If you’re like me, then at some point in your life you awoke to a startling realization: that although your childhood instilled you with a particular map and compass for navigating this life, and although this framework served you for the first 2-3 decades of life, at some point (for me, it was at ~26 years old), you realized that life expands far beyond these limited viewpoints, and there is now a need to discern the best direction to go.
What paths are yours to follow in life? What paths are those that will best serve your ability to express yourself fully and truly, allowing your heart to shine brightly as the curiosities of your mind are answered and as your soul is fulfilled?
These questions became my guiding light, taking me out of the constrained worldview I had found myself in, allowing me to explore and expand as I wove together a meaningful map and compass that truly served my life:
- Bringing me true joy and deep, soul enriching fulfillment
- Bringing me into heart-centered connection, with others who are aligned with me and my soul-centered path, and also with self, and with Earth
- Bringing me healing as I mended the painful wounds I had accrued while living life out of alignment
- Bringing me healing as I came to know myself as whole, complete, and interconnected with this world
This is but a small list of all the ways my life transformed as I stopped living from the limited viewpoints that had been instilled within me, and as I opened to the vast ways in which we can receive wisdom along the many paths that open to us in life.
Recognize that these paths may be directly spiritual (such as a yoga or meditation tradition, a traditional religion, etc.), or, these paths may exist as any other walk of life that has the potential to be every bit as spiritual as anything else (e.g., trail running, mountaineering, or rock climbing, which are 3 deeply spiritual and embodied paths I, myself, follow). To list a few more ideas for what could be woven in here:
- a relationship or a family, mother/fatherhood – each which require us to know ourselves in relation to others
- a service project, which requires our heart-centered devotion, hard work, intelligent thinking, and a discernment that guides us through all the complex choices
- a hobby (knitting, weaving, gardening, hiking, writing, singing, playing an instrument etc.)
- a physical endeavor – again, trail running, rock climbing, and mountaineering being my favorite, along with my yoga asana practice
Truly, the bullet list is endless as we open to the realization that any and all parts of life are game when it comes to knowing ourselves ever-more truly, letting go of harmful or other unskillful patterns, calling in and embodying more light, becoming more deeply heart-centered and discerning, becoming more deeply grounded, and more!
This, here, is beginning to get to the core themes of the embodiment path: a spiritual path that is centered on the modern individual as he/she/they explore the open and endless opportunity to show up for life in all their creative expressions!
With this post, we will explore this path as it relates to the experiences that the modern human being is likely to bump up against. It is my hope and intention that it may serve you, dear reader, in cultivating your own soul-centered, embodied path through your unique and wild life.
A world of extreme abundance (learning to discern with clarity and dissolve overwhelm)
If you’re like me, as an individual who awoke to find yourself in the 21st century, you recognize that we are privileged in these times with unlimited access to receiving guidance and information that holds promise of paths worth pursuing. Just take any moment to scroll through Instagram or YouTube, and you’ll be bombarded with hoards of posts about what you should be spending your time doing to best heal/transform/fulfill self. And, if you’re like me, then the natural response is that of overwhelm, often coupled with anxiety, leaving us feeling paralyzed in desire to do far more than any individual could ever do in a lifetime.
Loves, we have got to learn discernment, and grounding, and all the abilities that help us stay centered, aligned on the paths the matter most for our own sovereign, individual selves. We do this as we learn and grow and heal and otherwise transform into more soul-aligned, fully expressed versions of self.
This is The Embodied Path, and it has everything to do with how you can live your truest, most authentic life.
My own story of ungrounding, overwhelm, crippling anxiety, and other shitty experiences of life
Let me tell you something about me. As a 7x Sagittarius (that means my sun, ascendant, moon, n. node, and 3 planets are all in Sagittarius!), I am someone who is constantly driven to explore any and all paths that speak to me. Embodying that fiery arrow soaring through the ethers (that’s the Sagittarius symbol, by the way), I am one who is constantly pulled in one direction, then the next, then the next! Gosh, in any one moment it’s like my heart and mind are shooting off in different directions, pulling me in all directions as my soul-centered self gets thinner and thinner. The quest for information and truth pulls at me just as the quest for adventure and athletic pursuit rips through my heart. I need to be here and there but also over there and then back here again!
Ugh. Talk about being ungrounded.
At the age of 28 (this was during the heart of the Covid pandemic), I had found myself fully thinned out. My inner and outer worlds had turned to fire, and I had no sense of direction that held any valid meaning any longer.
I needed a grounded path forward, but with little spiritual guidance in my life, I knew nothing of what to do!
For the first 2-3 decades of my life, I had pursued the path laid down me with ferocity. The path, being one instilled in me of devotion to academics and athletics, drove me to study and compete with a focus that consumed the totality of my life. I loved it! But then it was over. School ended, and finding myself as an adult out in the world, I couldn’t seem to make any good choices. I had no idea where to direct myself to. More than this, I had no idea how to direct myself in life in a way that offered true joy and soul-deep fulfillment.
