Awakening Collection Inspiration

I have spent that last month designing and creating a new collection that I am really excited to share with y'all. The official collection sneak peak will be next week but I really wanted to share with y'all the inspiration behind the new collection, titled the Awakening Collection.

I went through a pretty intense spiritual awakening in the beginning of 2017 that has gone on for about three years. The process of a spiritual awakening is wild. It's different for everyone, we all gravitate towards spiritualities that fit our personalities and no two experiences will be alike. Mine looked a lot like diving into every trauma I ever had, the big and the small and healing it for myself, for my ancestors and for the collective. There have been moments of great joy and complete understanding, accompanied by times of darkness and suffering. If you have gone through your spiritual awakening you can probably relate. I would love to talk about the details a little more in a different blog post, but for now all you need to know is I went through a crazy awakening process.

I don't now if the awakening really ever ends, or if we just morph and grow as we realize different aspects of our existence here on earth and in the ether, but there have been a few things that have really kept me grounded while doing all of this spiritual work. Symbols that triggered different aspects of my awakening and symbols that comforted me in other parts. The power of symbol has become something I spend a lot of time thinking about.

I also recently learned about my ancestry and that my great great grandmother was jewish. I never really cared much for the abrahamic religions (lots of religious trauma from growing up in the deep south). But once I learned of my ancestry, I felt this calling to go deeper. To try to understand where my people come from and what they might have had to go through. The jewish symbol of the Hamsa is something that I have always felt very inspired by. The protection of the hand and the evil eye have always felt very comforting for me. So this collection really begins to explore my heritage and where my ancestors come from.

I use mainly serpents and eyeballs symbols in this collection. The snakes came to be at the beginning of my shadow work in a strange synchronicity. I found two baby snakes in my house when I first moved into it and there was something about the way the snakes wrapped in on themselves that mesmerized me. I felt so connected to these animals in a way that I couldn't explain. The snake of the ouroboros, the kundalini rising, even the way a snake sheds it's skin, all symbolized the beginning of the next chapter of my life. The chapter when my truly awakened life began. 

For this Awakening collection I wanted to really highlight the symbols that have gotten me through the hard times. We all go through hard times, a lot of what this earthly life is about is suffering. And while life can be hard and grueling we always have a choice when it comes to our mindset. Our mindset really frames the way we look at the world. For this collection I wanted to create pieces that would be spiritually deep, but really have the soul purpose of being beautiful. The world can look so ugly sometimes, and sometimes we really just need something beautiful to look at to remind us that life can be really awesome, and focusing on the beauty in the little things is a simple step anyone can take to change their entire outlook on life. 

There's so much more to say about the inspiration for the Awakening collection, but really It marks the beginning of a new chapter for Left Handed MFG. A chapter where we start the process of putting it all out on the line and being as authentically vulnerable as possible. My spiritual awakening has influenced every part of my life big and small. I felt so much fear around sharing it within my business because I had this voice in my head that told me to stay clear of politics and religion. But in reality religion is something that we can really all relate to in some way. More so the spirituality. When we put our egos aside, and try to remember that there is an infinite number of ways to have a relationship with God I think there is a really beautiful opportunity to connect with people in a very real and authentic way. I seek to break down the walls of religion and long to bring spirituality back to what it is at the core.

My artistic talent is a gift from the divine, I believe. And I long to use this gift to bring ideas from the spirit realm down to the earth. Truly my intention is to glorify beauty. Beauty seems to be something that really goes beyond language and understanding. And like I said before, paying attention to the beauty in life really does have such a compounding effect on your life. I seek to create beauty so that maybe, even just one more person can see the world through a more beautiful lens.