The Evolution of a Soul Art
On art, embodiment, grief, and the quiet work of becoming
There’s a Soul Art piece I’ve been living with lately that has felt less like something I made and more like something I’ve been in relationship with.
It took me weeks.
It began as a body map and the terrain of the present moment.
Then it became a painting.
Then I bathed it, wrung it out, and began to paint again.
I cut and pasted and collaged. I trimmed it, and I fell in love with the imperfections.
Then it became the orientation of the painting.
Then a question, and writing, and words that held the spaces left inside the expression.
Then a threshold.
Then embodiment.
Then photography, movement, grief, joy, instinct, mess, and return.
And somewhere in the middle of all of that, it became clear to me that this was never only about making an art piece.
It was about becoming. It was about letting the piece change until I did too.
One of the things I love about a Soul Art journey is that it’s never just about what gets created on the page.
Your energy is in the journey.
The days are in it.
The pauses are in it.
The questions are in it.
The exhaustion is in it.
The openings are in it.
The synchronicities are in it.
So being with this piece for weeks mattered.
In the middle of the journey, I was in a Soul Shamanism class that took me through a Soul Retrieval. I was brought to a space described in my book, The Midnight Carnival, with a carousel, where I found my teenage self — frantic and lost, with no one showing up for her. I brought her home.
She was deeply connected to cherry blossoms, and to the cherry blossom tattoos across my back and arm.
That mattered.
I spent hours writing into the questions and feelings held inside my Soul Art as I moved across the visual expression. I tapped into grief, into the way everything seemed to be collecting at the center spiral of my life — balancing the work, my home, my past, my future, and my present.
The writing mattered.
I worked with the piece in every orientation, only to find that each one held its own teaching for me. And then, finally, I found the one that felt like home.
The orientation mattered.
I connected this piece to an older Soul Art I had created a year ago, and I spent time with that one too, following the thread of the same intention.
The older work mattered.
The things that happened in between mattered too.
Even when I wasn’t sitting in front of it, something in me was still in conversation with it. Time had its own heartbeat and the thoughts, the quiet moments, the rush, the dreams, the synchronicities and my personal presence throughout the process all began to converge.
I went on this Soul Art Journey alongside my youngest daughter while she was on her own Soul Art Journey. In the middle of all of it, we were talking about the cryptic Mimic — the presence that pretends to be someone you love, using a familiar voice to get close enough to be believed. That conversation stayed with me.
Because abandoning myself has not always looked like something harsh or obvious. Sometimes it has arrived in a voice that sounded comforting. Persuasive. Familiar. Like care or relief or something that wanted to help me, when really it was only pulling me further away from myself.
That’s what felt so alive in this journey.
Soul Art does not let me stay with the imitation for long.
It keeps asking for what is real.
What is embodied and honest and actually mine.
And maybe part of showing up for myself is learning to recognize the difference between what truly nurtures me and what only mimics care.
And then there were the other threads that kept appearing around it and the quiet realization that I have been making space for more than just my own process.
That’s part of what makes Soul Art feel so alive to me.
The final piece holds more than paint and collage.
It holds the weather of the becoming.
This piece began in a Soul Art journey with the intention:
I am held as I release the woman who abandons herself.
Which, over time, transformed into something simpler and even more true:
I am showing up for myself.
That was the thread.
Not “make something good.”
Not “make something pretty.”
Not “make something that proves anything.”
Just that.
I am showing up for myself.
And even with an intention that clear, I still hit that moment I know so many of us hit in art and in life — that place where the mind starts whispering:
Is this good?
Am I ruining it?
Should I stop here before I change it too much?
I could feel the exhaustion that had taken me away from my own expression, and that old tape showed up right on time.
The voice that would rather preserve something acceptable than risk letting it become something honest.
But I kept going.
And I’m so glad I did, because I am absolutely in love with the piece now.
Not because it became more perfect, but because it became more alive.
Because I let it keep becoming.
There was one point where my husband walked in and asked me which way was up. I didn’t know, even though I had been painting it from one side the entire time. I turned the piece and suddenly found another orientation of the piece that felt like home. That was the moment it stopped feeling like just an image and started feeling like a being. A presence. A self-portrait of some deeper part of me — the steadier part, the wiser part, the one at the center of her own life.
That alone would have been enough to sit with for a while.
But the piece wasn’t done with me.
This was the first version — what was there before I soaked it and wrung it out and held it crumpled in two hands, before I trusted what else wanted to come through.
Looking back, I can see that this version mattered because it held the original terrain. It held the beginning. It held the part of me still circling the old shape of things, and it’s still there underneath.
Once I was felt complete with what was in the paper, I started to feel that I didn’t only want to look at it.
I wanted to enter it.
My first instinct was actually to photograph myself inside the moving arcs of the piece itself — to somehow catch my body in the motion of it. But trying to do that on my own was too complicated, and in the middle of that I realized something more wanted to happen.
Instead of trying to place myself inside the art, I let the art come onto me.
That changed everything.
The first paint was yellow.
It was meant to be the sun at the center of the piece — that yellow-lit pulse that feels like a portal, a source. But once it was on my face, it became more than that. It felt bird-like. Animal. Instinctive. Alive. A life force moving through the body before language gets involved.