This is the point of the story where someone usually interjects with some version of the story:
- this is when I heard the voice of God
- this is when I turned to Jesus
- this is when I found yoga and it saved me
- this is when I started my meditation practice and it saved my life
- this is when I entered a Buddhist temple and my world changed forever
My story actually sounds nothing like any of these traditional spiritual awakenings (although, my spiritual path does eventually call in weavings of most of the above).
Truly, it’s trail running that saved me. When nothing else could, it was literally signing up for a hundred mile trail running event that saved me.
You guys, I cannot make this shit up.
I had tried many of the traditional paths that countless books and speeches have laid praise to. Again, as a 7X Sagittarius, believe me when I say I had tried, and I had tried hard! At the time, I was even immersed in my second and third yoga teacher trainings, and while I was loving the principles and theories I was being taught, my reality was that yoga and meditation practices were proving to only make my anxiety worse and send me into what were then regular panic attacks. No traditional spiritual practice was helping!
What helped? I would put on my running shoes, head to the trails, run up a mountain, and here I could finally feel okay:
- The fires within me would settle
- I could find the ground beneath my feet
- I could breathe deeply and freely
- The chaos in my head would settle
- Thoughts became clear
- I could at last be present – truly present – with all that I needed to be present to
I found my own way to the presence, to the peace, the joy, the connection, and the healing that I was seeking as I followed my own heart and curious mind into the spaces that spoke to me at the time. I recognize that the way I did this was wild! But it worked!
More than this, my wild path healed wounds and opened doors that would finally allow me to embrace some of the more “traditional” ways of engaging with spiritual practice. After some time, I would be able to cultivate a more traditional yoga and meditation practice, and also even begin to open to the realms of spirit, gods and goddesses, and more.
With this, recognize that the embodied path is not one that shuns traditional spiritual nor religious paths. These days I am deeply involved in my personal yoga asana practice, I meditate regularly, and I teach a yoga class. I have an altar space devoted to gods and goddesses that I am working closely with. These traditional practices serve me today to call in all the spiritual experiences and states I listed above, even though, at the time, I could only cultivate those experiences and states while out moving my body on the trails.
It’s just, given the poor spiritual shape I was in back in those days, these practices were not aligned for me.
I had to heal while outside, feet in direct connection to the Earth, breathing freely with the forest. I needed an open sky above me and life in full expression around me. A sticky mat or yoga cushion couldn’t do that for me during these times. Today, these serve me well.
A particularly unique spiritual path: The Rock Wall
I will also take a moment, here, to weave in a particularly wild spiritual path that has unfolded for me throughout adulthood. Rock climbing, an experience that tests the individual through strong physical, mental, and emotional challenge, is a space that has held a deepest of spiritual seeking for myself.
For years prior to what me may call my “spiritual awakening,” rock climbing had my heart. It’s a space I could show up, apply myself fully (mind and body), test myself, work through fear, achieve, make incredible friends, experience beautiful spaces, and more!
However, when my world went up in flame at the age of 26, it is rock climbing that was taken from me. I did not let it go easy, but eventually torn arm ligaments, chronic and crippling anxiety, and panic attacks make the experience so awful that I had to relinquish it.
I blame the whole thing on my ridiculous and unskillful clinging to the sport. When all else in my life had gone to complete shit, and when scary forces had shown up to reveal real threat to me, I clung to rock climbing with all I had. Here, the only space that I felt control, I would push myself to climb harder and harder.
In the end, I was left crippled in extreme bouts of panic and anxiety. These met me in my daily life, but they showed up in greatest force while on the rock wall.
I remember the first time it happened….
It happened on the wall, and no, it wasn’t even a hard nor particularly scary climb. It is safe to say that it had nothing to do with the inherent fear that comes through rock climbing. Truly, this climb was just an easy warm up.
Still, I went into full panic. I couldn’t breathe, and I couldn’t find any sense of grounded connection to the solid rock. All I could see was myself in free fall.
My nervous system had crumbled. Demons found their way in.
I was left devastated. My life, as I had known it, was completely gone. Anything that had held value before had dissolved. My body was chronically consumed by fire (label it anxiety, PTSD, panic, or whatever you want… I prefer the descriptor “fire” and “demons”).
I had lost most everything. Very little remained. But it is this “very little” that I learned to turn my attention to, and with it, grow an entirely new life: one that would, yea, take a fuck ton of grieving and healing and battling my way through demons – but one that would eventually lead to solid ground beneath my feet, a centering focused on what matters, and a routine ability to deal with waves of anxiety (yea, those still show up regularly. But I mean, have you seen the world we live in?).
