When your soul calls, do you answer?

#TransparentTuesdays

Hi friend,

Last weekend was the final run of my community theater production of the musical Rent, and…whew. I feel such an interesting mix of emotions about this experience ending!

On the one hand, I am so sad for it to be over. As scary and overwhelming as this whole thing was, I really loved the rehearsal process, connecting with new people and remembering how joyful it is to sing and dance and tell stories that feel meaningful. After that came the performance part, and I was surprised to discover that I loved that part too, if anything even more than the rehearsal part. 

Having an audience was exhilarating, but the coolest part for me was the big transition from practicing to performing; from thinking to doing. 

As a cast, it was like we were suddenly playing a completely different game, and I found that shift incredibly empowering. Instead of the lightly submissive role of trying to remember everything, do it right, and make the director happy, we were suddenly thrust into the more dominant role of taking the audience on a journey, and giving them an experience. 

The whole experience was beautiful, powerful, and fun as hell. I loved having a place where I went to play with my friends every day, and I’m definitely going to miss that.

On the other hand, this experience took so much time and energy that I had to let a lot of other things fall to the wayside to make it work. So I am undeniably excited to have my life back, and to be able to reinvest in some of the things that got put on a back burner. 

But the biggest feeling coming up for me right now as I process this whole experience is just… gratitude. 

I went to college for acting because I thought I loved performing, but in my early twenties I realized that I didn’t love it enough to really pursue it as a career. I found other things that I was passionate about to pursue instead, and I found other ways to express myself creatively, and make a difference in the world that filled the tank I once thought could only be filled by theater. 

I never thought I would find myself back in a space like this, and admittedly I never even really wanted to. 

I auditioned because I felt like the universe wanted me to, and also because my life had gotten smaller since Covid, so I wanted to tap into the life-expanding power of fear-facing by doing something way outside my comfort zone. 

As it turns out, I was absolutely right, and this experience has expanded my life in ways I didn’t even know I needed. 

I didn’t realize how badly I still needed to heal my relationship with my voice, which has been rocky since I got blisters on my vocal chords in college. I didn’t realize how many wounds I still carried about performing, or the feeling of belonging in a community of people I perceived as having rejected me. And I didn’t realize how decades of focusing on building my business had injured my relationship with play, how rigid and blocked my concept of play had become, or how powerful it would be to shake that up again. 

I never could have guessed that this show would be so deeply healing, empowering, affirming, or expansive, which makes it fascinating to look back at my decision to audition. I had no real conscious idea why I was doing it, but I trusted my gut, and I trusted the universe. 

I am so grateful for every single person who made this experience possible, and helped me heal and grow. 

I’m grateful to the warm and supportive production team who gently shepherded me back to this part of myself. I’m grateful to my fellow castmates (and new friends for life!) with whom I went through all the highs and lows of the human experience together. I’m grateful to the audience and the local community who embraced us and our project so fully. And I’m grateful to the magical stranger at a pool party this summer who told me about the auditions in the first place. 

Perhaps most transformatively, however, I find myself filled with an extraordinary depth of love and gratitude for the me of three months ago, who decided to take the risk and follow their intuition.

Trusting my gut, my body, or my soul (all of which are the same thing, to me), has always been my north star.

I’ve always strived to center and prioritize that deep-down and authentic soul-knowing above all else, and I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that every good thing in my life has come on the other side of doing so. 

It’s never easy, though.

After all, it requires being so connected with your body and intuition that you can hear and understand those messages in the first place… which can be incredibly challenging for a wide variety of reasons in the world we live in.

I think I’d been struggling with this a bit over the last five years because the pandemic, mental health struggles, medications, and burnout all interrupted my ability to connect with myself, my body, and my intuition to different degrees. 

The messages were still there, and I was still listening, but they seemed to be more muffled and quiet than I was used to, and I felt less confident in acting on them.

Then, even when you know what your intuition is telling you, you still have to be courageous enough to act on those messages… which is incredibly challenging in its own right, because our soul’s deepest desires are rarely aligned with everything we’re taught about the good, right, safe, and responsible way to live!

Our souls never seem to tell us to take the sensible job with the good benefits package, or to stay in a difficult marriage in order to avoid the scary prospect of starting over, do they? 

No. 

Our souls aren’t interested in what’s safe, smart, responsible, or easy. They only care about one thing: becoming the most expansive, joyful, and fulfilled version of ourselves.

There are always a million rational, logical reasons not to do something that we feel called to do, and there is only ever the one reason to do it: because I feel called to it. 

Because I want to. 

In order to audition for and do this show, I had to ignore the million logical and rational arguments I had for why doing so wasn’t a good idea. 

“I don’t have the time.”

“It’ll cost me too much in terms of energy and capacity.”

“I won’t get in anyway.”

“I won’t be good at it.” 

“What’s even the point?”

I had to watch all of those reasons not to audition parade across my mind, and decide that the whole collective argument against it weighed less than my one single argument for it: because my soul is asking me to.

It’s obvious now that it was the right thing to do, but at the time it really felt silly, stupid, and ridiculous. I am so deeply grateful that I set all that stuff aside, and chose to follow my north star. 

The truth is that our soul’s messages can only ever be validated by choosing to follow them. If I’d listened to all those reasons not to audition, I would have spent the rest of my life sure that I had made the right decision. 

I would have gotten busy, or stressed, or tired, and thought to myself “see— I knew it would have been too much, I’m so glad I didn’t audition!” 

And this is what we so often do. When we listen to our minds, our minds will then tell us that we made the right decision. But when we listen to our souls, it is our souls that will then tell us we made the right decision. And if we do that often enough, our lives will expand and change and improve in ways that we could never have imagined.

So today, I want to invite you to consider what your soul is telling you to do. What is it whispering about? What feels like a deep-down yes, or a deep down no that you’ve been talking yourself out of? 

What does your soul want?

And are you brave enough to listen?

Big hug,

Jessi