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Dikenga

@dikenga.life

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✿ Where expression & creativity flourish
♡ Create a fertile and alive body
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🌀Dikenga is a symbol used by my ancestors, the Bakongo, to illustrate their perception of time, life and the cosmos.

They believed that every life force moves through cyclical rhythms and they saw this movement in humans, plants and even ideas.

This foundational symbol got mostly forgotten in the two Congos due to the multiples colonisations and genocides but traveled to the Americas expressing itself through Voodoo or Candomblé.

🌀I remember that when I came into contact with the symbol of the suncross or simplified spiral, I used to force outcomes and make « things happen » not considering other cycles at play or my inner compass.

It shows in the projects, relationships that seemed to collapse one after another. I was told that to heal my creative center, I had to create a music project per season moving in counterclowise motion. Starting with winter being the frozen state I was in.

Listening to those signals and rhythms, helped me take better decisions overtime and create from a place of expression instead of performance. This is how building the space of Dikenga came into life.

🌀Before creating the website, my grandfather said to me that I’ve been at war with myself for too long at that it was time to reconcile. By using the Dikenga in this counterclockwise motion, my intent is to bring regeneration in my body and let it feed my offers and collaborations.

What I envision, is to create a space where we remember our interconnectedness and where we can celebrate and experience the fullness of our human expression.

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Day 6 of Ripple Challenge by @lakedays.co by @dikenga.life

Hey it’s Corinne ✌🏾
I am the human behind dikenga and I realized that I never truly shared the journey that led me here.

🌀I love exploring my own creativity and the full spectrum of my emotional expression. As a child, I loved reading, singing and not minding my own business which earn the nickname of songi songi (a very gossipy person). I started to perform once I realized that this expression was not not being accepted by my family.

🌀I lived life in constant summer: worked, danced, ran and eventually burned out. Hiding at become a second nature and I was tired of not showing up as the authentic me. And this even showed in my cryptic selfies…

🌀Eventually, I took a leap of faith and poured my heart into my first music project and… crashed. Anxiety, flashbacks of traumatic situations all came to hunt me. I spent the last years listening to all the ghosts of the past. Got better, at times sicker. No straight line.

🌀I struggled with endometriosis for decades and developed a rare blood disease that accelerated my transformation. My body wanted to be held, hydrated, nourished and rested. And eventually, I stopped being at war with myself. All the diseases are fading away and I am now in awe of the body’s capacity to heal itself.

I love sharing what I learn and meeting other people who also want to radiate their most authentic self.

📷 First picture is from @line_beckmann - thank you for capturing this moment of creative void …

💧This is day 1 of the Ripple challenge from @lakedays.co by @dikenga.life

🌀The Joy & Creativity beyond Legacy

Legacy often hands us a script before we are even born. It tells us who to be, how to be successful, and what to value. We want to perpetuate the traditions, the roles in honor of our family or country.

But what happens when this heritage is riddled with exploitation, colonial extraction, wars and distorted narratives?

As a teen, I used to search for books to understand what the DRC was prior to the multiple colonizations and genocides. Questioning if I was Congolese enough and feeling somehow so disconnected from myself. Not realizing that those questions and sensations were the results of exploring the living libraries that my parents and grandparents are.

I could see how they disconnected from the pain of merely surviving. And being born in a different country granted me the privilege to actually feel that pain and accept my place in this bloodline.

Congolese people are some of the boldest, most creative people I ever met. And I spent my life wondering if I could live up to that standard. And this expectation kept me captive in a self-imposed cage.

Maybe it is less about what the ancestors did but more about which kind of ancestor we would like to be for the future generations.

Maybe it’s less about performing traditions and rituals but more about accepting that our life, language may be completely different but that paradoxically we are exactly what the bloodline needs at this time.

It’s about tapping into the joy of existing for ourselves, first, and create from that place.

Because our aliveness is our bloodline’s greatest gift. by @dikenga.life

I spent years confronting and exposing my inner critic. It brought me places but never created lasting change.

