I didn’t plan for “fear” to be the first topic that we touch on in the Gold Mine, but every road just led me to face & dig into the one thing that has been holding me back from launching any segment in the first place: fear. I tried to stray away from lining up this experience with The Artist Way (the first week’s theme is recovering a sense of safety amidst creative fears), but alas life imitates art.

I was experiencing so many blocks as I tried to structure & plan this whole “Gold Mine” experience out. I thought I could just jump in & everything would figure itself out & all the puzzle pieces would fall into place on its own. But I didn’t recognize this new journey for what it is, which is another form of art & creation. 

When I started Aurumana, I had this grand ole vision of creating something deeper & more impactful than I had originally envisioned with Misfixed. As much as I’ve always known that I wanted to be in some type of creative field, I also knew that I wanted to tap into, enhance, and emphasize the power and the importance of creating in some way shape or form as a human being.

It has always been a lingering feeling that I’ve had. I even did my senior project in high school with the thesis that every student should be required to take an “art” class every year, and it should be taught as a way to decompress & express freely as opposed to having a certain skill set that is graded and critiqued. In art classes (and this isn’t always the case but in a lot of cases), they teach techniques and methods with a strict grading system that sucks the creativity, room for error/growth, & curiosity out of the process. I always felt that it taints the true essence of what it means to be a creative and make art, and how much better our experiences could be if we just used forms of creative outlets to better our connection with ourselves, others, or the rest of the world.

So tapping into the thoughts & trials & tribulations & highs & lows of what it means to be a creative conscious artist isn’t new to me, but putting those thoughts out there & opening up the door to a community having access & perceiving & connecting & interpreting them IS new territory. Therefore, I experienced a bunch fears surrounding this form of art that I didn’t even want to admit. Some of the same artist fears I had when I first started designing but with a new connotation, & some new fears that I didn’t have before at all. The fear of being seen, being as vulnerable as I need to be whether I want to or not, emotional vulnerability on top of artistic vulnerability, the fear of doing it wrong, the fear of doing it half-assed. When I faced that bittersweet reality (very shortly before writing this), I finally was able to get started. 

It’s almost comedic how I envisioned the process of it going down just for it to become a full on immersive experience myself, thinking I was a developed butterfly when I’m really just barely coming out of a whole other cocoon again. I treated this as if I’m just the teacher just to realize I’m also a student in the process, & the entire point is to inspire & be inspired. For everyone to act as both roles towards each other. Being a butterfly in one realm of creativity & a caterpillar in the other. That’s the point of this experience. Nobody is above another, there’s always more to learn, to feel, & to teach… and if my goal was to create a safe space free of judgement and failure, then that’s exactly what it will be for me as well.

So welcome to The Gold Mine! We’re gonna get messy, deep, vulnerable, inspired, & all the other beautiful things that make us great creatives and profound humans <3