Sarah Pauli is gentle and brilliant. She is the kind of creative you want to listen to closely, because you don’t want to miss the meaning inside the tenderness. She finds inspiration everywhere—across the universe, in nature and through all of life.

I met Sarah at the Sedona Yoga Festival years ago. She and her jewelry both sparkled in the sunlight as we passed her tent. Sarah gifted my daughter a stunning necklace, which she treasures to this day. As an artist, Sarah chooses and uses the “feels” of color like magical rasa. I wanted to ask her what gives her work its special kind of beauty.

Before the interview, I sent her a list of questions to initiate and orient our conversation. By the time we were together, those questions had already become further inspiration for her work.

Because she just can’t help it. She lives in a world of inspiration, creation and wonder.

“We’re meant to be here to experience beauty. It is actually vital. It’s life force… We all have a creative impulse. Creating beauty is a divine offering.” —Sarah Pauli

FROM THE JOURNAL brings conversations with the artists, writers and makers who have shaped the pages of Soul Artist Journal into the Listening Room.

To become whole, Carl Jung taught, we must recognize that we are more than the small, familiar self we call the ego. Beneath the surface of awareness lives a vast interior world that shapes our choices, relationships, longings and fears.

The work of individuation begins when we turn toward what we have neglected, rejected or hidden. Whatever remains unconscious continues to influence our lives from the shadows.

But when you shed light on your shadows, they lose their power. When you stop hiding your wounds, they begin to heal. When you pay attention to the emotions, desires and urges that wait in the roots of your psyche, you begin to awaken your creative freedom.

To honor the full landscape of your psyche is to welcome both ego and soul, strength and vulnerability, darkness and light. The very places you have learned to avoid often conceal the greatest possibility for transformation.

The treasures of this Soul Story

• Treasure the wisdom of your unconscious.
• Recognize the limiting power of the shadow.
• Honor your entire being—ego and soul.
• Confront what prevents creative freedom.
• Tend to your wounds with compassion.
• Shed light on your shadows.
• Courageously follow the path of mystic wisdom toward personal transformation.

La Loba: The Wolf Woman invites you into one of the most enduring stories in the mythic imagination.

Deep in the wilderness of Pueblo country lives an old woman known as La Loba—the Wolf Woman. Bent with age and weathered by sun, she wanders mesas and canyon floors searching for bones. She is a bone collector, gathering what has been scattered, forgotten and left behind.

Myth is more than an old story. It is a way of making meaning.

Your personal myth is the story you tell about your life—the experiences that have shaped you, the conclusions you’ve drawn and the identity you’ve come to inhabit. The “bones” of your life are the events themselves: the undeniable facts of your experience. They cannot be changed. The songs you sing about those bones, however—the meanings you give them—can.

Like La Loba, each of us is a collector of bones.

In archetypal stories, every character, landscape and symbol reflects something within the psyche. They speak in the language of the soul, inviting us to see ourselves more clearly. La Loba asks us a simple but transformative question:

Which parts of your story are bones, and which parts are songs?

When we learn to distinguish between the two, we reclaim the freedom to rewrite the stories that have confined us while honoring the truths that have shaped us.

In this Soul Story, you’ll explore:

• The myth of La Loba, the Wolf Woman
• What it means to live from a personal myth
• How archetypal stories reveal the deeper patterns of your life
• The difference between the unchangeable bones of experience and the meanings you assign to them
• How to begin reshaping the stories that no longer serve you