What is an Activation Painting?

I believe art is a bridge to a deeper version of self. All art is a mirror of our soul; that's why what the creator experiences in making the piece will feel differently than how every viewer interprets it.

So when I started exploring creation, I had this weird sensation that everything I created wasn't mine. I had no connection to what I just spent 15+ hours making. It felt foreign to me, like I wasn't the one who actually made it and it had nothing to do with me, as an artist. I had heard artists have a hard time getting rid of their work because of the deep connection to the pieces, but I had the opposite experience. I wanted it out as soon as I finished. It didn't feel right keeping it.

Then a couple of years into making these pieces that felt so distant to me, someone reached out and wanted to buy one. They told me it felt like they had never been so seen; that everything they were experiencing in their current reality was reflected back to them within the painting. In that moment I realized that this painting was completely theirs and not mine.

It continued happening. Close friends would tell me that the landscape I made was a place very dear to them. It got to the point that I thought "well if I'm making all of these sacred places on accident, what would happen if I made it consciously?"

So I went into a meditation and then tried to paint a self-portrait with the landscape that I saw while in that state. Every time I would meditate I would go to this valley with tall grass, large beautiful clouds, and always a ladder in the center, leading up to them.

This was the first piece that I felt fully connected to my work. I realized it was Mine. It was such a clear vision of this "safe space," for me and I wanted to know if I could tap into those spaces for others.

Through this experimentation I developed a method for channeling these pieces for others, to reflect their current energy and "activate" this energy to deepen their healing, embodiment, or abundance depending on what their soul was desiring.

To be honest, I thought I was kind of insane when I started this. But, I kept having the same dream of creating these activations for others, and ever since starting this, the responses have been pretty insane.

One person I created a piece for and gave a reading to, I had told to look into herbalism, and they had JUST made the decision to get into that. Another I told to focus on pleasure and they were creating a course to help others find their pleasure and joy.

Okay so what actually is an activation painting?

When you book, I meditate and tap into your energy and spend the next 10-15 minutes just writing everything that comes up for me. These are usually pieces of the image like lotuses, or roses, or tall grass etc. And then with all of those pieces come messages about your energy. Lotuses for example might represent opening up to a new version of self, or mountains might show up to remind you to stand in trust with yourself or tap into the feeling of safety.

From these messages, I start painting and set an intention while I'm in the process; similar to creating a prayer.

Before we meet, I pull 3 cards to represent your current energy, the lesson you are learning, and what energy will come if you embody that lesson.

Each reading includes:

-an 8x 10 Giclee print of your digital activation painting

-a 30-45 minute call explaining the messages within your painting and an energy reading

-rituals and prompts to help fully embody the energy within the painting

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My goal is to connect you to parts of yourself that you might not be in full trust with. My paintings are representations of your beauty and the feelings you desire to experience. Through this work I hope to activate this trust in my clients and help them move into a new phase of their being.

Say No to Positive Thinking

In high school, I wrote a 40-page research paper about how positive thinking is bullshit. This paper centered around the book, Bright-Sided, written by Barbara Ehrenreich.

Ehrenreich began noticing this trend of overly-positive thinking when she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Ehrenreich saw a common trend of pushing a positive narrative and being referred to as a “fighter,” “survivor,” and someone whose “life will change after beating this.” She felt guilt for wanting to feel like shit and be angry, something that everyone seemed to be pushing down.

This led to a deep dive into researching the self-help industry and criticizing mainstream ideas, like The Secret, a book on the law of attraction. A key issue Ehrenreich took with the positive mindset movement was that we are pushing the narrative that if we are not happy then we are broken.

Now, I might just be a pessimist, but I have noticed that there is an influx of “manifestation coaches,” claiming that you can create your dream life just by positive thinking and scripting. I also just want to say that I do believe in manifestation; HOWEVER, I do not believe in spiritual bypassing and I believe that we do a huge disservice to the possibilities of re-mything our narrative by saying that the key is to see ourselves happy and we will attract.

The Evolution of the American Dream

Happiness is one of the main six basic emotions of human psychology, something that is fleeting. However, as a society, especially in America, we push this narrative that happiness can be a constant state to be achieved and this idea has been preyed upon by the self-help gurus and the wellness industry.

This is not something new and I don’t believe it only resides in the wellness industries. My theory is that it stems from the byproduct of marketing tactics over the years; most notably, the American Dream.

