PODCAST: Accessing Your Intuition Through Creative Expression
This week on Work Your Inner Wisdom, I’m thrilled to welcome intuitive artist Tracy Nuñez. Tracy is a spiritual artist, teacher, and mentor who helps her clients build a bond with their higher power to help them tap into their subconscious mind.
In this episode, we talk about how spirituality informs art and how her intuition guides her work and her business. Tracy also shares how she uses a unique creative process called “Conscious Collage” to forge a connection with her Higher Power, and provides guidance on how we can do the same.
When I first saw her work, it was clear to me how her personal spiritual journey informs her art and in turn, influences the viewer (me). I knew I wanted to have her on the show to talk about how she accesses her own intuition and creativity and how we can bring new work into the world.
Tracy's Work
(3:00) Tracy is an expert in Conscious Collage, an art from in which she helps people tap into their subconscious mind and forge a connection with a higher power, the Divine, the Universe – whatever term they prefer. Her process is a merge of spirituality, sensuality, sexuality, and power that all come through in her collage. Through that work, people can have a conversation with the Divine.
Tracy says she has been an artist for as long as she can remember. She’s been interested in art and spirituality since she was 16, and has been navigating both worlds ever since. As her art and her spirituality developed at the same time, she decided to hand her art over to a higher power, asking her Divine to show up and work through her. She wanted her artwork to speak to people on a different level, to be unique.
Making an Appointment with the Divine
I love Tracy’s process of creation. She sets up a time to work with her Divine once a week. And no matter what, on that day and that time, she shows up and creates artwork, specifically paper collage.
Tracy says, “Over time, I saw my artwork transform and have magic in it, speak to me, and have themes. So much so that I knew it was a Divine hand. It became evidence that it was something greater than me working through me. I knew I wanted to share that process with others.” That’s how Conscious Collage came to be.
Her artwork expanded in so many beautiful directions because she knew she was working with someone greater than herself. She began to work with uncomfortable themes, like exploring her own sexuality.
Tracy went through a process of discovering her truth through her art and says it gave her the bravery and a voice to speak her truth. She wants people to understand that art means co-creating with a higher power but also seeing inside yourself.
Tracy talks about creating a piece, hanging it on the wall, and then a week or two later noticing something in the piece that she didn’t intend when she created it at first. As she began to trust her intuition, the art became richer.
Sharing the Creative Process with Others
(6:00) One of Tracy's strategies is to create a date with the Divine. She created time and space to connect with a higher power. Even if at first she didn’t know what would result, she still honored that time and commitment she made.
Through her own creative process, Tracy realizes she needed to share her work and her teaching with others. And she says you don’t have to be an artist to benefit from this process. The bigger theme is understanding how handing over the creative process allows your Divine to speak to you through the art.
Tracy acknowledges tahat every interaction isn’t going to be the best you’ve ever had, but what matters is showing up, doing the work, and interacting. Even on days when we try to create, but nothing comes out of it, Tracy says that’s the universe’s way of testing us to see if are okay if there’s not magic in every moment. Failures and bumps along the way help us develop our relationship with the Divine.
Tracy says, “The more relationship you build with a higher power, the more magic will flow into your life, and that’s what I’m trying to teach other people.”
The Divine Relationship Isn’t Transactional
(8:00) The relationship with the Divine isn’t a transactional relationship. It’s not that we give, and then we get. It has to unfold organically. There is some give and take, but it’s also very much about co-creation and allowing ourselves to reveal more as we move along. There will be bumps and setbacks, but there will also be rewards.
Even in failure, there can be magic. When you keep going, you’ll have a moment of success. Then, celebrate the success with the Divine, saying, “I want more of this in my life.” Anytime you give higher power recognition – in art or in daily life – that’s when the relationship builds, and the Divine gives us more of the good in our life. It multiplies.
Manifestation
(9:45) A lot of times, we talk about wanting to manifest in our life. Yes, the first step is creating a vision and believing in it, but at some point, our actions need to back that up. By showing up and doing the work, even when it’s a struggle, we are still communicating to the universe that we want this, and that we are willing to put the time and energy behind it. That’s how we manifest what we want.
In Tracy’s art process, even when going through a hardship like a failure, losing a relationship or a job, the process is still about showing up, making the artwork, and understanding that difficult things happen for you and not to you. We have to trust that our higher power is going to provide something bigger than we could ever have imagined. Work through it, knowing that’s exactly what’s happening, and you’ll eventually see it unfold.