It’s because I wasn’t getting at the root of the issue. After trauma or abuse, our body reorganises its life force towards protection and survival. The self which is pure expression cannot really be at the center stage until the abuse is seen, accepted, processed.

To speak authentically is to realise how our consciousness is being filtered through our past experiences, affecting our perception, creating our reality and defining our choices in life.

The goal is to work on those filters, get new eyes to be able to speak from a place of authority. The goal is to bring the self as the main character again. It becomes more about sharing yourself with others rather than extracting validity from the outside. by @dikenga.life

The inner critic kills our creativity.

It rears its head our most courageous moment. I created and also received opportunities in which I could get in contact with it.

Exposure is in a crucial phase, it builds our capacity to be comfortable with discomfort. Nevertheless, no matter how often I practiced or « faked it til I made it », I still felt hold back.

I could be next it but not looked at it deeply. This is when the real confrontation started. by @dikenga.life

👾 quietly loud
👾 gently overwhelming
👾 fiercely tender
👾 simply complex
👾 dangerously safe

🌀ancient visionaries

Maybe the question is not how do I fix it, but can I hold it? by @dikenga.life

Child… 🐺

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Day 10 of Ripple Challenge. Thank you @lakedays.co for pushing us to get out of our cave and making it fun 💛 by @dikenga.life

We often think of a “tongue-tie” as a purely physical medical condition. But there is an emotional version of this restriction: The Captive Voice. This happens when you subconsciously lock your voice away because your raw, authentic truth might upset, disturb, or trigger the people around you.

When you force your voice into hiding to keep the peace, your body pays the ransom: physical aches, mental anxiety and emotional suppression.

Healing a captive voice isn’t about forcing yourself to suddenly shout your deepest secrets to the world. That feels too unsafe for a locked-down nervous system.

True liberation starts from the inside out, by gently showing your fascia and your nervous system that it is safe to vibrate, safe to occupy space, and safe to open up.

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📸 Photo credit : Yishen Ji & Maharsh Borad

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Day 9 of Ripple Challenge by @lakedays.co

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Hi, I’m Corinne - an artist and coach passionate about sharing and teaching about how to reconnect with our vitality and truest creative expression.

You can find my upcoming course Homebody via the link in bio. by @dikenga.life

🦅 Which kind of bird are you?

I see birds as a mirror for our expression and communication style. I spent a lot of time with coots the last years and by learning about them, I also learnt about my shadow:

- Quietly floating & attacking out of seemingly nowhere
- Loud but only when necessary
- Shielded to keep people at bay and hide vulnerability
- Fiercely territorial

I unfortunately move a little bit away from the lake and don’t see them as much, but I am now realizing that have integrated a few aspects:

- The shield is gone and I had to adjust to being seen and vulnerable
- I no longer feel the need to use my word as grenades

But the girl is still territorial and could be louder.

What’s your favorite bird?

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Day 8 of the Ripple Challenge by @lakedays.co by @dikenga.life

2022 was a time when I was trapped in a constant loop of burnouts. Hoping that nature, the sun will help me recover.

When we burnout, we usually get trapped in the wildfire and fuming phase - always racing and at the same time numb and exhausted. We treat our body as a crisis zone or machine instead of the expression of an ecosystem.

Our exhaustion comes from the conditions of our soil: compact, dry and impenetrable.

Healing from burnout is not about learning how to put out the fire, nor is it about waiting for the ash to cool. Healing is the architectural task of building a fireplace, that is to say creating the conditions in your body for your vitality to bloom again.

Last thing I want to stress is that burnout is a clear reflection of the extractive systems existing in our society and not personal failure. That being said when we understand how our body functions and the external factors that influence it - we can think about how to minimise them and how we want to use our life force.

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Hi, I’m Corinne - an artist and coach passionate about sharing and teaching about how to reconnect with our vitality and truest creative expression.

Follow me here for more insights.

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Day 7 of Ripple Challenge by @lakedays.co by @dikenga.life

Source: Be the instrument
Rachelle: ⚡️⚡️⚡️

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Day 05 of Ripple Challenge by @lakedays.co by @dikenga.life