19. Unlock Your Potential: Activating Your Root Chakra and Subconscious Mind To Master Creative Blocks

Join me as we unlock your potential and activate your root chakra and subconscious mind to master creative blocks. In this episode we are diving deep into the transformative power of aligning your root chakra and subconscious mind to unleash your creative potential. We explore practical techniques to overcome creative blocks and rewrite limiting beliefs, guiding you through a journey of self-discovery and empowerment. Plus, as a special bonus, I'm serving up a free download: a guided walking meditation for mindful photography. This meditation will help you tap into your intuition, connect with your surroundings, and infuse your creative process with mindfulness.  

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Transcript

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This is Soul Therapy. I'm your host, Jen Hully, a professional photographer and therapeutic creativity coach obsessed with empowering others to build creatively fulfilling lives. This week on the show, we're talking about how to hack your brain and activate your root chakra to overcome creative blocks. We're gonna talk about why we don't do the things that we so badly want to do and how we can start implementing easy therapeutic and care-based strategies now to change that so that we can change our behavior and ultimately our results and how we feel about what we are living, breathing, and doing in our life. And the intention for this episode is to have an honest conversation about things like disassociation, trauma, scarcity, security and safety, and as well as looking at embodiment and creative living. And I want to share my own experiences with things like disassociation and sensory sensitivity and trauma and anxiety. And my hope is that in this conversation, something you hear might spark an idea or it might ignite a small change for you so that we can all start to come fully online, be in our bodies and our lives, and like start to enjoy the view while we're there. And we're gonna talk about a dual approach that I take to this, how I believe creative blocks are par for the course. It's just life. Life is not completely carefree, stress-free, and it's not free of um what's the word, friction, right? That is friction is a natural cause and effect of growth and change. And we're gonna talk about how I believe the best approach to this is a bottom, like a top-down, bottom-up approach, like starting at the bottom, starting at the top, and whoop, meeting in your middle. And I'm gonna talk about how we can tend, like I said, to the root chakra. I'm gonna share some of my favorite practices, and I'm gonna talk about mindset work, how we can hack our subconscious brain to support the work that we're doing with our root chakra. And I'm also going to talk about a free resource that I've created that you can download today that will get you started on a path to mindful, creative, inspired living. Now, as usual, we're pulling a card to ground the conversation or to just shine a light on the things that we're going to talk about today. And I used a different deck for the poll today. I used the Prism Oracle deck. And it's a beautiful deck, obviously. I mean, like, I like to buy things that look nice. That's how I get drawn to them. I like buy my tarot decks and Oracle decks the same way I buy my wine. I look at the labels and the pictures. Uh, and that's okay. And this Prism Oracle set that you have, I guess, or deck that I have, is really interesting because it organizes all of the messages by color. So there's like red cards, orange cards, green cards, blue cards, and it has a simple line drawing on it that's in white and just one word. And these messages are clear and they're quick and they're to the point. And I always use them in conjunction with tarot readings when I do like a full tarot spread, either for myself or for a client, because it gives like a really basic, like when you get this, because you can get a complex message in tarot, and then you can be like, okay, but what's the why? Like, why are we talking about this? Or what's the through line, or what's the entry point? And this guide, sorry, this tarot deck or Oracle deck is really, really effective in doing that. And the card that I pulled today uh was the anxiety card, which is interesting because we're talking about hacking your brain and opening your root chakra to overcome creative blocks. And really, what is a creative block? It's something that stops us from taking action towards the art we want to make, the projects we want to start, the life we want to live. And I will argue that every single time we're not taking action, regardless of how it shows up in our life, the root of it is fear. And what is fear? Fear is anxiety. And so this is a yellow card, right? And in this deck, it says that yellow cards are cards that ask us to look at the duality of a situation and not lean too heavily into one interpretation or one viewpoint that is presenting itself, and that there are contradicting meanings and there's duality in all situations, and how we have to move out of a single-minded state to see other perspectives. And this anxiety card is really, really accurate. Like, let's