This is all to say, that what happened to me is the exact thing that all my spiritual teachers say. When you live a life out of alignment, there are going to be signs that offer a different path. If you don’t follow those signs, then they will get louder and louder. If you continue to ignore the signs, then one day you are hit with a spiritual two-by-four, or else, the ground beneath you is taken away as you find yourself in a fiery free-fall.
Life has a way of speaking to us. It is here to guide us in directions that we best be going if we are going to cultivate the joy, the peace, the soul-centered fulfillment, the connection, and all the other spiritual desires that we are seeking.
You have to be able to listen to life as it speaks to you, and you have to be able to respond with skillful action.
This does not mean that you have to give up your life as you know it to join some established spiritual path or religion, but it does mean that you need to be prepared for life to change.
Don’t worry. This will, ultimately, be for the best.
When life shows up, speaking to you of choices you ought to make to better align your life path with that which is most true for you, you best listen.
If you don’t, that’s okay. But chances are that voice will get louder and louder over time, and eventually will win out. Chances are, the delayed path will suck more. Regardless, any of these paths will eventually strip away all that is out of alignment and bring you to solid ground. From here, you are now truly free to create your life in a way that serves:
- serving your own self, as you heal and awake to the expression of self that will bring you true fulfillment
- serving the world we are all part of – because, when you are in alignment, you will be showing up for the world beyond yourself
Your embodiment path is about so much more than just you
If you’re like me, you were taught that life is about you and your achievements.
Or, if you’re like others who I’ve met in my spiritual circles, you’ve been taught that life is solely about your ability to serve others.
I recognize these as two poles of an outdated spectrum that most of us have been taught. On one end, we are self-centered and working for our own gain. On the other end, we are self-sacrificing and working for the good of others.
The embodied path is here to dissolve this outdated, untrue spectrum.
In its place, we are here to embody a way of being that recognizes how interconnected we are with that which expands outside of self. As part of the web of life, interwoven with it all, there is nothing that we can do unto self that does not also affect the whole web. Simultaneously, there is nothing that we can do to the web of life that does not have a parallel within self.
Yes, I will be clear that some sort of spectrum between selfish and selfless still exists, and as we walk the embodied path, we swing from one end to the next:
- When I am working on my ponderosa seed project (which, today, looks like harvesting seeds from pine cones I picked up in my backyard forest), I am in service to the forest around me. This isn’t entirely selfless, but planting trees so that future generations and others may enjoy them lends itself towards the “service to others” pole
- When I am rock climbing, I recognize the act as almost entirely selfish. It is just me up there on the wall, working with self through challenges and towards goals that center on self
Still, most of the time, we recognize that our acts are some combination of both.
For example, my time spent trail running as I work towards “selfish” goals has been the most powerful path of spiritual connection with that which lives outside of self. It is the space from which my connection to the land unfolded, and it serves the foundation for all the reforesting work I now do. More than this, it has brought me into community with those who share similar values. It is the space in which I received the first inspiration (and continued inspiration) for the whole of We Are The Forest, The Mountain Mystic, and all the creative spaces I hold.
As another example, when I hold my Earth Priestessing Circles, my service is to the human beings who show up for circle, and my service is to the Earth that receives the fruit of our work in this special space. The ripple effect impacts humans just as it impacts the land and Earth, herself. Here, I receive much of my own inspiration, and I know there is healing and much light-filled transformation unfolding for self as well.
Get the point? No act is truly entirely selfish or selfless, but as we walk the embodied path we find ourselves swinging on a sort of pendulum. Yes, some acts are more focused on “self” and some acts are more focused on “other.” But no act is done in isolation from self/other.
I go to the extent of writing all of this out because our world seems to be stuck in an unskillful polarity here. We argue (externally, among selves, but also internally, within self) about where our time and energy is best spent. We throw out words like “selfish” as put downs towards others, and we feel the shame of it within self. It just doesn’t serve anyone, and this toxic, unskillful polarity is ready to die out.
The embodied path offers you a more wholesome view of understanding yourself in relation to the world
Whether we are talking about the joyful, creative paths that find our way to us…
Whether we are talking about the healing, peace-bringing paths that find our way to us…
Whether we are talking about the service driven paths that find our way to us…
Whether we are talking about the relationship, or community driven paths that find our way to us…
Whether we are talking about the traditional spiritual or religious paths that find their way to us…
It is all the same.
The embodied path views all paths in the same light: as opportunities for life to show up, move through us, and be experienced as we experience joy and fulfillment, challenge and reward, hurt and healing, and all the rest. Along the way, may we call upon each and every path, each and every moment, to cultivate wiser, more skillful discernment.
In this way, we move through life:
- Connecting in each present moment with more of that which we desire
- Moving forward into future moments with more skill, so that we may continue to call in greater joy, more wholesome connection, and deeper fulfillment
Subscribe to The Mountain Mystic Newsletter to receive further posts and all offerings centered on The Embodied Path