Live Your F*ckin’ Fairytale.
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I’ve heard several spiritual teachers tell their students, “That’s just a story,” as if story was just some playtime thing to be sneered at, discarded, and thrown aside. Like somehow living spiritually means that we are oh-so-superior to the juvenile realm of story.
I wonder, have they considered that this life — with all its triumphs and tragedies, with all its pleasures and pain, with all its wild twists and turns — is nothing more than a brilliant story that we are co-creating together? Have they been so frightened by their own story that they’ve become paralyzed at the wheel, repeatedly butting their heads against the revolving spokes on the great turning of life?
Shame is a powerful, pedagogical tactic used by those whose deep wounds are festering just below their line of sight. “That’s just a story” feels like another deliverance of shame disguised as some kind of detox plan or soul-cleanse, meant to clear away the cobwebs of the psyche and leave us lighter, brighter, and vibrating higher. And while shame can be a powerful control mechanism, it ultimately leads us down a path where our wounds are nothing more than the sources of our grief, rather than the fuel for our greatest expression of life.
I’m here to offer a friendly, but kick-in-the-ass, public service announcement: No matter how hard we try to deny or transcend, there is really no escaping this wild story called Life.
In a world so divorced from our own original mythology, we so easily forget that we are ourselves the inhabitants of an unfolding human narrative. Transcending story, we leave behind not only the worst, but also the very best, of what it means to be alive. We risk losing the wisdom that arises from reading between the lines of our own fairytales and the inner peace that arrives in the reclamation of our wildest allegories. Dismissing story, we abandon what it means to be fully human.
The more we deny the power of our stories, the more control they have over us from an unconscious place — keeping us hustling on that endless hamster wheel for that fleeting taste of liberation. Without an intimate relationship to myth, we lose the ability to read our internal compass, that guiding poetic force within us that speaks to us and informs the plotline of our lives. Sans story, we lack any substantial depth and, thus, ascendant height.
Redeeming our stories, we fulfill a need of the human soul to forge mass from emptiness, form from formlessness. As we reacquaint ourselves with story, we chip away at the corrosion built up within the rusty padlocks keeping us chained to repeating our mistakes over and over again.
Story possesses the meaning that arises from the indifference of the natural world. It is the nectar that begs to be tasted, the magic that bubbles just beneath the mundane. It is the glory that seeks to be gazed upon, as we wander blindfolded through the worldly realities of this life.
And like most great truths, there is an enigma inherent in this realization. For it is not until we reclaim ownership of our stories that we can realize ourselves as the infinite spaciousness from which fairytales arise. It is not until we can allow story to pierce the most vulnerable places within that we can know again what it is to be wholly human.
Yes, perhaps it’s just a story — but that does not make it any less real.
As life steps up to meet us, concurrently we must step up to meet life. From the tales we all tell ourselves, to the mythology inherited from the ones that came before, the story of humanity is one we each have the power to create and recreate in each waking moment. Our creative powers are revealed only when we make the conscious choice to step into our roles as poets and storytellers, as artisans who weave this reality by the very seat of our ripped jeans.
As we learn to renegotiate the terms by which we relate to the imaginative expression of our mutual destinies, we are given the opportunity to live a story that serves the alchemy of an awakened humanity. It is then that we have a chance to be directors, as well as actors, in this epic odyssey realized.
Reclaim your story and make your life your mythopoetic magic.
Go ahead, Wild One, and live your f*cking fairytale.
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Rachael Alaia is a truth-seeker and a wild child. As founder of Wild Soul Wellness, she is on a passion-driven mission to reawaken the instinctual nature of humanity as a force of healing on this planet. She knows that we become embodied leaders of progressive change when we return to the powers of the wild and sacred. Rachael chooses to dance through life with passion and a playful heart by honoring the self-organizing principles of the Earth and reimagining what it means to be human. Living in harmony with the principles of holism, the ecology of wellness, and the powerful creative force of the feminine, we each have an opportunity to contribute to a new story of humanity. As an educator, mentor, and healer, Rachael draws from a blend of ancient tradition and modern knowledge as magic for the soul and medicine for the planet. You could contact Rachael via Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or Pinterest.
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