let's just be honest. We're talking about the root chakra, which is about safety, security, fight or flight or freeze. It's about survival. And if your root chakra is not rolling and grooving and flowing the way you want it to be, it's you're likely anxious and fearful for your life. And I don't mean like really for your life, but the part of your brain, the survivalist part of your brain, does believe that these are life or death situations. And I'm just gonna read to you from the book before we go any further. And it says, when you're feeling anxious, it is usually because you're very worried about something that has an uncertain outcome. Now, this is my side note. Our brain does not like uncertainty. Our brain does not like uncertain outcomes. We want to know that we're gonna be totally fine and safe. And so this card is saying, remembering that there's uncertainty around what could possibly happen. And when this happens, we write a script in our heads, creating an outcome that is far worse than the actual outcome. Because we've got the survivalist brain, doesn't want us to die. The ego's there. We like, we love our ego, we have to have it or we would be dead, right? Um, and this card is saying try your best to stay in the present and not focus on the events that haven't occurred yet. But also let's look at the duality of the situation. Your brain is gonna write the worst case scenario, and it's a process of writing the best case scenario, but also supporting and training your brain because it's like owning an owning an animal, right? Like having a mind literally is like owning a wild animal that you need to kind of domesticate and work with. And we're gonna talk about all of that today, about how we can start to tame this animal that's in our mind that's going like, don't do that, don't do that, stop, stop, terrible, you're gonna die, everyone's gonna hate you, you're gonna be abandoned, you're gonna have no friends. When you're like maybe just thinking about like doing a watercolor project, or maybe you're like, I'd like to start selling some calligraphy, or you know, it's gonna do it with the little things and the big things. And so before we jump in any further, I want to just talk about something that's really important with all of this. When we're feeling trapped by creative blocks and self-doubt, and we start to build a lack of confidence in not only our creative abilities, but we develop a lack of self-trust to assess the situation, to know what we want, to believe in ourselves. And we just we don't believe that we're gonna be there, that we're gonna show up for ourselves because every time we don't take action, we further program that part of our brain and build this identity of I'm someone who doesn't follow through, I'm someone who doesn't experience success, I'm someone who doesn't get what they want. And it's super frustrating because it's this cycle, this loop that we just keep going around in. But you can get off that hamster wheel. Like we don't have to stay in this self-perpetuating cycle. And, you know, as a professional photographer myself and as a therapeutic arts coach and hosting this podcast, I have seen firsthand and come into contact with so many people to witness the transformative power of like breaking through those barriers. And again, barriers can be big or they can be really minute. You'd be really shocked how the smallest things can create the biggest hiccups and the biggest resistance. And I want to offer you a lifeline. I want to give you the opportunity to transform your life and your creative journey through personalized one-to-one creative coaching. All creativity coaching takes this dualistic approach. We look at your mind and we look at your creative soul. And just imagine what it'd be like to like wake up not feeling stuck and not held back by fear or not waking up and being stuck in this like freeze mode where you're like, well, what's the point? Nothing's gonna change. And instead, you start waking up with like a renewed sense of confidence and purpose, and you're ready to like embrace your creativity and express yourself fully. Like that's the kind of transformation I'm talking about. Little micro shifts in our brain open the doors phenomenally wide and just create this massive path in front of you that doesn't exist until we do that housekeeping work. And so in our coaching sessions, they're therapeutic, they're creative, they're mindset, they're everything. We dive deep into the heart of what is holding you back, whether it's a creative block, maybe it's lack of confidence, maybe it's simply logistical things in your life. And it might just be that you're feeling so disconnected from your true artistic self, your true authentic soul expression, your personality, who you are. And so we explore mindfulness, we explore embodiment, we explore self-expression, and we unlock your inner creativity and we empower you to live a more fulfilling, expressive life. And we do it in a way that is not overwhelming, is super sustainable, and is going to bring you the results that you need in order to keep going. You have to really do things in a way that is going to like show your brain, hey, I can do this. And you're gonna like hit that reward center that makes you want to