The 7 Chakras of Creativity

In this episode, I ask: What is creativity? Like, what is it, really?

It's a question I asked in a recent workshop called Tarot as an Ally for Creativity (Under Capitalism), and many folks in the room offered interesting answers. 

I pulled them together, separated them into categories, and present them to you here — spontaneously applying them to the chakra system... Like, if Creativity had seven chakras, here's what they would be. 

(It was an impromptu creative move!)

I hope this exploration helps you see something new in your relationship with creativity this week!

And if you're curious about one-on-one creative mentorship with me, hop on the Creative Conjuring waitlist!

And check out Marina and the Diamonds singing You Are Not a Robot (mentioned in the episode).

This podcast is a production of Typewriter Tarot. Learn more & join us:

• Join the newsletter and receive the first 3 journaling prompts from Tarot for Creative Spirits (the workbook).
• Check out upcoming events & workshops.
• Book a Tarot reading.
• Shop our bookshop.

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

Welcome And The Big Question

SPEAKER_00 0:16

Hello, creative spirits. Welcome to another episode of your creative and magical life, which is hopefully your real life, but is also this podcast. I'm your host, Cecily Saylor. I'm a tarot reader, a writer, a mentor and guide for creative spirits. And today I want to talk to you about what creativity is, which seems maybe on its face kind of basic. Like, do we really need to talk about this? I think we all get it. I think we know what creativity is. And yeah, if you bring creativity up in any conversation, everybody pretty much knows what you're talking about. That's true. That's valid. That's good. That's good. Um, but creativity is kind of a mysterious thing, and I want to make sure we really think about it. You know, we talk about like how to do it better or do it more or to feel better when we do it. But when's the last time we stopped to ask? Like, what is it? What is it? Where does it come from? Why is it here? Did we just like collectively hallucinate it, or is it a real thing? Because it's not something you can touch, it's not something, it's not a discrete object, it's not just one color, it's not a place, it's not a person, it's this invisible thing that we experience. But yeah, what is it? Let's discuss.

Creative Conjuring Mentorship Announcement

SPEAKER_00 2:09

Um, first I want to give you a couple little updates. Starting on Tuesday, I'm speaking this into the microphone on Sunday, July 19th, and I hope to have this on the podcast spaces by this evening. Um on Tuesday, so in two days, I am launching my four-month one-on-one container called Creative Conjuring because together we are conjuring your creative project into being. It's a four-month, highly supportive, highly attuned mentorship, coaching, guidance to help you move your current creative project forward in a big way. Depends on where you are in your project, what we can do in four months. So I can't promise you like your project will be done and out in the world and winning awards by the time our work is finished together. But I can promise you that most likely, if you're showing up and like, you know, working with me and working with your art, that your project will be in a very different place than it is right now, four months from now, or four months after we start working together, and it will be in a place that you are very happy about, and it will get to that place without burning you out, without causing you massive frustration, without you doubting yourself every other step of the way, without you fighting yourself and wondering why you're doing this or if you're doing it right. We're going to take your art very seriously. We are going to treat your art like it has a spirit because it does, that wants to come into the world, and we are going to honor that. And we are going to honor you as the creator and the steward of this creation. And I'm going to help you both step forward and come more into being. You will become more of your creative self fully, and your art will become more of itself as well. So I'm opening that on Tuesday with an application, and there's going to be, I've I've been working on a launch. I used to hate that word launch. I'm launching this. Like, I'm like, I'm not a launch girly. Um, I don't know what else to call it. I haven't thought of a good word yet. And like, do I have to hate the word launching? Do I have like why? Just because Elon Musk launches rockets doesn't mean that when I launch a beautiful one-on-one offer, that it's gross. So we're changing our thinking. And I have also learned that you can't just like put a couple emails out there and everyone's gonna like be like, yeah, sign me up. Um, and there's a lot to share about this offer. So I've been working on, I have been creating a series of messages and communications that will start going out over email starting on Tuesday, inviting folks in. So if you catch this in the early days, you can hop on that waiting list. The people on the waiting list are gonna get a bonus if we work together. There's a little menu of bonuses to choose from, and you'll have first dibs to sign up. And then if you're just on my if you're on my email list but not the wait list, you're gonna hear about it as well. The launch will last about a week, so that's happening. I've been working really hard, going from like very resistant to selling my one-on-one services and feeling like it's not gonna work, nobody wants it, no one wants to spend this amount of money right now, to you know what, there are tons of creative people who have projects that need to be born, who are having a harder time than they need to, and they would love my support and help, which is not just practical. I do have three planets in Capricorn, I am a Taurus rising, my Saturn is in Virgo, I am practical AF, but also with the magic and the mysticism and thinking about your astrology and your nature and the conditions of your life and what you're able to do. And it's not just about making like the best product that everyone's gonna love or that the market's gonna love. It's about making the product, the creative creation that you are called to make in the way that you feel called to make it and share it. And it's not just about making this art, like it is about that. I want you to move your project forward. I don't want you spinning your wheels anymore. I don't want you fighting with yourself when you don't need to be. Like, let's move forward. We have lives to live. Like, we're gonna die someday. Let's make our art. Don't don't just like waste it and fritter it away because of Instagram or because there's a new season of whatever show that came out. Um, there's that, but there's also, I am going to change the way that you relate to your creativity. You will change it and I will help you. And that change will be lasting. You will always get to keep that. You will not see creativity the same way. You may struggle with some of the same things again in the future that you struggle with now, but you will have a different awareness. Your body will have a different experience with creativity than it has in a long time. And you're gonna be able to tab back into that when you are struggling in the future. So I went from I don't want to sell it, nobody's gonna want it, no one can pay for it, everyone's got money, troubles, to people need to make their art. That's why I'm here to help people do that. And I'm going to serve people powerfully. I do serve people powerfully. And so I've been through a creative process myself, like writing different messages, really connecting with this offer, designing graphics, writing, writing, writing. I made a candle last night that I'm gonna be lighting on Tuesday when the launch begins to call in the right folks. So that's something I've been

