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*hello, welcome to week 1!
this week’s materials holds the foundational practices + guiding questions for the entire journey. it’s like the ace card in the tarot — the beginning seed, and the entire arc. when in doubt, come back to this. trust that your energy will guide the way.
I’ve created 3 artifact/practices — W1 metabolizing prompts , 2 visualizations in meeting your creative energy , and a sensing map to explore. always adapt these prompts for your own practice! make it yours.
I also made week 1 practice zine (excerpt)!*
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Guiding Question:
if you truly believed your creative energy was your greatest resource for holding you materially — how would you inhabit your life and business differently?
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Core Skill — discerning when an impulse comes from “should” vs. when it comes from your creative aliveness.
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🗺️ | MAP
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🌱 | PRACTICES & ARTIFACTS
week 1 practice zine (excerpt)
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✨ | MORE
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🔊 listen to this section (4 min)
Hi friends, welcome to week one of Digital Abundance.
We'll dive in with part one, inquiry. The guiding question is: ****if your creative energy is your greatest resource — not just for making meaning or bringing more pleasure into your world, but for holding you materially — how would you inhabit your life and business? How would you move through life and through the world differently?
I'm not asking you to answer this question today. I'm asking you to begin holding it like a stone in your pocket. See what emerges from this holding.
To begin this inquiry, I want to ground us in the fact that we've lived in a world that has consistently disempowered and compartmentalized our creative energy. People are thrown into this impossible bind — creativity is either compartmentalized and pushed to the margins as a hobby or luxury, or it's commoditized under the paradigm of “monetize your passions.”
The premise of this inquiry is — can your creative energy be spacious enough, expansive enough, to hold play, pleasure, poetry, meaning and beauty and safety, trust, responsibility and power — the things that we need to live in this material world. Can it be both/and? Can it be everything — both child and adult, wild and responsible, fluid and changing and consistent?
This is radical work and I don't take this lightly. It's counter to everything that we've inhaled and digested over most of our childhood and adult lives. But the truth is that who we are is not something that we can cleanly compartmentalize — no matter how much we try.
And perhaps, at first it'll feel unsafe, wrong, uncomfortable, especially if you've put different selves in different corners for any period of your life. At first, holding them both — the self that shows up to client meetings and the self that is an artist, the self that's a teacher and the self that creates, the self that shows up in the workplace and the self that wants to dream — if you've compartmentalized those selves for any period of time, holding them both will feel hard, at first.
We create webs on the internet and we are webs. We are a web of nodes in conversation with each other. We have different parts of ourselves, different ways of being, different facets. Our business, whatever businesses we create, is simply creating a living resource that allows the integrated creative essence of who we are to be in flow with the world. And it's not about rejecting the more linear, success-driven, culturally approved version of ourselves. It gets integrated into the web, into the whole.
Inhabiting your creative power through intuition, through nonlinear processes, through play is — if anything — more important now than ever. Because we can no longer compete on matters of productivity and output and linear thinking in this era of artificial intelligence.
What's cherished and unique to being human is the embodied, sensory life, the nonlinear, intuitive, spiritual intelligence. AI does not have a life, it does not have our creative bodies.
If anything, Digital Abundance is a course about inhabiting the creative body and trusting it to have the power and channels to carry us in the direction of our visions and dreams, and towards the life that we want to build.
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practice: explore this question in the W1 metabolizing prompts
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🔊 listen to this section (5 min)
When it comes to integrating art, creative energy and business, let me tell you two stories.
In 2021, I created my class, House on the Webs, and people loved it. There was a voice in my head that said, this is your golden ticket out of tiring, depleting client work. So I would keep pressuring myself to teach as many live sessions of this class as I could. I would corner myself to do it. Then, I just kept putting it off. I never wanted to do it. I cornered myself to make landing pages and marketing around it. It felt so forced, nothing came out.
This class just took up a lot of background weight in my head where I felt guilty every time I thought about it. Not because the course wasn't truly aligned (eventually I did go back and create and release it again) — but because in that season, the energy was wrong. It came from should energy. I was… graspy. There was a conditionality to it, like: if I put my energy into this thing, then I will have safety. The underlying premise was a story of insecurity, scarcity, and fear — that I found my golden goose and I should squeeze it for what it was worth. And so my energy blocked me. It created static frequency. Eventually I just dropped all my plans for this class and didn't touch it for two or three years.
The second story is in summer of 2023, I wrote Way of the Artist Entrepreneur, which felt like a total brain explosion, but I also felt pretty alone in this life-changing discovery. I had been curious about internal family systems as a therapeutic model around engaging with different parts of ourselves. What I did instead of talking about this discovery was holding this question inside of me.
If creative energy is my greatest resource for wealth, then it means I must give the artist version of me a seat at the table for making decisions about my business. Like opening the doors to my boardroom inside myself and letting her sit down and have a voice. Or letting her get into the driver's seat and trusting her to take me to where I wanted to go.
Up until this point, the part of me that had been driving the metaphorical car was the version of me that was working with clients, that bent myself over backwards to satisfy them, because I was just grateful to be able to work for myself. When I thought about my artist self, I related to her as this moody, overwhelming creature with big feelings, very melancholic, and just had way too much emotionality to be trustworthy in paid work situations.
But after articulating this paradigm of integration, I did a visualization in which I imagined a car and I invited my artist self to get in and take the driver's seat.
And you know what? She was not what I expected at all. She wasn't this delicate artist child throwing temper tantrums and crying all the time. She was a full grown woman — older than me. She was this modern sorceress, seemingly ageless, kind of reminded me of the character of Trinity from The Matrix. She was powerful, and badass and yet calm, wise, and serene at the same time. She got into the car and I, my consciousness, was in the backseat with the responsible, business-y, client-facing version of me. And we complained, we protested a little, and she turned around and told us very calmly to shut up. And she said, I will take us to where we need to go. Trust me.
I realized then that she was not the uncontrollable artist child version of me that I thought I needed to protect. She was the future, older, wiser version of me that was so integrated, so at peace with herself and fully conscious of her creative power that she had nothing to prove. And in that moment, I realized that I could be safe with her. She has wisdom that I, in my overthinking mind, didn't. She doesn't need to force anything — and I trusted her to know the way.
And yet, even with this discovery, the old version of me, of course, did not disappear overnight. It was a gradual process. So let's talk about how to work with this transformation through one of my favorite teachers, which is resistance.
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practice: work with two visualizations for meeting your artist self / creative energy in meeting your creative energy
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🔊 listen to this section (7 min)
When you are exploring this idea — what it might feel like for your creative energy to be your greatest resource — how that would shift everything — the old operating system, the old versions of you, will claw at you because it doesn't want to be retired. It doesn't want to die. It's served you its entire life.
I want to share three forms of resistance so that you can recognize the difference between all of them.
The first is what I'm calling surface tension — not wanting to start a task or a project or something new because there's a fear of difficulty, of overwhelm. But the thing about surface tension is that it dissolves when you begin. The hardest part is just starting. To see if you're dealing with surface tension, put a timer for five minutes or seven minutes and see how you feel after that first micro window of time.
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