keep going. So if you are ready to just like say bye-bye to these limitations that have been holding you back and you want to just step into this creative potential, I really encourage you to schedule a free discovery call with me, a little chit-chat, I like to call them. They're just like 30 minutes where we hop on a Zoom or a Google meet and we just talk about what's going on and where you want to be, and we look at the possibilities that await you. So hit the show notes. It's right there in the show notes. You can tap on the link and it will take you to the page. You can read all about it, and you can send me an email and we will book that session for you and we will get the ball rolling. All right, now let's get going into this episode. And I want us to talk about, like I said, hacking your brain, opening your root chakra to overcome creative blocks. And we're gonna start with the root chakra. We're gonna start with what is it? Okay, and if you're unfamiliar with the chakras systems, we will do a whole episode on that in the future. But the root chakra is your energy system that sits at the base of your spine. It is what makes you feel rooted and connected to the earth. If you think about a tree, it's what goes into the ground and like holds them steady and gives them the support that they need in order to like reach upwards and outwards. And for us, our root chakra is our center of safety, it's our center of security, it's our center that activates flight, fight, freeze, or flow. It's survival. And it is survival in the essence of having a strong connection and sense of belonging. So connection to ourselves, connection to our surroundings, and connection to those who are around us. And working with the root chakra is a process of tending to our nervous system, essentially, and making mindful connections to our surroundings, to our environment, to ourselves, to just get us out of that state of either disassociation or flight, which is like abandoning your goals and not doing the things that you say you want to do. And we do that, we open up that system so that we can then start to hack your brain and we can start to work with your subconscious mind to start to move you through this fear. And I believe that we can't do one without the other. But before we go further, I want to talk a little bit in depth about the root chakra. I'm gonna read to you from a book. It's called The Awakened Life Chakra Healing: Restore Balance to Your Body, Mind, and Spirit through the Seven Energy Centers. And I picked it up at the library last week. And as per usual, when I get something in the library, I'm like, oh damn, I'm gonna have to buy this because I really do enjoy this book. So I'm just gonna read you the section called Root Chakra 101, and it says, whether you notice it, work with it, or ignore it, the first chakra is always right there at the base of your spine, spinning its energy and trying to keep you grounded. Sometimes it might grow larger with excessive energy, and sometimes it might grow smaller or even close down for a while. However, it is consistently the root of your energy body and the measure of your sense of security, physical sensations, and place in the world. So, my side note: your root is your root. It's your cord that grounds you to who you are and what you're experiencing. It's associated with the earth element because it represents an actual physical connection to the earth and a physical incarnation in a body. Its symbolic color is red, and the traditional lotus symbol depicting the chakra has four petals. The sound associated with this chakra is long, and chanting it helps to activate the first chakra. So the chakra, the root chakra, is located at the base of your spine and it is associated with several structures in the body. They list a whole bunch of body, body spaces. We're gonna skip that part. And it governs very several important aspects of your life, and we're gonna look at them in this podcast. It like I said, it grounds you into your surroundings. It looks at your concept of security, safety, and survival. And it just looks at your um your sense of belonging, like who you are, why you're here, and who you're connected with. And when we think about the root chakra, like we all come into this world like naked and afraid. We're babies. Um, we're totally dependent on the people that are taking care of us for survival. And this is where your root chakra starts to be established, whether or not you learn that you are safe, that you are cared for, that your needs are witnessed, valued, and attended to, or whether you learn that like you're alone on this earth. And it comes from early childhood experiences. And like if you didn't feel protected, or if you had you were mistreated in your childhood, it can be, you know, there can be dysfunction with it. But I also want to like talk about the fact that you maybe weren't mistreated in your childhood, right? Like maybe everything was okay, and you can still have root chakra um dysfunction. And one of the things that I'm learning with my son, who's four, because he's going through some rough times with stuff. And, you know, I've done a lot of work on my own root chakra because like mine is chronically blocked. Every time I go for Reiki or anything, it's