Comment and Share this Image and poem from my
Artists Shiloh Sophia Facebook page
I don’t want to impress you.
I refuse to perform to make you love me.
Looking good is exhausting.
Especially if you have to keep it up.
Being right is so last life time.
I am not invested in hiding to protect myself.
This doesn’t mean I am surrendering.
This means my soul has plans for me.
I just want to be as I am called to be.
I am spontaneous, a badass, unpredictable at best,
and if you still love me, awesome. I love you too.
I would much prefer to play together than look good by myself.
I don’t care about being right, I would rather just be with you. Okay?This doesn’t mean I am surrendering.
This means my soul has plans for me.
You know this already,to be yourself takes crazy courage.
The kind most of us are born with.
But somehow, we tuck it away to protect others.
Or, even worse, we forget.
People can be afraid of people like us, and try to shut us down,
it isn’t too hard,since we don’t want to offend.
That doesn’t mean I am surrendering.
This means my soul has plans for me.
When we are too shiny, we scare people.
That’s okay. Tell them what all the sparkle is about.
Tell them your shine has spilled out,
that the edges of your container have expanded.
Invite them to dance in the scattered radiance.
Tell them not to surrender to the way things are.
Tell them, their soul has plans for them.
~ Shiloh Sophia
Dear One,
This writing came out of the left field somewhere in the cosmos. They just fly out and I try to type fast enough to let them come through. Sometimes it is personal – and other times if feels more like it is a ‘collective’ experience. As in, there may be many of us feeling this way.
I Love
I love loving people. I love giving. I love sharing. I love being in community. I love being a part of transformation. I love raising up women and their work. I love providing images and poetry to uplift. I love teaching.
I don’t love
I don’t love performing. I don’t love pretending. I don’t love keeping up appearances. I don’t love not having more freedom to be unpredictable. I don’t love fearing my reputation is stake if I am fierce.
And yet my desire to be loved is greater than my desire to just do whatever the f*ck I feel like. This is part of the challenge of choosing to be ‘out here’ in the world as a voice that speaks to others. I see there are plenty who are brazen and say the f word way more than I do – and I admire their bravado in so many ways. Yet I am not really brazen, but I am wild. That wildness is however tempered. I feel a responsibility to continue to allow myself to be shaped by my community. It is me, and them together, that is shaping me. This is a dance. A tango perhaps. And I don’t know how to tango.
Why? Why am I so shaped by others?
Because I have been a being of service since my early twenties and a being of service doesn’t just think for themselves and act for themselves, they consider the others. A greater whole. But there’s more, my entire creative process is KEYED into the codes of loving my community – of tuning in and sourcing what I need to bring out for them. And me. We both are served.
What is most needed NOW?: is the question I ask myself before I call a new circle or event. I am informed, and shaped by the women and families I serve. There is a price to this at times, as I don’t just act – I think a long time, years, sometimes before bringing something forward to share with you. And at the same time, the shape of that offering is also authentic and spontaneous because I bring my “me” energy and muse creativity right into the mix of that moment. This is the part where I get to show up, but not ‘perform’.
I often tell my students, if you are going to be big enough to be loved, meaning out there in the world, you also may be hated or receive weird messages and energy coming back at you. Don’t take that as a sign to turn back – turbulence is normal when we are real and out there and may be a sign you are on the right track!
For some reason, with our current election and all that is going on in the world I am navigating a feeling of fierceness, a desire to be even more myself and how that can serve in its own way. As you may have read in a previous letter, I have shed an old archetype. So right now I might be in the caterpillar stage of my journey :)
~ ~ ~
An inquiry I would like to bring to you today is:
Where have you been being the ‘least’ authentic for fear of not being loved or accepted?
Spend some time there, and then let that ‘place’ speak – write it out. That I think, is kind of where the poem came from. A feeling that I was so concerned with not disappointing you, that I was preventing my own freedom. That is an illusion of course, because any one in my tribe would never want to do that – it is just me and my fear – keeping me from the fullness of my being expressed. That said.
One of the reasons I don’t call myself a mentor, although some might, is this reason, so I don’t have to uphold someone’s ideas of a mentor.
“I’m warning you I’m weightless,
and the wind is always shifting
so don’t hang anything on me
if you ever want to see it again
Ani Difranco
So anyway dear one, thanks for sharing a cup of tea with me today in the cafe. Below you can find some new classes, including one I am very honored to share with you from Kate Langlois, who is making her debut in online video classes and we are proud to share her – she is a Cosmic Cowgirl and Color of Woman Teacher and I have been witnessing an awesome unfolding of a very real woman – her class starts in about a week – come see!
And a save the date for a very exciting stream coming up, and in person with Shilo Shiv Suleman who is an artist from India who has her work at Burning Man, on TED and was written about in Rolling Stone and Vogue Magazine. I will have a sign up page in my next letter – but save the dates of August 12 & 14.
Wherever you are. Whatever you are doing right now. I am sending LOVE through the cosmos. Today it is hot pink toward magenta, waves and ribbons of love. And a call to greater authenticity for both of us. That means, we will mess it up. We will get it wrong and disappoint. But it also means we are breaking free…
Signed in a Red Thread,
Go HERE to find all the latest Upcoming Classes
with Shiloh Sophia and the Cosmic Cowgirls
