Seeing Your Soul’s Land

Questions and metaphors are two of the most powerful tools we have for revealing meaning and diving deeper into a complex subject, and there are few subjects more complex than knowing our deepest selves. Last week’s post introduced the idea of your soul’s land and invited you to begin charting that land with a series of questions.

These were designed to give you an idea of what your essential personality – strengths, loves, traits – would be like if it were a true physical location. Today we’ll refine your vision a little bit further.

Visually “Find” Your Land
If you haven’t yet, it can be a very powerful step to find or create a visual representation of the land that you described last week. Sometimes finding the visual representation prompts clarity in ways you would not expect – for example, as I scoured, looking for my soul’s land, I came up with the Huntington Gardens and Library in Pasadena, CA –  part of the sprawling mass of cities that makes up Los Angeles. This is a large, lush, green, beautiful piece of land that feels otherworldly but is also smack in the middle of the city.

Though I’ve been to the Gardens, it was some time ago, so I used Google Earth to explore further. While I virtually explored Huntington Gardens, I recognized some elements of the topography and layout that weren’t quite perfect for my soul’s land. We’ll get to why that matters in a minute, but first, I’d like to invite you to find visual representation of your own land. There are a couple of ways to do this:

1. If you have a specific location in mind, try using Google Earth to explore it.
2. If you have a vague idea of where it might be located in the world, try travel guides or a Google Image search of the area.
3. If you have no idea and are looking for inspiration, try searching on Pinterest (and maybe creating a secret board to keep all your pictures) for land that is generally like your soul’s land. (Bustling city, stark desert, etc.)
4. If your land is fantastical (or you are artistically inclined), try drawing it, painting it, or creating it using whatever artistic medium is fun for you.
5. If you are still searching, try creating a collage by flipping through travel magazines, ripping out elements of land that call to you, and pasting them on a posterboard or in a scrapbook. Keep at this until your land comes into clear focus for you.

Refine Your Vision
While you are in the process of finding a visual representation of your land, be sure to notice the elements that are calling out to you (both positive and negative.) As I experienced in my search, you might notice that you find a representation of your land that is 90% perfect. This is great information! You can use this to further refine your vision by answering these questions:

1. What about the land is perfect? Why?
2. What about the land is less than ideal? Why?
3. How would the land need to be changed to make it ideal?

Let this be a fun process – keep going until you have some kind of visual representation of your soul’s land that feels ideal to you. This might end up as half-collage, half-drawing. Or a physical location you can go explore and snap a picture.  Or a Pinterest board full of elements that are ideal that you can combine in your mind’s eye to the perfect land.

Take a few weeks to refine this and play with it. We’ll be exploring how this land represents your deepest self next month, but for the moment, have fun finding the visual representation!

Interested in exploring your soul’s land further? Check out this 50 page guide with over 20 ways to explore and get to know yourself better –  click here to get your copy.