To every man there openeth
A way, and ways, and a way.
And the high soul climbs the high way,
And the low soul gropes the low.
And in between, on the misty flats,
The rest drift to and fro.
But to every man there openeth
A high way and a low,
And every man decideth
The way his soul shall go.

---John Oxenham

Believe it or not, even personal development coaches can sometimes feel themselves struggling with inertia, seemingly unable to figure out much less take the next step, feeling stuck. Recently, in the throes of a particularly impotent (figuratively speaking) period where I felt both my personal and professional life were going nowhere fast, I had an unusually vivid dream.

I was with a group of people taking a computer class, and the class had taken a trip to a palatial estate near the Pacific Ocean. I had decided that I already possessed the skills being offered in the class, so when we arrived, I ditched the class and took off on my own, heading up a mountain path. Suddenly I was surrounded by a small pack of mountain lions — cougars. They were aware of me and I was aware of them, and although I was nervous in their presence, I willed myself not to panic or to make any sudden moves that might antagonize them. There were adults and cubs in the pack, and they all seemed to be watching me and waiting to see what I would do. I moved slowly and quietly away from them and continued up the path. One of them followed me — somehow I had the feeling this particular cat was a female — and she continued along the path with me, watching me closely but never threatening or attacking. Eventually I stopped and she came over and started sniffing around me. Then she jumped up and placed her front paws on my shoulder, her powerfully intense and inquisitive eyes staring straight into mine. I was remarkably unafraid, and I just stood there with her, almost in a kind of embrace, wondering what she wanted from me.

Only a week or so after the dream, I was visiting the Sonoran Desert Museum in Tucson, Arizona. I had not bothered to read the brochure about the tour beforehand, and so I was not expecting to see, perched up on shady ledge on a sunny desert afternoon, two mountain lions staring back at me with those same powerfully intense, inquisitive eyes.

Cougar Medicine

Native American shamans and mystics believe that animals are teachers with important lessons for us about how to create, heal, and balance our lives. Sometimes they will appear spontaneously during a particularly difficult period or at a critical juncture. Sometimes they make a literal, physical appearance. Other times they visit us in dreams or stories in books or articles we read. Sometimes we simply discover an affinity for a particular creature for whatever reason.

According to Animal Speak author Ted Andrews, whenever a particular animal crosses your path, it can be helpful to find the meaning or message in what that animal symbolizes in myth or folklore as well as what it represents to you personally. Note the characteristics of the animal, its habits and behaviors, and your gut reaction to its appearance in your life.

I discovered that mountain lions — cougars — are known by many names, among them, “Puma,” which in the language of the Incas means “power.” I learned that the cougar is the second largest cat in the western hemisphere and one of the fastest and most powerful animals, able to hunt prey up to three to four times its size, able to leap up to 45 feet, and sometimes staking a territory that can cover as much as 200 miles.

“If Cougar has shown up in your life, it is time to learn about power, to test your own,” says Andrews and DJ Conway in Teachings of the Cougar. “The cougar teaches decisiveness in the use of personal power. If cougar has shown up, there is a choice to be made, and it should be made quickly and strongly. A cougar leaps at its opportunities.”

In another article on “Cougar Medicine,” Lynx Graywolf says that “Cougar symbolizes one’s ability to accept and direct the course of power through one’s life with grace and speed. Its appearance heralds a time when we will learn to move quickly when the opportunities we have been seeking to transform our lives suddenly present themselves, especially if we are willing to claim and step fully into our own power.”

Like a good self-development professional with a mystical bent, I asked myself as I sat in the muck of inertia seemingly unable to put one foot in front of the other in any major area of my life, what lessons the cougar might be able to teach me. How might my own malaise be healed by a healthy dose of cougar medicine?

“The Cougar,” Graywolf says, “both stalks its prey and keeps a sharp eye out in case an easier, tastier meal presents itself. Then it acts quickly, not stopping to ponder whether one choice is truly better than another, but trusting in its own instincts and ability to get what it wants.”

I wondered about the territory I was currently staking in my life. What was I stalking? What choices were available to me and more important, in what ways was I stalling and second guessing rather than leaping and as a result, feeling like I was stuck—even to the point of feeling like I had no choices at all?

The Power of Choosing

“It is always your next move.” --- Napoleon Hill

Emotional Intelligence guru Joseph Liberti says that “We are gifted with an enormous power — our ability to choose,” and quotes a teacher who said, “If you want to know what kind of a life a man (woman) wants, look at the life he/she leads.”

Too many times, in too many situation, however, many of us can feel like we have very  
little choice. Work, family obligations, attending to the daily duties of earning a living can leave us feeling helpless and stuck. Add to that the sometimes crippling fear of making changes, and we can feel completely paralyzed.