Closing Substack And Building Capacity

SPEAKER_00 9:02

working on. I also recently, like just today, announced I'm closing my Substack. My Substacks going on hiatus and winding down because I realized I just don't have the capacity, like I'm really interested in building and nurturing some of the things I've already created and making them stronger and making them talk to each other more and having more of an ecosystem that's feeding itself in the business and not just like platform maxing. So that was big. I thought it would be, you know, it's kind of been in the back of my mind for a while, and then this cancer new moon was interacting with my Capricorn moon across the zodiac wheel and just helped me realize I can't like I can't. Also, my body is hurting more. I am getting older, you guys. If you are young, oh enjoy, enjoy, enjoy, and make your art. Um, so that's some of the things going on to tell you about. And hopefully, not doing my Substack means these episodes become more regular for you. And hopefully those people from Substack are also listening here. So it's all still, you know, one happy family.

Tarot Creativity Under Capitalism

SPEAKER_00 10:28

Okay, let's talk about what creativity is and why thinking about this is valuable. So this came from a webinar, a presentation that I did for the Summer Solstice Tarot Summit, hosted by the wonderful Shannon Knight, who whose podcast you may also know and love, the Tarot Diagnosis. And I was presenting on Tarot as a creative ally under capitalism. So y'all know I think about capitalism all day, every day. And I'm thinking about how capitalism both allows us certain freedoms and also how it corrupts our creativity, and in particular, how it corrupts our creativity without us always noticing it. So, you know, like in creative conjuring in my one-on-one container, where it's gonna come up how capitalism has infiltrated your psyche, and we're gonna unwind that. But we're doing that usually wherever I go. I can't help myself. Um, but this presentation was tending to let's notice some of the things that capitalism does to our creativity, which again, not all bad, but some of it's really harmful. And how tarot can help us reframe our relationship to creativity and get us moving with creativity in a different way. So, one of the first questions I asked that beautiful room of people, some of you listening now may have been there. Thank you for coming, if that was you. And one of the first questions I asked everyone in the room was, What is creativity? And even the hostess, the brilliant hostess of the tarot summit, she was the first to chime in in the chat and said, OMG, why does it feel hard for me to define? And yeah, because it is invisible, it is sort of intangible. I think of it a lot like just energy. I've probably said this before on the podcast. I definitely said it in the presentation, that energy is everywhere, but no one has really been able to define what energy is. Scientists can't tell you. There's not, you know, yes, there's a diff definition in the dictionary, but no one really knows like what it is or where it comes from. We only know its manifestations. So we can harness it as wind power, we can harness it as electricity, we can harness it in the movement of water. Plants generate it through their photosynthesis system. We have an energy field around our bodies, but like where does it all come from? What is it? Question mark, question mark, question mark. And creativity is kind of the same thing. I think it is an energy. I compare it to the planet Mercury, or I invoke the planet Mercury, the god Mercury, Hermes, who is a psychopom who flits around the universe, delivering messages, shape-shifting, being multiple ways, being multidimensional. And I think creativity functions a lot like that. It's this energy, it's an energetic type of thing that's coursing through the universe that we can harness. So I'm giving away my own definition here at the beginning, something you have probably heard me say here on this podcast if you've been listening. But let's talk now about seven different aspects of creativity.

