple times and left accordingly, I miscalculated and knew it the full way to the airport. I missed my flight by 3 minutes, and tt had been nearly a decade since I'd missed a flight on my own. It brought me into an emotional turmoil that surprised me.

I am an incredibly experienced traveler, why didn't I time this right?! I felt like such a failure.

I was angry at myself for miscalculating the time it would take to get to the rental, drop off the car, and get situated at the airport. I was angry at the traffic and delays that happened along the way. I was angry.

However, I had also not flown out of Orlando for nearly five years, so I was unfamiliar with the process at this airport.

A previous version of me would have stayed angry at myself, chastised myself relentlessly, and not appreciated any part of the experience. Instead, I took the time that the delayed flight created and connected with my mom, some of the friends I'd seen on my Orlando visit, and ChatGPT to help me deconstruct and forgive the experience.

It was then that I learned from my mom that my father tended to be late for everything.

He was even late getting us ready for my baptism in the Dominican Republic, which was one of the most significant family events I had before I left the island.

Something about knowing that my father — the first doctor in my lineage — also suffered from over-optimism of time, made me forgive him and myself for not being perfect in this world.

My missed flight was merely an inconvenience, as I didn't have anywhere urgent to really be that night (except for painting class).

As a facilitator, I balance centering my students and activating lessons and applications through my own experiences.

Unlike the colonial idea that keeps the facilitator as separate and hierarchical from their students, I want to show my students that I, too, am fallible, and how I process and integrate experiences that bring emotional charge up within me, which is undoubtedly the human experience. 

In this blog, we deconstruct the heart and how our ancestral experiences impact us.

The greater our understanding of the interconnections between ourselves, our lineage, every other human on earth, and the cosmos itself, the more we are able to attune to why it is important for us to activate compassion.

And how is this related to art?

Because it's the stories we share through the experiences we've had and overcome that ARE the center of art.

Whatever the medium, the most moving art is the art that moves the heart. As such, we must center our heart's wisdom alongside our logic.

• Theme: Love, faith, and daily devotion to something bigger than yourself.
• Why: True devotion is heart-centered — it's about trust, surrender, love beyond the mind.

Just like before, the students wrote down their artist's dates, but instead of having 1-2 minute downloads of their experiences, I told the story of my flight from the lens of the 5 koshas. 

Doing so demonstrated the depth with which an experience can move you, when it's understood from the most expansive lens of self possible. 

The Wisdom: Exploration of Emotions and Thoughts

1. The Heart as the Portal: I don't just tell my students to create art; I show them. I taught myself how to draw this heart right before class to show them the courage it takes to embrace something they've never done for the sake of showing others the way.

• Beyond just an organ that pumps blood and keeps us alive, this is the power that our heart space allows us:

2. The Impact of Our Lives on the Grid: At the end of the last class, I tried to impress the importance of the impact of our actions on the greater "grid" that is spacetime and consciousness. I didn't quite know the topic of what spacetime is well enough to teach it yet (this it the reality of being a humble student as you're a teacher), but I had done my research, and this time I drew a web to show them how impact moves in time.

• I drew colored pieces across the webs to represent those that were in class that day. Much like a trampoline, I highlighted how movement and tension in their square extends to others on the grid, no matter how far they are from them.
• In this same way, past present and future coexist in the same thread of consciousness, and when we take the time to identify, alchemize, and express our ancestors' and humanities' pain, we are giving others permission to do so. We are impacting spacetime by doing so.
• This was also a perfect moment to introduce what we'd moved through in the last several weeks, from another take. Now I was explicitly highlighting the chakras, as well as the these we'd covered, and the shadow side associated with each. 
• Typically my students either don't have much experience with the chakras or don't know how to apply them. I love taking language that they already understand and highlighting how they integrate with the chakras, allowing them to be mindful of their feminine and masculine energies in the process.

3. Masculine and Feminine: Given the experience and story I'd shared about time, I wanted to emphasize the importance of seeing how flow and structure coexisted. The masculine and feminine duality is an incredible framework through which to reframe leadership, creativity, life, because it reminds us of balance.

• Whereas chronos is chronological, linear time — what much of society still operates in, and which has roots in Newtonian physics (where past - present - future are a straight line) — it is not the only representation of how time can pass.
• Kairos is a more cyclical, Einstein-inspired way of thinking. Where instead of just passing through experiences and time in a unilateral way, we cycle through experiences over and over again, like a spiral, each time more deeply understanding parts of who we are, where we are, and where we're from. 
• Now that we'd progressed through so many of the chakras, I called out how they could be called in to represent our feminine (F) and masculine (M) energies, yet another way of deconstructing ourselves.

4. Expanding Definition of Self: And then, we brought up the koshas again, this time using them as a way of expanding how we see ourselves, how we see others, and what we connect to.

• I've been listening to the Telepathy Tapes podcast lately, so I wanted to incorporate how quantum physics unites with the work we'd covered so they could understand the greater grid we're in.
• Whether it's called Energy, the Universe, Source, Consciousness, Field, the Big Bang, or God, it's all related to a higher power. And when you believe that you and your fellow humans are part of it, it helps you integrate your why of healing and forgiveness.

The Embodiment: Broadening Our Hearts

• Liberation Lesson #1: Courage is heart-first, not perfection-first.

We liberate others not by proving our mastery, but by modeling our willingness to try. The heart chakra invites us to lead with sincerity, not polish.

• Liberation Lesson #2: Everything we do echoes in the field.
  Our choices ripple through the unseen web of time and space. When we move with integrity, we not only heal our lineage — we upgrade the frequency of the whole.

• Liberation Lesson #3: Vulnerability is a creative superpower.
  True art is not about aesthetics — it’s about resonance. When we create from the open heart, we offer medicine to others in ways the mind alone never could.

• Liberation Lesson #4: Devotion is discipline with a soul.
  The heart chakra teaches us that consistency doesn’t need to be cold — it can be devotional. Repetition in service of love is what makes a practice sacred.
• Liberation Lesson #5: Multidimensional awareness creates deeper compassion.

  When we understand ourselves as layered beings — physical, energetic, emotional, intuitive, and infinite — we stop reducing others to their behavior. We see the soul behind the storm.

The closing homework for these classes was meant to learn to express what they loved, including what they loved about the class. I've been receiving lots of positive feedback about how they were feeling and shifting throughout the course, and because it is part of my mission to extend these kinds of conversations beyond the classroom, I invited them to write letters to our creative director describing how the class had moved them. As another way of getting them to understand themselves and their past better, I also left them with the following musings:

• Divide your life into 7-year increments and identify both the tragedies and moments of pride that you've experienced in your life. The purpose of this exercise is to help them become familiar with and own their stories thoroughly, just as I illustrated owning my own story. 
  • Takeaway: Your tragedies are your portals of light, should you choose to heal.
• Go back 70 years in your ancestral history and divide by 10 years. What's happened in that time? Use the visuals from this writing to expand your ideas of the tragedies and generational trauma that have existed in your family and the human experience. 
  • Takeaway: Your ancestral experiences bring gifts in addition to tragedies. Attuning to them both allows for greater material for expression in our creativity. 

In the next class, we go all in on our expression, our voice.