The American Dream was repurposed over the years, beginning as a representation of the nation’s dream of equality, justice and democracy. This idea eventually transitioned into the American Dream many of us know today. This dream became skewed into this desire for individual wealth and success.

Businesses used this phrase throughout the 1950s as a consumerist ideal to push products to those seeking out this individual wealth and success.

Though this is just a personal theory, I think that as we began to globalize, this phrase turned from the American Dream into the general, “happiness.” Where businesses were advertising products that pushed the American dream narrative, they soon started pushing products to help you create a better version of yourself and “achieve happiness.” If you buy this product or service, you will find love or success and ultimately happiness.

These marketing tactics inadvertently attributed to happiness becoming synonymous with success. Modern consumerism does not function if we all have high self-worth. In order to get you to buy into a brand, the business needs to make you feel like you are missing out if you do not do what they are saying. That you are not worthy until you have that product or achieve that societal milestone.

I don’t think this is fully the result of consumerism; I just believe we should look into trends that have impacted the narrative we are telling ourselves. Ultimately, I think this American Dream and goal of happiness has influenced us to avoid the more uncomfortable emotions.

Happiness or Bust

The more we grew the self-help industry, the more we gravitated towards the idea that happiness was a goal to be achieved and negative emotions were the enemy. With this shift in society, I believe most people began hiding away these emotions in order to feel like they had obtained the American Dream. We as human beings are always looking forward. If I become a lawyer, I will be happy. If I get to the house, I will be happy. If I get married, I will finally be happy.

This created dissonance with many, feeling that if they expressed these negative emotions, then they would not attract those things in life. This became even more prominent with the social media boom and with more and more “gurus” coming out and saying that we are capable of attracting things through positive thought.

We all identify what we believe to be that key point of “happiness,” yet no one really knows what true happiness is. If you look in the dictionary, the definition leaves you even more unsure, stating “happiness is the state of being happy,” and happily stated as “showing pleasure.” Not the most useful definition out there.

We seek out the easiest path. We are lazy creatures by design, so when someone comes to us, saying that we can have our dreams without going through those uncomfortable emotions, we desperately want to believe them. But, there is a reason that the majority of the basic emotions are “negative.” We would not be here today if we did not go through those negative emotions as a species in order to survive.

We hold onto fear and grief more easily than we do joy because we needed to in order to remember where and what we needed to avoid. We would remember certain areas that we knew a tiger was because we were attacked there, or we knew not to eat a certain leaf because we would remember a reaction. Bad emotions create a deeper knowing in ourselves and our environment. The only way to thrive is to fully lean into those emotions and to release them in a healthy and nurturing way.

The Way Out is Through

When we try to avoid uncomfortable emotions, we turn to vices that numb us. Whether we turn to alcohol, media, sex, drugs, we all have coping mechanisms in order to shut down certain emotions. We are taught to suppress and deflect.

This causes us to shut off our emotional channels, which causes stress on the body and discomfort in our energy. Through this avoidance, when emotions finally do come up, our body and energy go into a state of shock, causing us to turn to numb even more.

Disconnection from our emotions and our body also can affect our environment. Everything is the matter, right? So we are all vibrating and different frequencies, and when we shut down our emotional channel, we are either causing our frequency to lower or we are pushing those emotions through to someone whose channel is actually open (hello empaths). We have the power to affect those around us, so in an ideal world, we all would show up for ourselves through our emotions, learn from them, and then grow together. Instead, we have large groups of people blocking off those difficult feelings and causing those that are emotionally sensitive to feel the emotions tenfold.

So we know all this, but how the hell do we fix it?

Connecting to Your Emotions

If you have been numbing or avoiding emotions, then I have listed a few tips for connecting to your body and emotions. I am not a licensed therapist, these are just experiences from my own healing journey as someone that prided themselves on never crying in the past.

Journals Save Lives

Firstly, I just want to say how important it is to get a journal. I started journaling almost every day five years ago, and I credit writing as one of the main sources for my emotional development. When we journal, we free our minds from looping and allow ourselves to dump everything onto paper, decluttering the mind and offering new insight into our emotions.

Observational Indulgence

I have been through multiple rock bottoms in my life. I have experienced situations in my life where I felt I could not get out of, could not find motivation and felt completely lost. One of these rock bottoms involved a traumatic experience that was coupled with grief from my mother being diagnosed with two types of cancer. Instead of acknowledging my emotions and seeking help, I shut down and sought out coping mechanisms to numb myself.

