Several weekends ago, I was at a meditation retreat at Kripalu with one of my teachers, David Harshada Wagner. Something continued to come up for me that I couldn’t resolve. It’s not overwhelm. It’s not busy-ness. It’s not too much. It’s more like – YES – I love all this good stuff coming my way – but I also need an extra me to ENJOY it. Besides meditation, I asked, how do I gain more agility? More stamina? More bandwidth? More everything?!?!

Many of you are in the same boat…especially if you’re living an Ensemble Life (see last week’s post.)

His answer was hilarious – he even laughed out loud saying it.

“You have a capacity issue. And while there are many ways to change that, an easy one is through your spirit animal.”

After fully enjoying how very West Coast that wisdom really is, we got serious. I’ve been operating as a gazelle – a light, bounding, quick-footed animal leaping through the prairie. And that was great for my 20’s and part of my 30’s, but now I”m a mother, an author, a grown daughter, a wife. Now I need the power, strength, foresight and leadership of…a lioness. Boom.

I have a feeling you’ve traveled a similar path.

As funny as it sounds, your energetic source material – the thing you channel in your day to day essence – really informs your ability to find capacity. What’s even more interesting, is it doesn’t look that different on the outside, but on the inside, the architecture shifts and expands.

What you may need is to slow down, to do more in less time, to get smaller, to get much, much bigger. Whatever it is, an animal makes it embodied.

Thanks for not thinking I’ve gone down a mystical rabbit hole today. Once in a while the woo-woo magic is pretty practical.