The Seven Chakras Framework

SPEAKER_00 14:32

I almost like this came from looking at the chat and what people responded, and then like breaking that into different categories. And it looked to me to turn into seven different categories, which I'm now kind of thinking of as like the seven chakras of creativity. I haven't put them in like a chakra type order, but maybe I can do that. Okay, I'm gonna kind of wing it. I'm gonna kind of wing it. Okay, yeah, let's try this. So, chakra number one.

Creativity As Nourishment

SPEAKER_00 15:08

Let me put a number in my notes. Okay, chakra number one is nourishment. Creativity is a form of nourishment. Someone in the chat at this presentation said creativity is oxygen to me. I can't live if I can't be creative. So that tells us creativity is an inherent human impulse. Even people who seem to have zero interest in creativity, who do not seem to be interested in art, have a creative capacity, and have creative energy coursing through them. Maybe they use creative energy to make jokes. Maybe they use creative energy to fix stuff. Maybe they use creative energy to engineer things. Maybe they use creativity to build uh pyramids of beer cans. You know, like not necessarily high forms of art, we could say, but creativity is available to everyone and every human being within the like relative scope of normative function, broadly speaking, has creative capacity and has a creative impulse. Some people use that creative impulse in very destructive ways, in very harmful ways, in violent ways. You can be violent in very creative ways. If you listen to true crime podcasts, you know that. So creativity is a neutral energy, which we can channel to make you know amazing, beautiful, elevated, enlightened kind of things, or it can be used to opposite ends. The people in our government right now who are sort of blunt-headed, like very unimaginative, it seems, very closed-minded, actually, would be more appropriate, um, very self-oriented people, supremacist type of people, egotistical people, insecure people, they still have a creative capacity. Project 2025 is a document that used some creativity to really assess what could be done to dismantle the government that we know of and institute a different form of leadership and rule, fascism and autocracy, even though they're not going to say that. So creativity is neutral, but creativity is a form of nourishment, it is an essential function of being human. And when we don't use it, something within the soul, within the human system is going to wither. So we can think about that like this the root chakra, like that origin chakra that keeps us rooted, that keeps us nourished, connected to food, connected to home. This is that chakra for creativity, creativity as nourishment. Someone else in the chat said creativity is in the human bone, it's in our DNA. And obviously, like we can't prove it's in the DNA with like a particular DNA sequence, maybe someday. But what this person is getting at is like, yeah, it's part of our nature. I don't know where it would go in the hierarchy of like Maslov's, Maslov's hierarchy of needs. Um obviously, you know, food's gonna come first, air, breathing, pretty important. Um, but creativity, you know, it goes in that field with things like belonging and expression. So the creative act, nourishment, chakra number one. Let's see. Let's move up to yeah, let's go to this one. Another feature, another aspect of creativity.

Play Curiosity And Vitality

SPEAKER_00 19:45

I'm gonna use three words to describe this, but I guess I guess one word would be like passion, vitality, aliveness. We'll think of this as the sacral chakra, the chakra that's associated with sex and procreation and passion. And that's another feature of creativity. When we are creating, we are exercising some amount of curiosity and we are engaging in a form of play. When we are creating, we may, we certainly, you know, we often have a vision of what we're trying to create. Sometimes, and I encourage you to create in this way more often, if you're not doing this yet, is to create in a very open-ended way where you have some materials, you have space to work with, and then you just follow what you think feels right next. You're not trying to make a specific looking thing or sounding thing, you're just working with the materials, exploring, experimenting, step-by-step curiosity exploration. So this creates a sense of play, something that as adults we do not get enough access to. Our forms of play are very limited. Play is sold to us as fun, which is sold to us as watching sports, going to the bar, partying, maybe travel. You know, there are people out there who are like playing DD games and who are doing like actual fun, more playful things, but that's not always the depiction that we're giving, that we're given. When we are creating, we get to be in a playful space, and thinking back to that sacral chakra, we get this sense of aliveness, this vitality when we're creating. So, you know, someone in the chat said creativity is getting curious. Someone said it is play. Someone said is it is combining familiar things in unfamiliar and new ways. That's what play is. You know, when we're playing, we're not going like when children are playing, they're not inventing something they've never seen or heard of before. They're usually mashing up different things that they have been exposed to. Sometimes there are new elements and there's total whimsy and silliness, but often it's like a recombining kind of thing where we take the normative order, we mix it up, we play around, we see what happens. I just got the image in my mind of a mud pie, you know, where you just have like, here's some rocks, here's some seeds, here's some grass, here's here's the mud. And kids are just like, well, this grass represents the hair of a witch. And these rocks are the teeth of a dragon or whatever. So imagination, playfulness, recombining, all of that comes together in the creative process to give us this feeling of moving through the unknown in a way that feels safe and good and invigorating. So that's number two. We could call that passion, but it's kind of got like curiosity, play, aliveness. Okay, next up, we're gonna talk about manifestation.

