Art, Spirituality, and Cosmic Ancestors: Exploring the Root Chakra and Creativity

Welcome to the second session writing of Creative Awakening: Integrating Art & Spirituality.

 If you know me, you know I'm the creator of Queen Mindset Leadership 👑, and everything that I speak, write, and coach on is through the lens of this integrated leadership philosophy.

Each class, then, is a beautiful opportunity to extend the application of this paradigm, helping to create more conscious and integrated artists in every single conversation.

For the rest of the series, you'll notice I use the chakras as a guide for what awakening (another word for liberation) looks like in each area of life, but I'm also using the wheel of life as a reminder that creative freedom applies to more than just art. It applies to the human expression itself.

With that said, let's jump into this session's setup.

Background

I don't do much planning for this series, because I take an intuitive approach when it comes to facilitating. While I have a few ideas of how to apply each chakra to the intentions and creative / spiritual challenges my students face, I work to create space for my students to co-teach with me.

P.S. That is what decolonized leadership looks like in action. It's heart and mind making space for others.

For this class, I had three ideas that I wanted us to discuss: Defining Ancestors Spirituality, and Art. 

Because we delved into the root chakra, I spent some time orienting the class to astrophysics and quantum physics and its applications to the constructs we'd be exploring. Spirituality and science have deep, interconnected roots, making beautiful topics to explore together.

Focus Point: The Ancestral Root Chakra

The Big Bang happened 13.8 billion years ago. Everything that Is — life, elements, the stars, all the planets, light itself, quanta — originated there. It is the point of Union of all matter and energy, and when we trace back our ancestors back enough, it transcends the human existence and connects back to time itself.

Time is its own interesting human experience. Although we often perceive the past, present, and future as separate elements, time is not a linear construct. I'm not going into the technical details of it in this blog (a write for another day), but what we did get into is the fact that everything is accessible only from the present.

Further, all of the Universe is constantly moving and changing, through the material that is timespace, and so when we look back at the past or envision a future, we are accessing different points of space too.

Understanding the vastness of the cosmos is a gargantuan task, and one of the purposes of religion was to help us understand an inherently unknowable world. We created rules to understand this odd existence on this unknown planet and to learn to coexist with all the beings we were learning existed on it.

At a high level, here are the elements of the Root Chakra we explored:

• Root Chakra (Mūlādhāra): Base Chakra 
• Focus: Security, Stability, Safety
• Color: Red
• Location: Base of the Spine (perineum)
• Areas of Life Explored: Financial, Physical 

The Discussion

How we define our ancestors matters. As you'll see below, this conversation began with standard definitions of ancestry, but as I pressed on, I guided the class on deepening the point of origin from us all. This was the space in which I started weaving the above on astro and quantum physics, because when we see why and how we are all connected, it allows us to take our unique expression and lens as sacred.

Defining Ancestors:

• Relatives that have passed
• Forgotten family that's come before
• Ancient sites
• Old wisdom 
• Necessary element of our existence
• Parents
• Younger selves
• Higher selves incarnate
• Earth
• Big Bang
• Source

With these definitions of mind of what Ancestor is, we then defined Spirituality. All the students in my class are interested in exploring different paradigms of spirituality that are more expansive, integrated, and aligned with their life experiences, and so defining their "New Age" definition of Spirituality allowed them to see how it connects to art. In particular, the last point about how Spirituality can disrupt the status quo tied in beautifully to the purpose of art and why it may thus be suppressed. 

Spirituality:

• "We are greater that we've been told"
• Big bang => no separation between us aka unity
• Energy
• Higher Self / Truth
• Anti-Patriarchal / Colonial
• Incorporates femininity which leads to alignment
• Encompasses chaos + structure and therefore balance
• Our expression
• Disrupts status quo

These expanded definitions of Ancestors and Spirituality naturally led to an expanded definition of art. If we come from infinity, and spirituality is infinity, then everything we create must be infinity too. The Self is important because it is that which allows us to be unique, but Unity is important because that is the default origin of us all.

Art:

• Infinite possibilities
• What the Self wishes to create
• Create from Self
• Allows others to witness us
• It is Everything
• Self-led
• "Create what's coming to me"
• Creative outlet

Artistic Growth Challenge

Our identities are an important component of how we experience our Earthly experience, and how we experience others. The more that we educate ourselves on our marginalization and privileges, as well as those of our ancestors and the general human experience, the more we're able to forgive Creation for creating an imperfect but still valuable existence.

Moreover, this knowledge of personal, systemic, and ancestral trauma allows us as Artists to be more conscious in the art and artists we consume and explore. Not having an identity or an experience then becomes an opportunity to learn more from people who do share that experience, so that we can then expand our understanding of those we coexist with.

The graphic below is from my Masterclass on The Audacity to Queen Leadership, and is a great guide on how to further explore that which impacts your and others' human experience. Take a look at these identities and experiences and write about it. Which of these are new to you? Which of these are known? How does knowing what's impacted your ancestors allow you to expand your lens of compassion?

What's Next?

I can't tell you how geeked I am that I have such creative freedom to teach this series.

The conversations kill in every single class, and we all have been leaving each engagement expanded and thoughtful — the literal intention behind this workshop series.

Peep the next blog on how we explored the sacral chakra — finding the purpose behind our emotions and our bodies in creating art and embodying spirituality.

Dra. García out!