I had adopted an OCD tendency of picking my skin in order to cope and “turn off” to my environment. When I did seek out help, my therapist offered me a technique to start identifying my blocks and what I was hiding from. I do not recommend this if your coping mechanism is harmful to you or others.

I call it observational indulgence. Instead of shaming myself for the ways I chose to cope, I would allow myself to indulge in the coping mechanism. I would allow myself to feel the desire and would just observe as it was happening. In my journal, I would date and time when I would pick my skin, write anything that occurred before that may have triggered that desire, any feeling that may have happened during, and how I felt after.

If you are pushing down emotions for so long, there is a chance that you have created numbing acts as well, which can be from anything. I encourage you to start observing your own behaviors and triggers to start opening up channels to emotions that may have been hidden from you.

Reidentifying Sensations

After logging my behaviors, I began journaling the basic emotions. I would write out ways in which each emotion presents in my body. This included any sensation that would come up for me, any trigger in which I found I experienced that emotion, and any memory that may be linked to that emotion.

Taking time to connect with my actions and sensations really began opening my emotional channel and allowed me a deeper insight into where I wanted to begin healing from and understanding.

Shadow Work Meditation

If you feel called to more spiritual practices, this meditation technique really helped me connect to my body.

I adapted this from a spirit hack from Shaman Durek.

Using this meditation music, I lay down somewhere that I can have complete calmness. I begin the music and take deep breaths (4 counts in, hold the breath for 4 seconds, 6 counts out) for 10 minutes to get into a relaxed state.

When I am ready, silently to myself, I ask “Spirit, show me where I am holding emotion.” This is based on the theory that our bodies hold onto emotions and many pains that we feel are trapped emotions and memories.

I will feel a sensation somewhere in my body and then say silently to myself, “thank you, I felt that. Spirit, show me why I am holding onto this emotion.” Then I let my mind wander as I keep a focus on my breath. The more I did this meditation, the more memories and emotions would come up. I would cry, sometimes I would feel the need to yell or hit something.

When I felt I was finished feeling the emotion fully, I would silently say, “I am ready to release this emotion.”

Once I came back up from the meditation, I would journal about any memory or emotion that I felt called to address.

Schedule in Sadness

When I was really sad or was holding a lot of grief, I would schedule in time to fully feel those emotions and wallow. I think we feel we constantly have to be busy, which makes it harder to fully acknowledge and experience our emotions.

I would give myself maybe one or two days to fully express my emotion, loud sobbing, and all. One of the mistakes we tend to make with emotions is when we start tearing up, we instantly try to hold it back, and then we never address it. Scheduling in sadness might feel strange at first, but an emotion cannot be released until we fully embrace it and let it move through us.

After I fully felt those emotions, I would write down what I was ready to release on tiny strips of paper and then burn them (safely).

Reinforce Yourself

Once we begin opening the flood gates of emotions, it can become easy to get trapped in wallowing. It’s important to step back into a high self-worth once we are ready to release the emotions we have been working through.

When I am ready to get out of those states and have gained the insights I have needed from those emotions, I begin writing out a chart.

On one side I write down things that light me up and on the other, I write down things that drain me.

For the next week, I focus on as many things as I can from the “light” side and try to remove as many things from the “drain.” This helps solidify the release and reminds me of the power I hold.

How I Use Human Design for Self Reflection

Human Design looks like an astrology chart on crack.

You can definitely dive into your chart yourself and figure out what everything means and take notes and do the damn thing. However, I do recommend getting a reading from someone’s energy you trust. Every reader has a unique flair with Human Design since it is such a vast pot of information.

When I look at someone else’s or my own chart, I look for points of self-reflection. How can this chart help me solidify who I am and the narratives that I hold regarding my identity?

The Energy Centers

The shapes on the body graph are the energy centers. Each energy center offers a different expression and when they are defined (colored in) that energy responds in a different way.