Manifestation And The Magician

SPEAKER_00 23:47

Some of the things people said about creativity here were creativity is bringing things into being in whatever shape or form. Someone else said creativity is the capacity to create new things in a variety of contexts. Someone else said the physical manifestation of unrestrained emotions. And someone else said making something that wasn't there before. And I want to bring it back to Mercury here because this all reminds me of the magician in the tarot. The magician is the card that represents Mercury in the astrological framework. So creativity is taking that energy of creativity, or the creative process is taking that energy of creativity, channeling it through the body, and using our physical form, our mouths, our minds, our hands, our feet, our full bodies sometimes to alchemize that creative energy, turn it into something that other people can experience. Like it lives outside of us in some way. I mean, we can have a creative act that's completely internal, but creativity wants to move out. It wants to keep traveling. Like think of Mercury. It's not trying to sit in one place and stop, it's on a global adventure, a cosmic universal adventure. It's not trying to, yeah, like settle down forever, right? Um, and so even if we're not choosing to share our creations with a big audience, there's still this act that produces something external to us, even if that thing is fleeting, like you make up a song and you sing it out loud. Maybe there's no one else in the room. Sometimes, uh speaking up for myself, sometimes I'm singing a song for my dogs. So they are my audience. I made up the song, it was playful, but it wasn't there before. It's obviously not gonna stick around. I'm not gonna write down the lyrics, I'm not gonna record it. I have very little musical talent. So it's not my main art form, but it was still a creative act for me to channel some creative energy, get a little playful, and use it to bring it out, to manifest something that wasn't there before. It's here's this song My Dogs Have Never Heard Me Sing. Sometimes there's someone in the house who can hear it. But so even if we're not sharing it far and wide, there is the quality of manifestation. And the magician in the tarot, of course, is the manifester, someone who is channeling that energy, using alchemy, transforming through the body, bringing in different elements. These can be our artistic tools, the language that we speak and know to create something that simply was not there before. This we can kind of liken to the solar plexus chakra above the belly button, below the diaphragm, that yellow-colored chakra that represents our willpower, our drive, our forward movement, our need to go for things, to not just sit stagnantly in our lives and be passive and just wait for things to happen to us. Our solar plexus is going to propel and compel us forward to pursue things that we desire. Let's see, then I think let's try this. Number