The artwork starts to give evidence of the Divine’s presence in your life, through those difficult moments. It’s about transforming a challenging time into a beautiful art piece. Pain is what makes art so relatable: it’s a universal experience. We work through it, we trust in a higher power, and let our lives unfold. This is when we get into the flow.
Getting Into the Flow
(11:50) Getting into that flow is almost magical to me. Time seems to fly by, and that’s when I can tap into that pure creativity. Tracy talks about how the art transforms her, but her worldview is transformed by it as well. She makes art, she thinks she knows what it’s about, but weeks later she returns to it, and it means something completely different.
Tracy mentions that people want to know “what’s behind the art.” But she says she doesn’t always have an answer. The beauty it when the art reveals what flowed through you in the process. She says her process encourages a gentle unfolding, letting the art reveal its secrets.
When we try to manifest things, we have to understand there’s a subconscious mind operating. Sometimes our art reveals blocks and nuances we need to work on but didn’t know we had. See some of the delicate beauty in your life lessons be revealed, see themes you enjoy, see things you need to express.
There doesn’t have to be a huge meaning. The point is to let the Divine guide you and to be in that flow.
Art as Co-Creation
(14:30) There are many components involved in the co-creation and the soul of her projects: Tracy as the artist, the higher power and connection to Source, and the art itself which has its own soul, and the viewer, which could be the artist or could be me as the viewer, making my own meaning out of it.
Art is the process of connection and the tangible result of connection. It’s a dynamic process where art can be the source, the creation, and continuation of an idea.
Tracy talks about her medium, collage, and how it requires you as an artist to flip through images to see what’s calling to you, and you become a creator. That process gets us closer to the Divine because you become a creator yourself. When we sit down to create, we’re interacting with the same energy that we innately are, a creator.
And that’s not just in artwork. No matter what you do in your life, it’s all forms of art. You’re always in creation, and when you align with a higher power, you let that flow and that creation affect other people. It might be visual art, working with clients one on one, or in a small business, but you can tap into that power and call on it when you need it. It does affect other people: people respond to passion, to something real. Practicing this art form helps you do that.
All About Analog Collage
I love Tracy’s inclusive stance on what art it. It might be visual art or creation in our businesses; anything we create can be art. But at 17:00, I dive into Tracy’s specific art medium, exploring how she discovered collage and how she uses it to work with others.
Tracy majored in photography, but she always incorporated journaling, trying to bridge from artistic self to spiritual self.
When she began to feel less aligned with photography, she began to find more alignment with paper collage, called analog collage (her preferred method is scissors and a glue stick). Sometimes, she’d have a preconceived notion of what she wanted a piece to be.
(18:00) Often, it’s the female form, so that would be her intention, but she always leaves space for the magic. As she thumbs through magazines, she sees what calls to her, letting herself be guided, ripping pages out, and starting to create.
“Just like life, having a goal is important, but equally as important is leaving the room for life to come and interject and flowing with what comes naturally. So that’s how I found my process of my artistic expression, letting it unfold and grow, and I became better just like you get better at everything with practice.”
Conscious Collage
Eventually, Tracy decided to share this process with other people, creating a class called Conscious Collage. She shares the process with a group class or individuals. It all starts with a prompt and an idea, something like transformation, fear, or the seven Chakras. She gives a little background about the theme to get the participants ready for class.
Then, they’ll journal that week leading up to class, finding images that go along with that theme, leaving room for creativity to flow in the day of the class. On the day of class, participants meet and get a collage together.
Tracy adds in some guided meditation and then ends every course with an ancient blessing allowing the Divine to come through the space. She invites participants to let the Divine flow through them, and as soon as they sign up for a class like this, they know the Divine is fully operating in their life, or they wouldn’t be called to do this work.
Then, she asks participants to keep looking for the Divine throughout their week, celebrating the magic when they see it. That process continues, the class meets weekly. She says it’s been a beautiful process.
What I love about Tracy’s story is that from the moment participants sign up, they’re engaged, and they’re ready to connect with something deeper. It’s an all-encompassing process. There are a lot of seeds planted, not only during the class but moving forward.
Tracy says she gets giddy thinking about them signing up for class, because she knows it’s not them signing up, but the higher power guiding them to be there. She can always assure them they will have a connection because it was their higher power sending them there in the first place.
She sees a parallel in this podcast: “I can tell you that if you’re the type of person who is listening to a podcast like this, your Divine is calling out to you. If you give one inch, your Divine goes 500 miles toward you. It really is a beautiful process.”
