One of the ways that I choose a topic for a blog post each week is to look at my library of photos and choose a photo that I feel drawn to and let it inspire a thought for a blog. I know that may be a bit strange for anyone primarily left-brained, but it is how I let my inner guidance take the lead. Plus, I find it more fun than “thinking up” a topic. I also look for themes during the week in terms of what my clients tend to be talking about a lot or other topics in the media or news related to personal growth.
This week I was feeling a bit uninspired and was going to skip writing anything. However, as I looked at my photo library, the above photo of a leopard kept standing out to me. It actually felt quite haunting and I couldn’t let it go. My rational mind kept wanting to skip over it and was questioning what could I actually write about that has anything to do with a leopard?
Yet, I felt the leopard had a message for me. I decided to Google “leopard” as a totem animal and was stunned by the message. I am going through some major transitions in my life right now and sometimes feel as if I am being swept up in a current that is going faster than my mind can handle. My self-identity is shifting and expanding in ways that feel out of my control and it can be very disorienting at times. All I can do is stay as present as possible and take one step at a time.
The leopard’s message to me was this:
As a holistic psychotherapist and life coach, I work with clients all week long who are going through major transitions of one kind or another; relationship endings and beginnings, career changes, geographic changes, death or loss of a loved one, health challenges, etc.
In my recent blog entitled, Is Your Old Life Dying?, I wrote about the way in which life is speeding up these days and so many of us are seeing our old lives fall away while being called to birth something new. Many times we have no idea what this new life is supposed to be or how we are going to create it, but the old way of living simply feels outdated, suffocating, uninspired and boring. I especially see this in the clients I work with who are in their late 30’s to mid-fifties and beyond.
I listened to a call by one of my mentor coaches this week, Martha Beck, in which she talked about the rapidly accelerating pace of change that is taking place in the world, and in all of our lives, like never before. There is a quickening going on and we are finding situations in our lives collapsing in a way that we are being called to reinvent ourselves, over and over, often in profound and dramatic ways.
Over the years of working with clients as a psychotherapist and life coach, I have witnessed many people go through periods of time in which they felt everything was falling apart. Life is full of unexpected losses, changes, and transitions such as an illness, a job loss, a divorce, a cross-country move, a major financial setback, etc. However, there are those times in life in which multiple uncontrollable events may be happening all at once that push you to the edge of your ability to cope and keep you from wanting to get out of bed in the morning.