Why am I here?

Your soul purpose is not and never will be contained in a job

I have been delaying sending out this month’s newsletter. I have not wanted eyes on me.

A few weeks ago, I was on a solo writing retreat and something uncanny happened that triggered a bunch of old religious trauma. Since then, I have been like a snake resting and hiding. When I had snakes I was in awe of the quiet power of their conscious retreat and quiet preparation for the shed. Sometimes the energy around the tank would feel electrical as Alaya (my first ball python) coiled tightly in a ball under her hiding house for three days, her back blocking the door, before she would shed her skin.

Don’t even look at me, she seemed to say. I know what’s coming and I’m getting ready. Deep rest and disengagement from people, food, and her environment always preceded the sometimes swift and sometime arduous task of shedding a layer of skin. When a shed gets stuck, it is the compassionate human helper who gives the snake a soak or help them get the eye caps off with a Qtip.

This was my actual first snake Alaya! Photo by artist Paul Clancy

Last weekend I realized that the month is almost over, and that this skin shed is a hard one and it was time for me to ask for help. I went to a 5 Rhythms dance class on the beach here in Victoria to pray and offer. One thing I know for sure is that when things are stuck, offering and praying without any demands on the spirit world always moves something in me.

As I moved with my headset on and beautiful music in my ears, the facilitator’s gentle voice purred cues to arrive, to listen, to find different body parts, listening, follow, listening, following. I settled into easy organic movement and started to call my beloveds. My council.

I danced more and called for one of my closest spirit guides. I didn’t know if he would come, as dance is not always the best gateway for me to connect with him. He did, and as I offered my movement, my listening body, my grief and frustration, he listened, he looked at me, and he said the thing that I needed to get off the stuck skin I was shedding.

He reminded me to not forget my wild devotion to freedom and healing, which is at the center of all the external goings on in my life. He reminded me of our divine core essence and soul medicine that propels us through trauma, through beauty, all of it. Knowing it, feeling it, landing back in my wild devotion, I was suddenly poking my head out of the hide and smelling the air again. I remembered that sharing the below piece about soul purpose and the big questions that haunt and propel us might be worth it after all.

The Big Question

Photo by Nathan Jennings

Why am I here?

These are sacred words: these words stretch like fingers in darkness, knowing through the intelligence of skin and bone that they WILL land on something. It’s not just abyss; there is something to be found.

This question is a soul call. It’s not frivolous, it is a move toward service and reciprocal relationship with the bigger web of life. It is a sign of growing up. It brings an awareness of the dark with it, as we realize our very nature and place in the world is unknown.

“What is my purpose?”

“How can I help?”

“How can I best use my time in this life?”

These humble, gorgeous questions are the soul reaching for itself.

In cultures where folks become adults without rites of passage held by community, without sitting alone in the woods asking this question, without fasting, singing, or asking their ancestors to help show the way, the question still demands an answer sooner or later. IT COMES FOR YOU! It may arrive cloaked in grief and depression: everyday achievements suddenly seem futile. Inherited constructs of happiness collapse. We sense the dark. How very tiny we are in the big universe. What matters, anyway?

Healers, shamanic practitioners, witches, seiðr workers, ritualists, therapists, and wilderness guides often end up accompanying folks holding this question. “You could consider it a sign of awakening,” I told a recent client.

But my friends, there is a major SNAG! It is just so tempting to ask your soul’s purpose to fit neatly and tightly into the box of your career. Like this:

Perhaps if I show up for my soul purpose it will become a job and it will pay amazingly well!

If a job correlates perfectly to my soul purpose I will be so happy AND make money doing what I love, right?

I don’t know where this was first born in the spiritual marketplace, this notion of our soul purpose and our money making going so perfectly hand in hand that they leap off into the sunset together and you are perfectly fulfilled by your job forever. Is this the spiritual version of the American dream?

It is such a tricky lie my friends, because there is some truth in there. You will have some paying jobs where your soul purpose expresses itself and it might be fun for you. Or it might be miserably hard, but you sense some deep value there and need to do it. Your career might offer an effective delivery system (to use Bill Plotkin’s language) for some facet of your soul purpose.

And yet,

YOUR SOUL PURPOSE IS NOT AND NEVER WILL BE RESTRICTED TO A JOB (even a job you created for yourself).

Your soul is bigger, vaster, and more dynamic than how you earn money at any given time.

Embodying your purpose, as multifaceted as it is, means that it comes through in countless expressions in your daily life.

For example, defending the sacred is something I can’t not do. It is undoubtedly an ancient and clear soul purpose of mine.

I can express it by donating to an old growth forest protection group, engaging in reconciliation work with first nations, telling a mentor when they do something hurtful, taking 30 minutes to read a cult expose about someone who uses “mediumship” to control people and raging about it for days, or helping someone to meet their own ancestors and spirit guides.

I can defend the sacred when I write a poem, choose to let the dandelions live in the yard, or when I place my hand on someone’s arm who is ready to give up and say, “I believe in you.”

The soloprenuer marketing milieu encourages folks to be over-identified with their jobs, and it is hard not to be when your job IS one place you do your holy work. But look around at your life. If you are listening to your soul, your holy work will come out all over the place. It will come out where you get paid, where you don’t get paid, where it is seen by others and not seen at all. This is your offering, your goodness, your soul’s learning and expertise in one.

Do not let capitalism trick you into thinking you have to make money with every ounce of gift you have, or that your job is the only container for your magic. Or that your soul purpose = JOB. It is broader and subtler than that. It moves. It unfolds, it surprises. It doesn’t end.

We are all bigger than what we make money doing and much older than we remember.

What is it that you simply can’t resist doing when you feel clear and connected? What lights your fire, stirs your waters, and warms the earth of you? I can almost promise you that it won’t be as clear cut as ‘become a naturopath and help people that way,’ though that may be one possible delivery system for your gifts.

What are the movements that increase your sense of belonging here on earth? What is it that tickles you with a yes this this this! What is it that grabs your attention and makes things get all dizzyingly real and cosmic at once, and perhaps baffles you that it doesn’t fit neatly into any particular career path?

Those are the things that deserve your reverence. Those are the places your soul is shining.

Summer Schedule

Online booking will be down in June, July, and August, during which time I will revert to an older way of booking. EMAIL!

This feels way more aligned with the spontaneity of this summer. I already know some days will be great for smelling flowers and soil in the garden and other days will be great for healing and divination with the spirits. The thing is, this year, I don’t yet know which days will be which!

If you would like spirit guided support this summer, email or my website is the way to connect June-August and we will work together to find a time.

A Poem

Here by Holly Holt

Thank you for reading.

Bright blessings,

Rayann is a spirit-worker, artist, and medium. She offers mentoring and healing sessions with compassion, kindness, and integrity. Her work serves those who need help with initiatory experiences, entanglements, loss, and reconnection to their own souls, ancestors, purpose, or place. She co-facilitates workshops on ritual and writing, assists clients who are recovering from spiritual abuse, and practices improvisational dance and quilting on Lekwungen territory in Victoria, BC.