like there's dysfunction there. And um, some of it I can trace back to certain things, some of it I'm not sure. You know, as I've worked on it, I've recently realized like one big thing that I was like, I can't figure this out because like I was never physically harmed in my family. Like, why is this, you know, being an issue? But it rooted back to something really small that I witnessed at school. Um, so there's all these things that maybe seem insignificant that can actually affect this. And also our perception. It's not just about what is happening. As with trauma, it's not so much about the event, but it's how you perceive the event and whether you perceive you are in control of what's happening. And to roll back to like with my son, he's been going through some stuff at school. And one of the things I've been talking with his teacher is like about whether what he's saying is what's happening or whether it's his perception. And I keep arguing that like it doesn't matter if it's happening or not happening. In his mind, this is how he's perceiving it. And so this is what's getting sort of wired into his brain. Um, and so that when you have that awareness that like, even as a kid, you can perceive something that maybe isn't accurate, but that is what felt true because you're four or five or three, you know, like you don't have a lot of world knowledge and you don't have a lot of that deductive reasoning. You just take things at face value. And um he and I were having a conversation about something that I had experienced with him. So I did have like a handle on what actually happened. And he was like relaying his interpretation of it, and it was so not what actually happened, but it was so eye-opening for me to be like, oh, this is how like childhood beliefs can get wired into your brain that maybe aren't accurate in terms of like, do they directly reflect what you went through? But it's accurate in terms of like how his little brain is trying to make sense of the world. So our root chakra issues, like, yeah, they all come from childhood, and like you could have had the most blissful, easy childhood and be like, everything was fine, and you can still have root chakra issues, and they will still show up in terms of how you feel safe in this world and what you think you can and cannot do. So it's really important to just be open-minded when we're talking about the root chakra. And, you know, like I said, we look at how we can support that, but we also look at how we can support the mind, the top-down, bottom-up approach, meeting in the middle. And I say that because you can have your root chakra open. If we do all our work just on tending to our root chakra and we don't tend to our mind, um, your mind is gonna fight like crazy to bring your root chakra back into a state of dysregulation. So if you're someone who is chronically dysregulated and chronically in a fight or flight state because maybe something's happened in your life recently, you've gone through a trauma, like a micro or a mega trauma, um, or it's just a pattern of existence that your brain has wired in as this is my comfort zone, this is my safe zone. I feel most safe when I'm dysregulated. And you might be like, how can you feel safe when you feel unsafe? Um, and that's because your comfort zone can be really quite painful. When I say your comfort zone, I don't mean what feels good, I mean what feels familiar to your brain and not even your conscious mind, your subconscious mind. And that's the part that's wired in childhood. Um, however many years it's different, some people say zero to five, some research says zero to seven, some say even to 14 if you're being generous. But if we just deal with the root chakra, which I was doing initially, just like doing all this grounding work, but then not dealing with the mindset and the subconscious reprogramming, the root chakra would open. Um, and then the mind would come up and be like, fuck you, let's go back to feeling, you know, this is why you should be scared. And it's like being in a ping-pong game, you know, being like boop, boop, boop, and you go back and forth and back and forth into this state of like feeling safe and secure to try new things, and then you're brain firing up, being like, what the fuck is going on? And that is not a cool space to live in, you know, it is not about um, it's not gonna create and nurture a sense of like stability. And that's what we want is we want things to be more consistent for you over time. And so if you don't deal with the mindset work and you're only dealing with the root chakra, right, your flow, like I said, it's either gonna be sluggish or you're gonna have this like extremes of like up down, up down, up down, which is fucking exhausting, if we're being honest. It's exhausting, and it's not a sustainable way to develop anything, and it certainly is not a great way to develop your creativity. So the root, right? Your root chakra, we're starting there. It's grounded, it's how you feel grounded for and into your life. Like, how are you rooted into your current identity, your current experiences, what's going on? And we tackle this through strategies of things like embodiment, awareness, developing a sense of safety and uh engagement with our life. And, you