How Art Informs Life: Tracy’s Transformation Through Her Artwork
(21:50) Tracy’s art is so special and evocative. It transcends language and gets straight to emotion, which to me means it’s a powerful means of self-expression. I ask Tracy to explain how her art serves her, both professionally and personally.
Tracy answers by saying art has been a platform to explore divine femininity and to show up for her life fully. It’s allowed her to transform her pain into something beautiful. She talks about her huge life transformation. She was married to a man for a long time, and she was in love with him. Eventually, she began to have the inkling that she might be gay. She allowed herself to explore that idea in her art, and that allowed her to remove her mask and explore the things she was uncomfortable with.
Her own transformation and her art have helped her reach other women, showing them that whether it’s in their sexuality or relationships or something else, having the bravery to remove that mask empowers others to do the same.
She adds, “I feel so often that a lot of us stay hidden, worried about social norms and what it might be like to show up as themselves, and I want women to know that they definitely can and should show up as themselves.”
Through working in this process and creating such beauty, Tracy says she can show up in this world. Her artwork has become deeper as a result. She says she’s very passionate –a Scorpio – and a lot of that passion comes through in her work. She deals a lot with nature, with soft and hard and how both of those things can operate at the same time.
The Shadow Self
(23:00) The “shadow self” represents the parts of ourselves that we don’t necessarily want others to see. But Tracy says you don’t have to be afraid of the shadow self; it’s something we all have, and when those parts of us show up, we need to offer them more love, not less.
This is what she does through her artwork. She sends energy and love to those shadow parts, transmuting them through her artwork. It’s a message to her shadow self: it can be universal, it can have a voice, and it can teach her lessons.
I love her explanations of the shadow self. So often, our initial reaction is to push away the shadow self, but it’s just as much a part of us as everything else. And it is there for a reason; it has so much to teach us. Part of tapping into our inner wisdom means making space for our shadow self and understanding that by trying to avoid it or push it away, we deny a part of ourselves.
Yes, it may be uncomfortable to explore, but that’s what spirituality is. It’s not all light and love and rainbows. It’s also sitting with and making space for the deep, dark parts if we want true integration and transformation.
As Tracy says, “It’s called spiritual work, not spiritual play.”
Through her art, Tracy says she can recognize when she is uncomfortable. She recognizes that her pain and anxiety are a sign that growth is coming. If we are too comfortable, we are too stagnant. She recommends we honor all our emotions fully.
One way to do that is by having awareness: identifying uncomfortable emotions that we want to explore, and not pushing them away, because those are our opportunities for growth.
Tracy’s art process gives clients the space to sit with and process those emotions. She says people are starting to recognize that pushing emotions away doesn’t work. What works is giving ourselves space to experience and explore those emotions. And this art process helps people honor all parts of the process and all parts of the experience. Whether you’re the next Van Gogh or just someone who wants to create art as a means of expression, this process can really help you do that.
I do think there’s something about co-creating with the higher power and having a tangible result that validates the experience, whether that result is for public consumption or for yourself. To have something at the end to point to and say, “I made this, and I made it in partnership with the Source” is very powerful.
As Tracy puts it, artwork becomes evidence over time. Clients look back at their artwork from three months ago, and they’ll see their whole journey during that time. She says if there’s one thing she knows she is supposed to bring to this planet, it’s to help people understand that magic is real, and the more you start interacting with that energy source, realizing that it’s all around us all the time, the more you start to rely on it.
Make it Work Moment
(28:30) Every episode, I like to give listeners tangible steps they can take to put into practice the concepts they hear on this podcast. When I have a guest, I always let the guest provide the Make It Work Moment.
Tracy’s challenge to you, the listener, is to create your own collage piece in the coming days. She challenges us (me included) to discover the theme of transformation, to journal about it, find images in magazines and elsewhere that speak to that theme in our lives, and then to sit down and create. It doesn’t have to all be done in one day, but make the space for magic to happen and for the Divine to reveal how transformation impacts your life and your business.
Share Your Artwork with Us!
Once you’ve finished your collage, we want to see it! Make sure you go to Tracy’s website or Instagram and show her what you’ve created. You can also share it with me on my Instagram or over at the Work Your Inner Wisdom Facebook community. I’m going to share my creation with you, and I can’t wait to see what you come up with!
A big thanks to Tracy Nuñez for joining me today. I hope you enjoyed her insights as much as I have. And be sure to head over to her website to check out her work and get some tips on creating a collage of your own.
Want to Dive Deeper?
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Mentioned in this Episode:
Tracy’s website: http://www.tracymarienunez.com/
This podcast was originally published on Work Your Inner Wisdom.