What if your shape was always meant to shift?
On shifting shapes and embracing our power.
For the longest time as a child, I was obsessed with the idea of being a shapeshifter.
I longed to move between forms so I could try becoming the birds that flew overhead, the dogs that were part of my family, and the dolphins I loved to watch playing by the coast.
As a teenager watching Buffy, I’d wonder how it would be to take on the shape of a werewolf, a vampire, or even the girl who became a rat; simply to see what it was like to exist in another form.
Even now I think about the story of the selkies – women who were also seals – which has been my favourite folklore tale since I first read it well over a decade ago.
I know I’m not alone in saying that shapeshifting stories have always fascinated me. A quick Google search today will bring up a host of books, movies and TV shows telling the stories of those who can shift their shape to fit whatever challenges may face them.
Why shapeshifters?
Why is that? Because I have a sneaking suspicion it’s not actually about us all wanting to be werewolves, cat people, or something similar (although all of those would definitely have their benefits!).
Part of me believes it’s down to a deep-held ancestral memory that goes right back to the time when our first ancestors crawled out of the seas and began to live and walk upon the land.
Another part believes it’s an even deeper remembrance; one that lives within our Souls and recalls a time when each of us was unlimited by physical form and could try out any form we felt like.
The final part? That looks to the Earth and her ever-changing nature and wonders how we could ever expect ourselves not to shift and change too?
Because of course, the truth is that we are constantly shifting our shape
Though we’re told that the body and the life we’re born into are the ones we’ll always have, we all know that’s not true.
My body has shifted and changed over time just as it continues to shift and change with each passing year.
And my life? Already it seems to have shifted shape more times than I care to remember; my relationships, my work, my mindset, the boundaries that I have, and so much more besides are all way more fluid than I was once led to expect. And I dare bet that if you stopped to consider it, you’d find that yours are too.
But then perhaps the ability to shift our shapes, and keep doing it whatever the world throws at us, is one of the greatest powers we humans have. Because that fluidity makes us far more powerful than we know.
Having spent the first half of my career to date in the world of corporate communications, where I regularly had to manage organisational change programmes that saw people change job roles, managers, or even companies, I know how hard change of any sort can be for us to accept.
And having spent the second half of my working life so far counselling and coaching, I also know how much the ramifications of the big changes in our life can knock us in the longer term, leaving us questioning every aspect of ourselves and our lives.
Imagine if it were different. Imagine if, from the moment you arrived on this planet you’d been taught to work towards not some fixed point of self-actualisation but a continual point of flux in which anything was possible, perhaps everything was possible, and nothing at all was defined for you.
What boxes would that have enabled you to break out of? What significant life changes might it have helped you to smooth? And, perhaps most of all, who could it have enabled you to become if you knew the possibilities were endless?
Personally, I can’t help but think that the idea of any aspect of ourselves as being fixed and unchanging is not only wrong, it also belies so much of what our ancestors knew to be true.
The shapeshifters who call to us
Look at all of the figures over time who were honoured for the ways they physically shifted their shape; the Morrigan’s ability to turn into the crow, Elen of the Ways’ tendency to walk the pathways of the land I call home as a deer as and when she chose, the way that both Cerridwen and Metis changed form repeatedly in a bit to outwit their foes, and so many others besides.
I wonder what we could learn from each of those figures?
How sitting with their stories and their essences could help us tune into that shapeshifting ability that lives within us and our lives too.
Equally, I wonder what we might learn if we were to lean into the ways we have shifted and evolved throughout our own lives, and the ways we’re called to keep shifting now and into the future.
Because I have a sneaking suspicion it could help us to reactivate our own power for shapeshifting in the most potent of ways.
As we head ever closer to the Samhain season, I'll be doing a special workshop on that topic. Join me if you'd like to learn all about shapeshifting and to honour the shapeshifter within you.
I want to look more deeply at the ways we can honour the shifts in our own lives, embrace those that are happening right now and spearhead those we know are yet to come so we can embody the beautiful spectrum of all the forms we are capable of being in this life.
Because I believe your shape, my shape, and all of our shapes were always meant to shift and that it’s far past time to escape the cage that tells us otherwise.
You can read more about the workshop and book your place here.
Meanwhile, if you’d like to check out my favourite shapeshifting story, that of the Selkies - you can find it in Sharon Blackie’s If Women Rose Rooted. Or, click here to listen to my reading of Sharon’s selkie story.
P.S.
One quick post script from me! Last week, I appeared on the fantastic podcast A Question of Death, where I spoke about silent suppers and other ancestral connection rituals with the lovely Rachel. I found the conversation incredibly inspiring, so if you’d like to listen you can check it out here.