There are some basic ways to at least start to regain our personal power. One of the simplest is choosing even when you have no choice. For example, most of us have to work to earn an income, and while we might have the freedom to change jobs, we generally don’t have the choice to not work. So how can we choose in this situation where we have no choice?

In their weekly newsletter Real Magick: Real Solutions for Real People, contemporary shamans Alan Joel and Stephanie Yeh suggest that you pick a segment of your day at work (could be as little as 15 minutes and no more than one hour) during which you will experiment with choices and personal power. If you have some freedom in your work, choose what you will do during that segment. Decide precisely when you will start, exactly what you will achieve, and when you will stop. When the time comes, start your chosen work and end whenever you’ve chosen. 

If you don’t have the freedom to choose what you’ll do, then choose something internal to focus on. For instance, you might choose to:

• focus only on thoughts that put a smile on your face

• be aware of the sensations in your right hand while you work

• see how much work you can complete in 15 minutes

• take off one earring or one shoe while completing a particular task

Silly as some of that may sound, it doesn’t matter what you choose or how trivial it might seem. The key is that you've chosen it.

Why does choosing when you have no choice make a difference? Joel and Yeh say it is “Because any intentional choice is an act of personal power, and will increase your personal power. The more acts of power you do, the more personal power you will gain. The more personal power you have, the less you’ll feel trapped by daily life. Just remember that you can do acts of power in any situation, no matter how little freedom you appear to have.”

In my situation, the issue wasn’t so much the lack of choices but rather my lack of choosing. At this particular point in my life I was in a longer-than-anticipated transition from full-time organizational leadership coach to full-time student, looking for ways to support myself while finishing a graduate psychology degree. My approach to the transition had been essentially to leave the door open for whatever means or opportunity presented itself to me to provide for my needs while I focused on finishing my degree. But what I got, rather than wonderful surprises from a presumably benevolent Universe, was a resounding nonresponse. No doors seemed to be opening. No one seemed to be lining up holding fabulous, high-paying opportunities, and the only movement that I could see going on in the desert was the rapid erosion of my savings.

Pick a Path

“I always wanted to be somebody. Now I realize I should have been more specific.”

— Lily Tomlin.

Right around the time of my Cougar dream, a good friend wondered out loud to me, “What if you just decided on something you really want to do? Instead of saying to the Universe, ‘I’ll take whatever comes along as long as it pays the bills and I don’t hate it,’ be specific. Choose something and then go for it.”

What a radical concept for a professional coach to consider for his own life. I had spent many an hour laboring with coaching clients to discover and make choices that felt powerful and motivating to them. I had also managed to somehow forget not only most of what I’d learned, but what I’d taught.

According to Lynx Graywolf, “Cougar reminds us that we need to express our power actively. We must pursue those things that truly feed us from the level of the heart and soul, as well as those things that feed our bodies. When Cougar appears, we shall also be seeing more clearly how we are actually expressing our own power and energy in the world.”

For me, the choice was to survey the territory I’d already stalked, pick the juiciest-looking possibility in my line of vision, and instead of weighing the pros and cons ad infinitum, to pounce. Minus the metaphor, my choice was to get to work looking for and doing the work I love most—as a writer. It was a decision staring me in the face as sweetly as a deer caught in a Cougar gaze: work that plays to my strengths and my experience and that never fails to feed my heart and soul— and every now and then at least, my body.

What changed immediately was how I felt. There was energy where there had been lethargy, anticipation where there had been anxiety. Ideas were flowing. I was writing—and getting published. I was moving again.

I can’t say for sure if it was Cougar Medicine that cured my paralysis, but the inertia of not choosing that had kept me spinning my wheels in the desert dust did begin to dissipate. I did find a way to feel and to implement my own Cougar energy, at least partly as a result of their visitation. More important, I was reminded of one of the most basic and easily forgotten truths: In any situation, no matter how barren things may look or feel, I can choose which opportunities will sustain me. And I can leap!

Resources

Ted Andrews, Animal-Speak: The Spiritual & Magical Powers of Creatures Great & Small, Llewellyn, 1996.

“Cougar Medicine,” by Lynx Graywolf,  http://morningstar.netfirms.com/cougar.html

“How to Choose Even When You Have No Choice,” by Alan Joel and Stephanie Yeh REAL MAGICK: Real Solutions for Real People,  http://www.shamanschool.com/

“Teachings of the Cougar,” by Ted Andrews and DJ Conway

“The Power of Choice,” by Joseph Liberti

Dan Stone