know, it's part of it also is this process called earthing, and that's about like physically connecting your feet to the ground, and it's about like walking and like actually like getting barefoot in the ground and moving and using your body to feel the ground beneath your feet, to breathe, to sit in your environment, to integrate all of your senses, right? You're trying to teach your body on a physical level that my body is safe, my body is strong, and my body is supported. And now, like I said, you can do walking. You can go stand out in the grass in your feet. Um, I lie on the ground. It's one of the things I do if I'm feeling really rattled, is I go lie on the grass. It's harder to do in the winter in Canada. Um, but I've been doing it more recently because like it's been a bit nicer. We've been out there and doing things. Um, breath work, anything that brings you back into your body. Anything like meditation that brings you back into your body and connecting with your body in terms of how it's interacting with the environment, like yoga is really, really effective. And so, like in my own experience, you know, I said it was doing all this breath work, was doing all this meditation, was doing like uh yoga and grounding and things, but the mind was still coming up and being like blah blah blah, blah blah lap, blah blah blah. You know, it's like safety's coming, let me come and kill you, let me come and smash that down. Let me tell you why this is like grounding, being grounded isn't actually safe. And so we tend to the root, we do those embodiment exercises, we do things like I said, um, meditation, and then like you don't even have to have your eyes closed for this. Sometimes uh embodiment can be even more affected with our eyes open, where we do like an ice open meditation where you're connecting with your different senses. I think. One of the biggest like um obstacles that a lot of us face is that we think like we have to be sitting on our couch, cross-legged, eyes closed. And no, no, no, no, no. There are so many ways to do this. And like I said, we can um this is something we talk about in one-to-one coaching, is we like look at your own experiences with embodiment and mindfulness and grounding and what has worked and what hasn't worked, and we make like a a little recipe or like a personalized prescription almost of different practices to try, and then we see what's coming up while you go through them. But with the mind, right, the mind goes into fight, flight, freeze, or flow. It's where we start to become consciously aware of our creative blocks, and we have to, have to, have to attend to our brain functioning while we're doing grounding work. If we're trying to deal with blocks, we need to make sure that we feel safe when some of these blocks are removed. That's the whole point of dealing with the root chakra, is that we're gonna change how things look and feel for you in your life, and your body needs to learn to feel safe in that moment. So that's the you know the bottom-up part, but we have to hack your brain function in order to support you taking action towards your creative projects. Um, we need to like eliminate or engage with these hurdles, blocks, rocks, whatever you want to call them, that cause you to stop. We look at, and you can do this through journaling, or you can even just do like an inquiry, a creative or a curious inquiry into your own history, looking at the things that you've wanted to do and that you've started and bailed on. Um, because we all have what I call a bailing point. And that's a point where we hit it and like something, the light, like the switch is flicked, and it's like we enter into this like, that's it, I'm done. I'm abandoning ship. And we have to identify what that bail point is so that we can build a bridge over it or we can divert you around it. Because if you just barrel into your next project goal, whether it's something for work, something for your business, something for your creativity, or even just your life, where you're like, I wish my house had more color in it, or whatever. If we don't identify that bailing point, the point where your mind then flicks into fight, flight, freeze, you're never gonna get into that flow state, right? You're gonna hit it and then you're gonna jump and you're gonna be out. And when we bail on our projects, we just reinforce that we can't trust ourselves, that we're not reliable, that we don't follow through on our dreams, and then we like the secondary learning from that is that we learn that I don't get what I want. And we can like really mis what's the word? Not misdirect, but misattribute that to different things in our life when really we have to look at okay, where is where am I jumping off course? Where am I abandoning ship? And after you we you know analyze that and we say, okay, like here's your boiling, not your boiling point, your bailing point. Um we we work around it. Like I said, you've got to build a bridge. And one of my biggest recommendations for this, while you're working on your root chakra and you're like grounding in, you're connecting to the earth, you're connecting to yourself. We're going to work with your mind to look at whatever it is that you want to a project or something that you want to