It came on fast.
I painted it quickly and almost immediately reached for the camera.
There was a charge in it.
A bubbling.
A movement.
A sense that my body had picked up something the painting already knew.
The sunlight that morning was perfect too. At one point it caught the reflection of the Soul Art in the closet mirror, and that felt like such a gift — one of those perfect moments where the whole thing seems to line up beyond planning.
The yellow phase felt like instinct, spirit, motion, and signal.
And that changed the emotional texture completely.
Painting the blossoms onto my face felt slower, softer, more intimate. And somewhere in the middle of it I realized I wasn’t just painting a branch of cherry blossoms — I was adding to a body that already carries blossoms. I already have them on me. My tattoos were already part of the ritual. By the end, I had brought the paint down onto my arm too.
At that point the whole thing shifted.
It was no longer face paint.
It was body canvas.
And grief came in.
Not because the entire journey was “about grief.” It wasn’t.
There was too much life in it for that.
Too much play.
Too much movement.
Too much joy.
Too much weirdness.
Too much feral energy.
Too much delight in the process itself.
But grief absolutely came through.
It came through the blossoms.
Through tenderness.
Through the many faces.
Through the softer images.
Through the branch-like lines on the skin.
Through the strange beauty of letting the body hold what words don’t always know how to say.
What I love most, looking back, is that I didn’t stop when it got messy.
I didn’t only keep the beautiful, composed, symbolic images.
I let the ritual keep moving.
And once I did that, something even truer appeared.
There were photos where the paint smeared.
Where the expression got wild.
Where the whole thing became less elegant and more honest.
Where it felt like I was shaking something out.
Where grief and joy and distortion and humor all started sharing the same body.
That part matters to me.
Because becoming is not clean.
It isn’t always a serene unfolding.
Sometimes it looks like a beautiful image.
Sometimes it looks like mess.
Sometimes it looks like faces we don’t usually show.
Sometimes it looks like letting the strange come out too.
And I think that’s part of what made this whole journey feel real to me.
I didn’t reduce it to a concept.
I let it move through me.
At a certain point, I realized I had stopped “taking pictures” and started following the ritual.
Time disappeared.
I went outside in the cold in pretty much nothing because it felt like the body needed to go where the image was going. I moved between the painting, the mirror, the light, the floor, the room, the trees, the body, and the camera. I wasn’t trying to create a polished content moment.
I was trying to catch the movement.
And I did.
That’s the feeling I’ve had ever since.
I caught it.
Not perfectly.
Not once and for all.
But enough.
Enough to feel the arc of it.
There was the first burst of life force and instinct.
There was the tenderness of the blossoms.
There was the grief that surfaced.
The mess.
The play.
The strange middle ground.
And then there was the return.
That part is important too.
Because the end of the journey didn’t feel emptied out.
It felt softened.
Integrated.
More myself.
I think that’s one of the deepest gifts this Soul Art journey gave me.
It pulled together things that had been living as separate threads:
my art
my body
my grief
my joy
my book
my space
my work
my becoming
It reminded me that these things are not separate.
The art is not separate from the life.
The body is not separate from the vision.
Creativity is not separate from healing.
What I am making is in conversation with who I am becoming.
And maybe that is part of the real work.
Not simply making things.
But letting them make us back.
This week I’ll be bringing this Soul Art with me to The Art of Becoming, and that feels deeply fitting.
Because this piece has taught me something about becoming that I don’t think I could have learned by thinking my way there.
Becoming is not always graceful in the middle.
Sometimes it looks like doubt.
Sometimes it looks like turning the piece until it feels like home.
Sometimes it looks like risking change.
Sometimes it looks like letting the body enter the process.
Sometimes it looks like instinct.
Sometimes it looks like grief.
Sometimes it looks like joy.
Sometimes it looks like mess.
Sometimes it looks like return.
And sometimes it looks like falling in love with the thing only after you stop trying to protect it from becoming what it was meant to be.
This is the power of Soul Art.
It can hold a mirror to the self that is still emerging.
It can show us what’s already moving before we know how to name it.
It can become a threshold.
A witness.
A portal.
A companion.
A record of the self in motion.
This piece began with the intention:
I am showing up for myself.
And somewhere along the way, it answered back.
Not with a neat conclusion or a perfect image.
But with a living one.
A body in conversation with symbol.
A woman in conversation with her own becoming.
A Soul Art that kept evolving until it revealed that I was evolving too.
And maybe that is what The Art of Becoming really is.
Not arriving polished.
Not presenting the finished thing.
Not proving that we’ve figured it all out.
But allowing ourselves to be shaped by what is true.
To be changed by what we dare to enter.
To stay with the process long enough that something deeper can come through.
To become,
again and again,
more honest,
more alive,
more our own.
And maybe this is where I am now too — not at the end of anything, but in the spirit action phase. The part where what has been revealed asks to be lived. The part where art doesn’t only reflect who I am becoming, but asks something of me in return.
If this piece found you at the right moment, I’d love to keep walking together.
You can find my book, The Midnight Carnival, HERE
And if you’re feeling the pull to explore a Soul Art journey of your own, or to step more deeply into this work with me, begin HERE
LOVE.
Jocelyn b.