Meaning Making Through Art

SPEAKER_00 28:07

four, we're getting to the heart chakra. And this aspect of creativity, I think of I'm connecting with from my my list I put together. I'm connecting with meaning making. For this one, that comment was seeing connections others might miss to turn into something meaningful, and this is where we come to another like basic human need, which is to make meaning. We are not just neutral, mindless robots who go around performing functions and following protocols and doing the instructions, rinse and repeat. Sometimes it feels like that, I know, but we are beings who experience the great universal consciousness in a way that seeks meaning of some kind, and people can make meaning from all kinds of things, they can take meaning from superficial or nasty, gnarly stuff that you or I would never find meaning in. Again, reference the leaders in the American government who it seems making meaning for them is about personal profit, accruing power, exerting domination, hoarding, destroying what existed before, oppressing people like they find this meaningful in some grotesque way. I cannot explain it. It would not give me any sense of meaning. For many of the rest of us, meaning making is a much richer process, and you know, we are obviously living lives in a world that is in many ways very navigable. Uh, we can find our way around the cities that we live in, we can travel to other parts of the globe, but we also have these experiences as living conscious creatures that are very difficult to explain. Why did this happen to me? Why is my life like this? Why am I like this? Why are they like that? Why, why, why, why? And then also, of course, mortality, the awareness that we are going to not exist in this form someday. And in the face of that, it's like, well, then what are we doing here if we're just gonna not be here eventually? Like, why are we here so we can just disappear? And so that's where this inherent need to find meaning comes in. We don't want to just live a life that is like a non-event that has no significance, that has no meaning, that has no purpose. And you know, there's no, you don't get a handbook when you're born that's like, here's what the meaning of life is, here's what your purpose is. This living life is the process of understanding what the meaning of life is for us individually. That's our great existential journey, and creativity can play a powerful role in that process. So much of the meaning that cultures have made over thousands, tens of thousands of years come through storytelling and through art on cave walls, where the rhythms of life, the process of life, the feelings of life, the struggles of life, the patterns that people suffer through over and over again, and that people triumph through over and over again, these get encoded in myths and stories and visual art that help us connect to that sense of meaning. And we can place that in the heart chakra where there is this desire for connection, for a sense of love and benevolence, for um something with emotional substance. And meaning making is a big part of that. When you have a stronger, increasing sense of what life means for you, then you can guide your life and make decisions in your life with a lot more clarity. You can create your life more powerfully because you have a sense of meaning, which gives you a sense of direction. And creativity is a space where we can work that out. If you've been creating over time, actually, someone just followed me on Instagram today, and I was looking at their profile, and it was a lot of images of like their journal, their calendar. They have a lot of like collage things put in there and like bright colors and lettering. And I was just thinking, like, how cool for this person to be able to go back sometime in the future to go back to these journals or calendars that they've kept over decades, over years, to see what a previous version of themselves was thinking about and struggling with and accomplishing and experiencing, the places they went, the sensations they felt, the emotions that came through them when they were in different uh phases of life, the struggles they went through, the eras and the chapters in their lives, and how they guided themselves through all of these things. And to have that record in this creative context, that you know, like a diary is great, a journal is awesome, but to also have these images and colors that were selected that create like a vibration that create a mood that convey archetypal and symbolic significance across time, it's like whoever this person is, they get to have this record of themselves creating meaning as life is unfolding and having the ability, you know. Like let's say they're 44 right now. I just don't know. And they could go back and look at a journal from when they're 31, and they can see something that that version of them, that 31-year-old version of them, was struggling with, that they were navigating a time back then that felt really difficult or challenging, but that they got through and then they sort of moved past and they're not thinking about it anymore. They haven't thought about it in a long time. And then here they are at 44, and they're coming back to this journal from when they were 31, and they're like, oh shit, that happened. That was intense. I was really scared when that happened. I was really hurt, I was really whatever. And then they have this journal with these different pictures in it, and there's something in one of these images. There's a phrase, there's a quote that the 31-year-old version of them wrote down that hits so good at the age of 44 that still has relevance because life is a spiral and we're circling around, and sometimes it feels kind of like what we already been through, except a little bit different. And so that creative act keeping a record in this way, and it this doesn't have to be the only way this happens, right? But art is a conveyance of some kind of meaning of sensation of perception framing that helps us feel into and understand life. So that's our heart chakra. That's a big one. I only had one comment for this one, but I really feel it's so important. Okay. Next, we're gonna go we're gonna go to the throat chakra.

Authentic Expression And Release

SPEAKER_00 37:26

This is number, sorry, y'all, I'm doing kind of on the fly. All right, here we are, number five. Expression. Creativity offers us expression. Let me sip my tea one moment. So something people said in the chat around expression, that creativity is the expression of life force energy. So that's kind of cool. That kind of goes back to our um like our sacral chakra stuff, that play, that passion, that curiosity getting channeled with creativity into expression. Someone else said divine expression in the physical world. Totally agree. When we get up to number seven, we'll be back to divinity. A chance to be authentically you. And being authentically you means actually expressing the you that is authentically you. If we just sit in a closet being authentically ourselves, it's not really, there's not a lot there, right? Authenticity, which I know is like an overused word, and another word that's difficult to pin down. What is the authentic self, right? Um, we have many parts of self, but let's just say authenticity is like what's true for you in a moment, and what's true in connection to some, you know, core part of yourself, maybe related to that meaning making we were just talking about. Yeah. So a chance to be authentically you and creativity is a space, a private space, initially during the creative process, usually, where we get to explore what that is. What am I making? What am I trying to say? What kind of energy is coming through me? Why do I feel compelled to bring this out of me? What's the nature of this expression? Where is it coming from? So if we let whatever is inside just kind of flow out through the creative process without inhibiting, without censoring, without filtering, as we go, there is authenticity there. We can certainly shape a creation later. We can make it look different, feel different, we can give it a different kind of polish. But creativity is a space where a truer part of the self gets to emerge. And this is so important because we do not have enough spaces where being authentically yourself is actually welcome and rewarded. If you work a nine to five, or if you work contract with corporations, organizations, institutions, there is probably some amount of your true self that you get to bring to work, but there are also parts of your true self that you are not authentically expressing at work because you know that other people you work with, your bosses, your supervisors, they're not interested, they're not trying to hear it, they're not trying to see it in this professional space. Also in our families, there are parts of us that we don't show some members of our family, maybe every member of our family in some cases, because we know they don't get it, they don't understand it, they cannot witness us in that aspect of ourself. And so we have a little compartment where some parts of the self go so that other parts of the self can be present and engage in the exchange and interaction of being at work, being with our families. And so when we're creating, and it's just us and the page, us and the sketch pad, us and the musical instruments, us and the body dancing, it anything goes. You get to do it your way. You get to get in touch with that authentic self that is not welcome and invited every other place that you tend to go. This one thing I one reason I like my dogs, I like having dogs, is like you can, I can just be myself. Um they get it. Or they, I don't know if they get it, they don't care. They like it. The unconditional love that I feel every day with my animals. Um, and I enjoy their authentic expression of who they are as well. So the chance to be authentically you, someone else said expression and release, expression without boundaries, expression of inner truth, physical expression of the crazy stuff in my brain. Yeah, because we don't, we just like we're not invited to express all that stuff. And that stuff has just as much energy of anything else we're gonna say or put out there in the world to do our jobs or to communicate with our families, all that other stuff inside us is just important because it's inside us, it's that simple. Society will tell us like that part doesn't matter, that part is not welcome, that part is unsavory, that part is just we don't talk about that, we don't we don't bring that out, we keep that locked away. But that compartmentalization is a block to our authentic expression. So Having creativity as a safe, insulated space where authentic expression can happen is so good for our spirit and our spiritual development. Okay, let's keep going so this doesn't become so long. So