create, something that you want to be doing where you want change. And you have to start and create an entry point that is really highly motivating. It's got high motivation, high reward capacity, and really low barrier to entry. And this is where, like, I'm gonna tap into my um behavioral change background and my behavioral analysis and give you some strategies from psychology that you can implement while tending to your root and your energy to get you to just basically rewire really big beliefs in your brain that are gonna show you, like, I'm good at this, I can impact my surroundings, I have control over my experiences. And when you do that, you boost your energy and you boost your confidence. These like easy, exciting wins almost give you this like it's like gasoline. Like it gives you fuel to this rocket ship that's inside of you. And then you take that fuel to tackle the big thing. Like if we're looking at a creative project that we have, there's always little parts of it, right? There's like, I'll have to do this and this and this and this and this. And there's always parts that are easy and exciting. And there's always parts that are like exciting but also terrifying and maybe logistically complicated. And we never start with the logistically complicated one. We never identify the biggest dragon and then go slay it first because that shit is crazy, first of all. Um, it's gonna be terrifying. Like anyone who feels like they have a gun to their head and it's like, go do this scary thing, you're gonna be like, fuck no, and you're not gonna do it. Right. So it's like we don't tackle it first because it's too scary. It's gonna activate your nervous system. You're gonna go into total fight, flight, or freeze, and you're not gonna do it. And we're just gonna prove to ourselves, I'm not good at this. Like your root chakra is gonna be, well, clamped the fuck down because it's gonna be like nope. And then your mind's gonna do everything it can to protect you. So anyone who tells you to like identify your biggest, hardest task for the day and start with that, I don't think has their feet grounded in what um, you know, holistic care looks like and what sustainable change looks like. Yes, you could maybe do that once, but I guarantee you your nervous system is gonna be so fired up that you're never gonna do it again. So we don't start with what's hard and we don't start with what's overwhelming, but we don't delay it. We don't put it off until the very, very end. That's the worst thing. If you start with it at the beginning or you start with it, you put it at the end, I mean, you're never gonna do it. Because if you delay and go, like, I'm just gonna leave the worst, the most overwhelming part till I finish everything, it gives you so much time to accumulate exhaustion and doubt. And you'll get dwindling interest, and your mind has all this opportunity to talk yourself out of it. You can get distracted and be like, oh, shiny object. I'll start this instead. Um, so we don't do that. And we don't start with it because it's too big. So we don't want to terrify you by putting it at the beginning so you never do it, and we don't want to give you ample opportunity to bail and you know go the other way, abandon ship. We're gonna like stick it almost in the middle. It actually becomes like the second thing you do. And you start small, like I said, with that low barrier to entry, whatever is like your easy, quick win that's gonna get you fired up, feeling confident and like trusting yourself, because then you take your rocket, your rocket ship is like full of fuel, fire energy, right? When we think about the suits, we think about the suit of wands in the tarot deck and just fire energy from the um the earth elements. Fire is so powerful. And when we don't have enough fire energy in our system or in our brain, we can't do anything. Or we can do it, but it feels like a slog. So we're gonna hack our experiences by doing that easy, quick win so that your rocket ship or whatever you want to call it, or you're like, maybe you have a lightsaber. I don't know. Whatever you're gonna slay this dragon with, you're gonna fuel it the fuck up, and then you're gonna go, that's my clap. You're then you're gonna go tackle the big dragon. You're not gonna wait to open doors to collect fears. You're not gonna wait to like talk yourself out of it. You're going to go straight into it with all that energy that you've accumulated, and you're gonna prove to yourself that your word is powerful, that you are rewriting your identity as someone who follows through. You're gonna do this. And when you do this, while connecting to your root, doing having a breath work practice, having a meditation practice, or a walking practice, you know, you're tending to your energy center that's going to sort of start to get fired up while you're doing this, top down, bottom up. Remember that coming from both angles. You're showing yourself that I show up for you. You're saying to yourself, this is important. We are doing it. And this starts to rewrite your identity of who you are and what you're capable of. You rewrite it and you start to build a new script and you almost start to build like a new avatar in your mind. And sometimes this is conscious, but often it's