The Soul*Full Tribe is a weekly series with inspiring life leaders
who have been invited to share their heart felt experience and soul.
Rita Rivera Fox
I had the priviledge to be apprenticed to Rita Rivera Fox for about 5 years when I was studying with don Miguel Ruiz. Her teachings are life changing. The Video above is Part 1 of a series. the full interview was an hour long. This first part centers around Fear and learning some tools to use that fear to wake up, and move toward what your heart desires.
At the end of the video she says we are “free to move into action” somehow that last word got cut off. So sorry about that. I hope you still got the spiritual download. And come back for another installment as an extra blog post – very very soon!
For more information on Rita Rivera Fox, visit her website HERE
What did you think? What touched you? What made you sit up and say YES! What resonated for you? What message did you hear – that was meant just for you?
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The Soul*Full Tribe is a weekly series with inspiring life leaders who have been invited to share their heart felt experience and soul.
Today I am so honored to have Jess Greene from Seek Your Course join the Soul*Full Tribe and share her wisdom with us.
A Path Of Passion Is Rarely Straight
When I was a child I wanted to be an artist or a writer when I grew up. I guess I was a fairly intuitive child because that is pretty much what I now do. But passion and interests are funny vehicles to ride when it comes to cruising down the path of life and the road has been all but straight forward.
When I was a child I wrote, illustrated and constructed my own books and illustrated greeting cards. My dad would buy cards from me and then I would take the money, walk across the street, pass the office building and buy a popsicle. It was a simple enterprise, but satisfying. I was passionate about making things and life was good.
When I was old enough to handle my dad’s 35mm Nikon, that became my medium. I learned about shutter speed and depth of field. I loved it. When I was fifteen I had an internship at a photography studio and started dreaming of being a photojournalist.
College opened all the doors and everything changed. The ideas and opportunities flooded my mind. I poured over the course catalog and tried to decide which fields were most appealing. I changed my mind several times from art to photography to architecture to political economics to community development to sustainable agriculture to teaching science. By the time I graduated I had over 150 credits and ended up with a degree in Agricultural Resource Economics, a minor in Plant and Soil Science, and enough general science classes in various fields to go into a Masters in Education program to teach Middle School Science, which I completed a year later.
In college the shift from an art/architecture/photography focus to a humanitarian/political economics/human services focus was deliberate and intentional. I was two weeks into my introductory architecture class when I suddenly realized that I didn’t like it because it wasn’t helping anyone. In fact, architecture represented the opposite of helping people. The field of architecture is often wasteful, caters to the whims of the wealthy, and usually values pure aesthetics over ethics. Obviously these are generalizations and I am still deeply in love with architecture and the process of designing and constructing living and working spaces. But I realized then that designing and constructing were not fulfilling a deeper longing and desire of mine: to help people.
So from architecture I shifted to international agricultural development work. This was fulfilling and interesting. I had fabulous teachers in my departments and that is where I stayed….until my last year of college when I made a drastic turn and decided to teach.
For the last year or so I have been cursing that part of myself that made that last-minute change that put me in a middle school classroom for the last five years. I loved it at first but not recently. For the last two years of teaching I have hated a lot of what teachers have to deal with. Then this past summer I quit.
I still don’t really know why I suddenly decided that last year of college that I loved working with teenagers enough to change my whole plan.
I now have two creative jobs that are growing and becoming a new life for me. I am an artist who paints mainly in encaustics (hot wax) and teaches art workshops. And I run a website called Seek Your Course, which is a database of creative opportunities such as ecourses and art workshops. These two jobs keep me busy and they each have their own creation story.
I am now into month #8 of working for myself. I am starting to gain some perspective. I am just now starting to marvel and wonder at the path I traveled for the last couple decades.
And now that I have enough perspective to see where I have been I realize that I had it all figured out when I was a child. I knew then that writing and making art were my calling. Should I have just taken the risk then and spent my college years majoring in writing and art? No. The wild, crazy, windy, path climbing hard mountains and traveling through low valleys that my passions have taken me on cultivated me. There was a greater purpose and an ultimate calling to all of those changes and all that time invested.
Sometimes a pilgrimage teaches us much more than the sacred place we are trying to get to.
Passion, though, has always been the thread. I was passionate about design and architecture. I was passionate about helping people. I was passionate about providing food to the hungry people of the world. I was passionate about teaching and designing good curriculum. And I still am passionate about all of those things.
What I am realizing now is that even though all of these passions are apparently quite unrelated there is a reason I pursued them all and a reason why each led me to something else.
I am now fairly certain that my true purpose here on earth is to inspire, encourage and teach people to create, expand their sense of possibility and ultimately find the purposes for which they were created.
This is why I was drawn to good design, helping people, feeding people, and teaching people. I have learned so much through each of these phases of my journey. I have always been looking for the signs and willing to take the risks to make sure I was following my true calling. I often felt very lost and was absolutely certain I had made a mistake when it came to teaching these last couple years. But I have grown into myself and my purpose. A decade or so of changes is really not a long time when I think about all that I have done and the way I have come into my own.
What about you? Can you see that your path has taken you through a hard or seemingly-not-related-to-your-calling place but it ended up being the exact place you needed to be? Are you looking for the signs that you are on your path to your true calling, even if that path seems to take you to strange places?
Jess Greene is an artist, blogger, and entrepreneur. She paints with hot wax, works on the computer far too much, loves playing fetch with her little dog, tries to love the independent streak in her bigger dog, and enjoys all sorts of outdoor activities. Her newest activity is ice climbing. She lives with her husband and the two dogs in Western Massachusetts.
Jess’ Website & Blog: http://www.jessgreenestudio.com/Seek Your Course: http://www.seekyourcourse.com/
"I have so much more to say to you about your lovely e-course - it's been by far the absolute BEST I've ever taken...It's been exactly what I needed...every week - totally spot-on. Catherine, oh fearless leader, I hope you seriously consider a SoulFull 2!" - Rachael F.