Creative Freedom As Resistance

SPEAKER_00 44:23

our sixth one, which we can connect to the third eye chakra, is freedom. And this one is the first one that people mentioned in the chat during the presentation. This one came pouring out, first of all, creativity is freedom. It's freedom to allow freedom to express our energy and emotions and not hold back. Creativity is not limiting yourself to one way of doing things. So on the one hand, we live in a time and a place. If you live in the United States, if you live in some part of Europe, if you live in a relatively democratic country where freedom is accessible. Freedom is something that we experience in a lot of ways. Many of us are free to travel, uh, you know, like a short distance, a medium distance, sometimes a long distance. We have some freedom in how we work, the jobs we choose to work, we have some freedom in terms of who we marry. Hopefully, we have a lot of freedom to do that or to not marry, which uh is the road I'm taking. And we have freedom to have children or not. Obviously, uh their reproductive freedom is being limited more and more. We're having a backlash around that. So it's not pure unadulterated freedom. But generally speaking, we have a lot of choice in our lives. We can access to some degree most of the things we need, though, usually we need to have money in order to do it. So is it fully free? No, it's not. Um, but we still have a lot of free, you know, I can have a business based on tarot and creativity. I can not have children, I can not be married, I can be a woman and own my own house, I can have my own credit cards. And of course, freedom is a spectrum that people experience depending on their privilege, their positionality in society, and the way that they're identified and categorized by a dominant group of people. So we have freedom and we don't. We also, as we've discussed, live in capitalism, which is a free market, allegedly, you know, which, like I said, allows me to have a business like this, but is also not fully free because every one of us needs money in order to have a comfortable life. We can't just do whatever we want all day long unless you're already like got the money. You've got piles and piles of money already. Um there are limitations. And I think, you know, limitations are just life. Like life has finite limitations. Those are things we're supposed to kind of struggle against to help us grow, to help us learn, to help us make choices, to define what's meaningful to us, to define our values. Um, but freedom's kind of this like yes and no in our lives. But in creativity, when you're in the creative act, you have complete freedom. You can make what you want to make, you can make it how you want to make it, you can say what you want to say, you can take 20 years to make something, or you can take 20 minutes, you can do it in a coffee shop. I mean, maybe you can't do it like anywhere, but you could do it a lot of places. The act of entering the creative process is opening the door to freedom. Someone in the chat also said creativity is an act of resistance and deep healing for me and for my ancestors. So many ancestors were denied self-expression, so my whole existence is rooted in sharing what they could not, even with disapproval, disapproval from some living relatives and the discouragement from even my peers who think it's irresponsible. So there's a beautiful note, a beautiful quote. Because freedom, sorry, because creativity is an act, a space, a practice, a process where we get almost complete freedom in the moment, it is revolutionary in that way because we do not have that same amount of freedom outside of the creative act, which is all the more fucking reason to create y'all. We think we're supposed to be creating to make the art and to make the art good, and that can be, you know, that's okay. But capitalism makes us think like that's the whole fucking point, and it's not. The point is also to give ourselves freedom and to give ourselves expression and to give ourselves nourishment and to give ourselves time for curiosity and play and passion, and to give ourselves the opportunity to bring things into the world of our choosing, not just what someone else told us to make if we want to get our paycheck. So the last quote I read you acknowledges that, and I think about this a lot myself, is that my grandmother and my grandmothers and my great-grandmothers had way less creative freedom than I do. Yeah, they probably expressed creativity by decorating their home and being resourceful with the materials that they had to recombine things, to recycle things, to turn old things into newer functioning things, to make resources go further for all the children that they were raising. Maybe they were quilting. Maybe they wrote in their journal. Maybe they sometimes wrote a little poem. I think my grandmother has a poem that my that her mother wrote. Her mother, who spent her whole life on a little farm in Mississippi, and she like that poem just lived in her journal until she died, and my grandmother had it. It didn't it didn't get to express itself and communicate its beauty in the people around her. So for me to try and make this work is a way of honoring them, of enacting one kind of freedom that I actually have the freedom to enact right now, but that they truly did not. Like I could reject this opportunity and I could be too scared by it. And sometimes I almost have done that. Um, where it's like, no, let me go get a nine to five, let me get some security. This is too scary, this is too unstable. But then I have to come back to like what I think is meaningful, which is freedom, which is authenticity, which is having a life that feels fulfilling to me. And that's not to say, like, if you're in a nine to five, that you're, you know, living a half-life, like I'm not saying that at all. Um, we all, you know, capitalism is not a joke, like we have to make the money. So in that context, in that capitalism that limits our choices in certain ways, we still have the freedom to create. And inside that creative process, we get to experience freedom that we do not experience everywhere else. And we deserve that feeling. We need that feeling. It is good for that second chakra of vitality. You know, we're not just robots. There's a song I love from like the early 2000s, I think it's like Marina and the Diamonds, something like that. She's like, you are not a robot. If I can link to it in the show notes, I'll put it there. But okay, that's our third eye chakra, where we know intuitively that we are free beings. All these things that limit our freedom, these are constructs, these are arbitrary. People start to think that, like, that's the way the natural order is, that some people get more freedom and other people don't. And that is how it plays out, but it's all a lie. And every one of us deserves to be free, and we know it. Deep down inside, we know it. And creativity is a place where we get to remember that and where we get to shore up that knowing. So we can take that sense of freedom that we feel when we're creating, and we can export it to other parts of our lives where we are helping to advocate for other people's freedom, for the freedom of animals and natural environments, for freedom in communities from all kinds of harm that they are facing more and more these days. All right, finally.