subconscious. It's going to start to change your perception and belief about who you are. Now, when I say that, I want you to ask yourself when we're changing a belief system about ourselves and our capabilities and what is possible for us, what do you think happens internally? It's going to start to dial down the fear. Because we're going to not just be ambushing ourselves with an identity change, we're going to be having proof of it. The fear when we're rewriting our identity comes from not having proof because it feels scary to believe something, but not experience it. And the direct experiencing of um change is like the feedback for your root chakra to be like, I am safe. Look what's happening in my environment. I am here. This is what is true for me. So quick win, slay that dragon. And when you go to slay that dragon, that big scary thing, break it down. Break it down into steps and start again, start with the easiest one, then start with the next one. And start to identity create an identity of power and safety in your mind and body. Some things to sort of say to yourself while you're doing this or while you're walking or working on your route, if you're holding like yoga poses, if you're in tree pose or whatever, is to just say, I mean what I say, I can trust myself, I trust what I believe and what I feel, I can do scary things, and I am building the life that I want. And I want to give you something that you can use today and take away and start doing this. So I want to give you a grounding activity that also has action taking in it. Because, like I said, in my own experience, when I sit in too much grounding, it gets really comfy. And I'm like, I'm meditating, I'm like do, and I'm not taking the action. And I'm when I'm not taking the action, I'm just proving to myself, like, I don't take action, I don't follow through, I don't get the results that I want. And when I forget about grounding and I step into just like, let's deal with the mind, my body still doesn't trust. So I wanted to develop something that does both, sort of like how we're talking top down, bottom up. Come up with some exercise that you can do that helps you ground, but also helps you take action creatively. And it's high reward, right? It's motivating because it's fun and it's gonna click that reward center in our brain where we're like, oh, I like this. I want to do this again. And that's where I've created this guided photography uh walking meditation. So it's, I don't know if you've ever done a walking meditation, but they are phenomenal for anyone who doesn't like sitting still, for anyone who maybe finds it hard to sit still with their eyes closed, or if you find you disassociate more when you close your eyes, uh, walking meditations can be an amazing solution for you. I will say from my own experience, when I'm like when my root chakras really clamped down and I'm really in fight or flight or freeze, um, I find the process of sitting in traditional meditation and closing my eyes causes me to disassociate. And I think the reason for that, I really feel the reason for that is because when your root chakra is not functioning, we actually need to ground into the environment. And a big way that we take in our environment is through our visual sense. So when we close the visual sense and we're not feeling safe in our body or our mind, our mind is gonna like blah blah, it's gonna go off. And those are the days when you're trying to meditate and it just feels like nails on a chalkboard, or it feels like bugs crawling on your skin. Sometimes I feel like I have bees in my chest, and I just know I'm so agitated and I'm slipping away into disassociation, which for me is like um, I will scroll a lot. Like I'll sit and scroll, scroll, scroll. Like I will just be kind of addicted to this numbing thing on my and I don't even know what I'm doing, or I'm not remembering what's happening. Like I can't remember what happened like 15 minutes ago. Like, I'm like, what did I have for breakfast? If you asked me, I wouldn't be able to answer because I'm there and I'm going through the motions, but I'm not like clamped in and locked into my environment. I'm not taking things in. Um, this is when you want to do an alternative style of meditation. That's a whole other podcast. We'll do a podcast on different styles of meditation, but in a walking meditation, you're going to attend to your root chakra because you're going to get that feet on the ground feedback. You're going to have a grounding and earthing exercise. And there's also something about the feeling of like step, step, left, right, left, right. That actually soothes your brain because it's repetitive. So it's going to soothe your mind if your mind is in a fight or flight state and try to get you back into flow. And like, fun fact, it actually like stitches or like connects the alternate sides of your brain, which is really important for like processing, reprocessing trauma and stuff. And um, so this met this meditation, it's 20 minutes and it's designed to get you outside and it's guided. So there's like breath work and checking in work and you know, looking and feeling and experiencing the environment around you, which is what we need to do to ground and to root into what's happening so that