Here is a quick reference for the theme of each energy center:

• Head: the pressure center of inspiration

• Anja: the awareness center of conceptualization and analysis

• Throat: manifestation, communication and doing

• G: the center of identity, love, and direction

• Heart (small triangle): the motor center of ego, worth and willpower

• Solar Plexus (large triangle on right): the motor and awareness center of emotions

• Sacral (middle square): the motor center of life force and sexual energy

• Spleen (large triangle on left): the awareness center of the immune system and intuition

• Root (bottom square): the pressure and motor center of adrenaline and stress

The main thing to note about energy centers is that when they are defined, you receive a consistent energy source through that expression, which you radiate out to the world. When they are open, you absorb that energy expression from outside sources and amplify it.

Not-Self

Because you receive energy from your environment with open centers, that is typically where you will find themes for lessons in life. This is called your “Not-Self” theme, which can be expressed through any open centers on your chart, when you are not in alignment.

You can see this the easiest through the heart center. The majority of people will have an open heart center, so we don’t have consistent access to willpower (succumbing to cravings isn’t your fault, it’s human design’s). When we have that open center, our not-self theme might show up as a sensation of having to prove ourselves and our worth. This usually leads to frustration and dog-paddling energy.

With each open center, when we step into that not-self theme it can feel like pressure.

• Head: pressure to figure things out

• Anja: pressure to be certain

• Throat: pressure to be seen and heard

• G: pressure to find love or direction

• Heart (small triangle): pressure to prove your worth

• Solar Plexus (large triangle on right): pressure to avoid truth or emotion

• Sacral (middle square): pressure to work or avoid limitation

• Spleen (large triangle on left): pressure to hold onto something

• Root (bottom square): pressure to do

This is not to say having open centers is a bad thing or wrong. This is an invitation to see how the lessons in your life may have been expressed through those open centers. An open center has the potential to be our biggest strength.

Since we do not have consistent access to the energy in an open center, we have more possibility to master that energy. We get to experiment with how that energy is amplified through us and we can take that energy and show others the lessons we have learned.

I have an open G center and growing up, I constantly had this pressure to figure out my direction or to find love, to be “complete.” My energy expression went completely against the ideal in society of knowing “who we want to be when we grow up.” I wanted to be everything. I still do.

And after looking at those lessons, instead of shaming myself for all the pivoting I’ve done in this life, I get to show up fully embodying the values that I choose to hold. Through that, I get to empower others to shift their identities without fear of losing everything.

In fact, defined centers may hold most of the narratives we place upon ourselves while growing up. If someone has a defined G center, they may have been constantly told that they had to be an engineer. So they took that narrative and placed it in their center, being so sure that this is what they truly wanted. Only to find out after years of going down that path, that that was a projection placed on them and was not actually true to their identity. So what happens?

They feel stuck; like they can’t shift out of that energy because that is all they know. They held onto that energy for so long and have such consistent access to the identity energy that they don’t know how to release it.

Cue me, coming in hot like a fluid identity fairy, to show the defined G center babies how to release these narratives and move into a new, more aligned path.

Your open centers may be your biggest lessons, but they will also show you your greatest strengths.

Making it work for you

When you pull up your chart, take note of the defined vs open centers.

First, I like to look at all the open centers and ask myself what lessons are showing up from those pressures. If you have an open head center, where is your mind focused? Are you overthinking things or are you allowing inspiration to move through you? An open head center may feel pressure to make decisions through your mind, but it’s important to focus on your authority and strategy instead.

Do you feel frustration with that energy or a sense of peace? When you look and the themes of each center, you can start to identify your own patterns and how they are showing up for you.

Next, I look at all my defined centers, starting with my strengths in each. How do they show up for me? Do people gravitate towards me for this energy? Defined centers are where we “sell” from. It’s energy that naturally radiates from us and I would say a lot of people with that center open, will gravitate towards you if that center is defined.

After that, it’s time to focus on narratives. For each strength you write in that defined center, ask yourself, “Is this a narrative I naturally embodied or is this a narrative that was projected onto me from someone or something outside of me?”

You might find that some narratives feel frustrating and confining because they aren’t actually yours. You might be holding onto a fear narrative in your Spleen that your mom projected onto you when you were 10 because she was afraid of you climbing trees so now you don’t really trust your ability to climb. Speaking from experience.

Going deeper

There is so much to unpack with Human Design that it can be a lifelong tool for self-reflection and development.

If you’re not sure where to start with self-reflection, I offer Human Design readings that come with 7 days of personalized journal prompts to start you on your embodiment journey. Book Here

If you have any questions about utilizing Human Design, be sure to comment below!

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