Creativity As Divine Connection

SPEAKER_00 55:31

Chakra number seven. Touch the top of your head, your crown chakra. This is the chakra that is connected to spirit, to the divine. And this is an important aspect of creativity. A couple people in the chat during the presentation said creativity is connection with something bigger and beyond us and bringing into our own spaceslash world. Okay, a little bit clunky. Connection with something bigger, bigger than and beyond us. But that visits us in our own space and our own world. And that is why we love the feeling of being in the flow with creativity, because we truly are, according to my theory, channeling creative energy through the body. That energy is divine, it is sacred. I know that, I believe that, because it is the same energy that created our planet and that created the cosmos. Which, if you've seen pictures from these telescopes, like it's just hard to be like, oh well, that's just like some random, just stuff turned out that way, just real random. It's kind of cool, but random. Or all the mountains, the valleys, the trees, the animals that live on earth, the incredible vistas on this planet. The fact that these living ecosystems nourish each other and themselves by design, it seems. They work so well. Here comes an ice cream truck. The spirit, the spirit is here, all that stuff that was that's part of the creation. We are part of the creation too. We are consciousness experiencing itself, interrogating itself. And when we are creating individually, making our own artistic expressions, we're channeling that sacred energy that also made everything, that made us, and it feels really good, it feels good. And I'm not saying like that's bad, it didn't go great for me. The drinking part, I've talked about that too, but um we I'm saying like we crave it, it feels good, we want it, and we get it when we're creating, when we're not fighting with our own brains or speaking to ourselves from the point of view of capitalism, as we're creating, we're not our brain isn't going like that's not good enough. This is not a productive use of your time, this is never gonna make you money. You should be doing something else. You're not that good at this. Why are you wasting time on it? When we're talking to ourselves like that while we're creating, no, we are not having a sacred, beautiful experience with creativity because we've got an overlord on the scene trying to like bully us out of the spiritually fulfilling act of creativity. When we can meet creativity as it is in its like spiritual and sacred nature, then we do get to feel that sense of flow, that sense of like I'm floating down a river, and every piece of it is pretty interesting, and I'm not sure exactly what's happening or where I'm going, but I'm just feeling guided. I don't have to think cognitively with my brain every second to make a gajillion decisions and make something perfect and amazing. I just get to follow this energy and see what it has to show me today, see what it wants to pull out of me today, see how it wants me to express today. And then the last quote, it is from the formless okay, wait, it's got a typo. It is from the formless center, they wrote enter. It is from the formless enter of God within us. I just did a copy paste job, y'all. I'm sorry. Um, it is from the formless, I'm gonna say center of God within us. And I agree with that, if I'm reading it right. I think what it's getting at, I agree with. There uh is some of God, some of the goddess within all of us. Like I said, we are the great consciousness experiencing itself, trying to sort out what it is, trying to have fun with itself, making some drama along the way, creating struggle so that that consciousness can be sharpened. And it lives within us. And creativity is that. Like, I think God and creativity could be the same thing, the same energy. I haven't spent enough time in metaphysical studies or deep meditation. I haven't gone to the proper oracle to verify this, but um, sometimes it really feels that way. And so this is the final aspect of creativity that I want to share with you that it has a spiritual element, it puts us in contact with spirit. And I think that's fucking amazing. You can go to church to get that, you can go to nature to get that, you can meditate and pull your cards and light a candle and pray to also feel that spirit. You can feel it every day when you're making coffee, when you're um playing with your animals, when you're cleaning the kitchen, you can access, you know, we all have access to that, but creativity is definitely an extra special place where it exists and where you where we can make connection.

