A few years ago, I was recovering from temporary paralysis.
It took only a couple weeks for the illness to steal my physical strength, but it took me a year to get it back.
I did that by pretending I was a panther.
Let me explain: The panther is a creature whose physicality I admire. When I think of a panther, adjectives that come to mind are:
fast, flexible, powerful, focused.
So, in the grand effort to regain sprightly vigor (and any semblance of calf muscles), I selected one of those panther qualities each day and used it as an intention to guide my exercise efforts.
In each workout, I expressed either speed, flexibility, power, or focus. Never all at once, just one!
For example, if I took a yoga class, I could choose to express focus by moving with exaggerated precision, alignment, and posture. Or I could push myself to stretch farther (flexibility) or hold longer (power). I could go through a sequence swiftly, if I wanted to work on speed.
I didn't know it at the time, but I was building a foundation for a longterm approach to exercise, among other parts of my life.
At that time, I called this trying to be like a panther.
Now, I call it embodying an archetype.
(Tomato, tomahto.)
When I chose a different panther quality every day, I found that I could simultaneously give myself a break and motivate myself to go harder. How does that work?!
It was all about doing my personal best at one characteristic.
If I had told myself during that recovery period, I need to get swole and I need to be able to do the splits again and I want to be perfectly aligned and also be able to sprint...
That would have really sucked.
Instead, choosing a particular area of expression every day always gave me something to feel good about, and let me off the hook from unreasonable expectations.
And this is different than bodybuilders who schedule Arm Day and Leg Day; choosing one quality (rather than body part!) was open to interpretation, and let me vary what it meant depending on energy level and class. Sometimes I demonstrated power only through my mindset, and sometimes flexibility was more about my attitude than splits.
I use archetypes in my work too:
There are days when embody the archetype of The Queen: A calm and dignified version of myself who is sitting up high enough to see the big picture, and wisely dictate what needs to be done (this is good for admin-heavy days).
On others, I'm very much The Fool: playful, mischievous, and wide open to possibility. These are my purely creative days, when I'm illuminated with ideas and fiery with brainstorms.
There are times when I feel more like The Servant, focusing much less on self and more on ways that I can serve my community or an audience. And there are those days that suggest I tap into my inner King, who seems to spend most of his time feasting and napping. There's a whole kingdom going on in this little brain.
While working on a mega project like a book, I find that changing my scenery helps me find suitable archetypes to co-write with me.
I could rent an apartment in an industrial neighborhood for two days and be the Brooklyn reclusive writer who is just tortured enough to use excessive adjectives.
Or I could book a room in the countryside and be a pensive Mary Oliver type, looking to wildflower fields in order to pen my next chapter...literally in pen.
Many motivational tools don't do the trick for me. I'm bad at keeping a routine, I break habits as soon as I start untangling my goal.
But I feel invigorated by trying on someone else's life, or experimenting with qualities that I don't claim to have. I used to want to be an actress for this reason. I love the vast range of people that anyone could be at a given time, how very many essences we can hold.
When I exercise, I become a different person (or an animal!) for an hour. I move around my inner kingdom every time I get to work.
And I enjoy shaping and re-shaping my year by exploring the different tendencies of each season. Nature has a lot of lessons on this (a coniferous tree changes its outward identity more times than a high school sophomore over four seasons), and the stars do too:
My dear friend tells me that she feels like her goal-oriented, organized personality is most appreciated during back-to-school Virgo season. As a Libra, I like that the transition time of late September/October brings out a love of beauty and imagination in many people. Maybe we can strive to embody the Pisces fluidity and go-with-the-flow-ness next February.
For the past year, I've been in a different sort of recovery period than I was after my illness: I'd been creatively expressing myself in the same way for a long time, and for a while it worked...and then it didn't.
I had a lot of moral dilemmas about social media, some unprocessed wounds from feeling over-exposed, and a whole lot of confusion about where to go next. Oh, and intense jealousy of anyone who seemed to have it figured out!
In order to gain creative strength to keep walking my own path, I took myself on solo retreats, I did a ton of journaling, I worked with a career coach, and surely bored many of my friends to tears with my over-analyzing.
Enter: The llama.
In the midst of a session one day, my coach said that he felt called to share with me a 'power animal' from a beautiful book he had on his desk. He flipped to a random page, and asked if I wanted to hear the description.
The thing about me is: When offered a power animal, I'm never going to say no.
He read the description of the llama, which made me laugh and sigh with resonance.
From Animal Power by Alyson Charles
I'd never thought about llamas that way before. Actually, to tell you the truth, I never really think about llamas.
Here are some words that stood out to me in this description:
free, mesmerized, connection, play, serenity, grand, fun, spirituality, beautiful, joy
Now, just as I did years ago with the panther, I choose one of those words a day to let guide my expression, and help answer any of my doubts.
Last week, I finally got around to unpacking my new workspace, and hung up the first piece of art I ever bought: a small bright painting of a llama I bought when I lived in Chile.
So much of this journey the past year has been a return home to myself and the sort of innocence and purity I used to create with. When I bought that painting, I had just started writing for the first time. I couldn't have known how much I was becoming myself at that time until I look back and admire that tender, intuitive 23-year-old who still teaches me so much.
I had marveled at this painting in a shop window for almost a year before I finally saved the $40 to buy it, and it was my treasure. I don't know exactly why it captivated me so much, but I like to think it had something to do with all those llama description words above, the words I'm trying to embody now.
I like to think I chose this particular archetype for my current self more than a decade ago, somehow knowing that I would appreciate this little guide some day on my office wall. I like to think that being llama-like is being Mari-like, and part of me already knew that.
I like to think that a different animal will take over in a few years (potato bug? meerkat?), and in the meantime I'll just be here with my personal kingdom, safari, trees, and stars that lend me their archetypes day to day, borrowing traits to become more like myself.
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