our root chakra starts to feel safe in our environment, safe in our surroundings. But you have these prompts in there as well to like stop here and take a photo of something that da-da-da-da-da, right? I'm not going to tell you what's in it because I want you to go do it. Um, and it's designed to do both. Like I said, it's designed to have the embodiment and the mindfulness that is so, so essential for our well-being and our health and our sense of safety. It's designed to have that biofeedback that we need to connect with our root chakra. And it has the quick wins. I like snapping today, apparently. It has the quick, easy, doable wins that have a low barrier to entry creatively. Because when I talk to people about creativity and their art or whatever, it's always like, oh, then I say if they want to paint, they're like, I just gotta get the paints out, or I gotta even buy the paints, and I don't have paintbrushes and I don't have this, and our brains are really good at finding reasons that we can't start, especially if it's linked to creativity and art. And there are no excuses when it's photography, because you either just need your camera or your phone. And if you're listening to the meditation as you're walking, you have a phone. Uh, I will say put your phone in airplane mode. Don't have your notifications and crap going off as you're doing that, because that's not being embodied and grounded into the moment, right? We talked about this last week, thinking our lives are in our phones when really our lives are within us and our surroundings, our environment, our people. So if you do have a camera, or maybe you don't, go get like a disposable camera. They still make those little disposable film ones. They're pretty cool. Um, and I my recommendation would be to get a standalone camera or to use the camera that you have. But if that is a barrier to starting this activity for you that's gonna cause you to not do it, then use your phone. But don't default to using your phone because I think we benefit so much when we just take 20 minutes to unplug from it. And so you're gonna walk around your environment and it's pretty free flow. Like you can go with it as it's timed or you can stop. Like when you get to one of the prompts, I say, like, feel free to pause, give yourself the minutes you need to do this, and then hit play when you're ready to go again. And it's totally free and it runs at 20 minutes. Like I said, if you work with it in real time, you could extend it and be out for an hour doing stuff. And you can even go back to different sections. Like when you're dealing with one of the senses, you might be like, I actually want to dip back into that because that felt good, or I feel like I need more of that. And my intention with it is, like I said, to give you an easy thing that you can do right away that has low barrier to entry. You don't need to go buy anything, you don't need to collect anything. You literally need shoes, headphone, and something that can take pictures. And I want it to be easy in that it's guided. You don't have to think up what to do. You just gotta listen to me and you just gotta go with the flow. And it's gonna tend to your mind. It's going to help you take action, especially if you've been feeling creatively blocked and not following through. You can make a promise to yourself that I'm gonna do this once a week and it's easy and it's fun, and you'll come back with some really cool pictures, and it's gonna like boop, you know, reward center of your brain being like, that was cool, let's do it again, while tapping into your breath, while tapping into your senses, while tapping into your environment and really tending for that root chakra so that you start to feel safe in your surroundings and safe in your creativity. All right, so you can grab that meditation as well. It's in the show notes. Tap the link there. You just need to fill out a really quick form, put your email in there so it knows where to send it, and it will send you an MP3 that you can get going right away with it. All right, that's all I've got for you this week. And I just want to remind you that if this episode was inspiring or helpful, share it with somebody in your world that you know will benefit. Reach out to like a friend who is creative or someone you know who's going through something that you're like, I think this might help you. Send them the episode, put it on social media, whatever you can do to get this into the ears of people who are gonna benefit from it. When we help ourselves and we help others, everybody succeeds, like everybody benefits, right? Because when we feel safe, we feel supportive, and we feel in flow with who we are, it just changes everything. We interact differently with others, which has like a knock-on effect, right? If you think about the butterfly effect. So share the episode, get it out there. Let's get more people tapping into their authentic self, feeling confident in their creativity and starting to really enjoy the view and be in the moment of their life and feel those things of joy, presence, ease, and happiness. And if you want to throw me a rating and a review on your favorite podcast platform, I would love you forever. All right. Have a great week. I'll talk to you next time.