Recap Listener Message And Offer

SPEAKER_00 1:02:28

So shall we review and then and then conclude? Number one, the root chakra, nourishment, creativity is nourishing. The creative impulse is a need, it is a human drive, and when we engage in it, we are nourishing ourselves and our lives. Number two, our sacral chakra. Did I say my root chakra? The first one was the root chakra. I could have said sacral, I don't know. The first one is the root chakra, that nourishment. The second one is our sacral chakra, that sexy, passionate, fire of life chakra, where creativity gives us curiosity, gives us play, gives us vitality, lets us move in nonlinear ways and experiment and explore. Number three is the solar plexus chakra, which is connected to manifestation, our ability to use our life force to bring something into the world that was not here before, to be the manifester, to be the magician. Number four, the heart chakra, making meaning, giving us a sense of purpose, giving us something to care about, giving us a reason for being here, and giving us a space, creativity does, to explore what is meaningful to us. It's not like we just wake up one morning and we're like, hmm, here's what this means. Now I know what's meaningful. We have to do things to arrive there. And again, we think sometimes we're supposed to like know where we're going when we're creating and just do all the things that move us toward that destination. When creativity is a commingling where we should be listening, taking action, and also moving with whatever vision is within us. So the creative process over time will give us more sense of meaning. Think back to that wonderful person who followed me on Instagram who is journaling and calendaring in such creative ways, who has a whole archive of their meaning-making process, even if they're not thinking of it exactly like that. Number five is expression, the throat chakra, finding ways creatively in our creativity, in our art making to pull out of us the stuff that is too often locked inside. This is scary, this is vulnerable, it is not always highly celebrated in our in our world, in our society, but it is another key human need to express, to be witnessed, to be known as we are, not just as we pretend to be. Number six, our third eye chakra is freedom. Knowing that we are free beings, despite the look of everything around us, despite what people tell us, we deserve to be free. We have free will. Creativity is a place where we get to practice that, and when we engage in that freedom, we can see more possibility, and that's something we need right now very desperately. And finally, your crown chakra creativity is a connection to spirit, to the divine. So, like, why wouldn't we want to do it, you guys? Okay, of course, this episode is longer than it needed to be or that I intended it to be. And I appreciate you listening. I welcome your thoughts. There is a little button in the show notes, a link you can click where you can send me a message. It looks like a text for you, and it comes to me in my email box. It's anonymous unless you put your name in there, which I would love to know your name and where you're from. But what do you think? What is creativity? What did I leave out? Um, what landed for you in this episode? I would love to hear from you. And if you're curious about my four-month one-on-one support container, creative conjuring, where we conjure your art together. Um, hop on my email list if you're not already and you'll hear about it. All

Astrology Note And Goodbye

SPEAKER_00 1:07:35

right, y'all. I hope you have a beautiful week. We have some big astrology going on right now. Four outer planets are at four degrees of their sign, forming this basket type configuration in the zodiac, and it's supposed to be a really big deal. So July 19th through 22nd, just like notice what's shifting, what feels different, what's showing up for you. Just keep an eye on it. All right, sending y'all lots of love, lots of creativity and magic, and I will talk to you later. Bye. Enjoy your creative and magical life.