About six months ago, a jaguar started coming to me. First, through an animal medicine card on the summer solstice. Then, in visions. And when I still wasn’t getting the message, it visited me in the dream realm and showed me the part of myself that was murdering it and draining its creative life force.
The dead jaguar caught my attention. At this point, the jaguar was in my conscious awareness, but I still hadn’t fully decoded the message. I sensed it was something about living up to my creative potential and connected to some form of expression. I knew the jaguar symbolized integrity and impeccability and represented the mental body, and that it was an archetype of transformation that revealed its creative power through death and rebirth.
I mean, that all sounded cool, but it still wasn’t adding up. And I knew some part of me was dying, but I wasn’t sure how to revive it. At the time, my life in 3D was in chaos, so my spiritual scavenger hunt with the jaguar was bookmarked for another day. My rational mind put the mystical shit on the back burner and returned to the fires I was putting out IRL.
And here’s the thing, our soul work — our WORK — doesn’t always make sense. There’s never a “good time” for it. It usually defies logic and flies us off the radar. It challenges us to commit to something beyond our daily To Do list. It asks us to make space for a devotional act of sacred expression.
When a soul assignment makes its debut, it usually arrives gently. It nudges us into a different part of the river to see if we’ll catch the current and change course. If we resist or ignore the gentle encouragement long enough, then the invitations turn into swift kicks in the ass. And if those don’t work, well, best get your life jacket.
Recently, one of these soul assignments that I’d been denying finally got my attention. I had to be thrown from the boat and exhaust myself trying to swim against the current before I realized that the river was guiding me in another direction. Who me? Oooooh, I didn’t realize you were talking to ME.
The funny thing was, once I acknowledged and admitted this soul duty, I could trace the thread back about five years. The signs were all there and they were clear. I’d been receiving these messages since 2014. I vaguely knew this idea existed somewhere in the back of my mind, but it wasn’t a real priority. I hadn’t taken this WORK seriously.
It was one of those if / then negotiations where the if kept appearing in different forms and the then never arrived. There was always some mundane distraction or survival game or logical reason that kept me from truly committing to this real WORK. Then five years passed. And I’d drifted so far off course from my soul curriculum that my spirit took drastic measures to get the message across.
First, it kicked up some natural disasters and shit storms in my life to put me on high alert. It brought the alarm bells into my external world since I kept hitting snooze on the inside. Then, it sent a jaguar spouting blood all over my dreams to give my conscious mind a kick in the head. Now, I knew something was up, but I still hadn’t connected the dots.
Luckily, my soul brother is a gifted coach who coerced me into confessing this secret creative desire that I hadn’t even admitted to myself. Once I told him that there was this one thing that I’d always wanted to write but never had, it was over. My WORK was clear. And now I had a witness. No more bullshit.
Unsurprisingly, this confession coincided with a rush of creative energy that flooded through me as soon as I moved that obstinate part of myself out of the way. This story that I had “no idea” about less than a week ago came through almost fully formed in a number of days. The river was flowing again. And I was riding the current instead of fighting against it.
At the time this creative confessional poured out of me and the story came through, I was designing a Creative Alchemy process for my clients. Part of this healing process of using your story as a tool for transformation is finding your myth and then expressing your unique version of it. This sacred expression is less about the form or outcome, and more about opening up to however this universal life force wishes to flow through you.
But this Creative Alchemy journey couldn’t fully come into form until I allowed this story, my own personal myth, to come through me and into the world FIRST. Not after all of my mundane tasks were in order (which means, you know, never). Not after I’d launched the program. Not after I retired on some tropical island. NOW.
I’d found my myth years ago, but that was only part of the equation. I discovered it, did a quick drive-by, and kept moving. Heyo! Nice to see you, Myth. Looks like you’re enjoying life in that cave. Gotta get back to work. See ya!
So, it sat there. Waiting for my return. It was stuck inside of me and it would remain there blocking the flow of the river—my creative life force—as long as I kept my distance. And nothing in my life could move until I created space for this real WORK to come into form.
This may seem obvious as I connect the dots—a “no shit, Sherlock” discovery—but let me tell you this was a REVELATION. I’d dismissed and delayed this idea for so long that I didn’t see any of this coming.
This is why we need each other. We are all mirrors for one another. We need each other’s reflections to reveal what’s hiding in our blind spots. And myth is here as the universal mirror to reflect our Self back to us—to help us find our unique location on the collective map of Life.
Without the skillful questions, loving presence, and fierce conviction of my soul friend, it would have taken who-knows-how-long for me to be honest with myself about this creative desire. Maybe another five years of me flailing in the river, fighting against the current, hanging on for dear life. Maybe longer.
Rewriting my myth was the final piece (or, as another wise friend noted, the final peace) that I was looking for all along.
This is my real WORK.
What’s yours?