A Soul Creation

by Matt Allyn

If you missed it, I’m taking a month of all social media (I’m 14 days in).

I haven’t taken more than a week off Instagram since I downloaded it in college 14 years ago.

I haven’t taken more than a week off creating since I began posting consistently over 6 years ago.

There’s a shift happening around the work I do and I need space to allow the shift to materialize.

It’s like going through a breakup where you abandoned so much of yourself but still living with your partner. How could you ever move on, remember who you truly are, and have your glow up?

The question I am deeply considering is, “Am I even here to help people create content?”

I’ve been doing it so long I think I just indoctrinated myself into it at this point.

I went from photographer and videographer posting my work on Instagram from 2017 to 2019 to teaching people how to post photos and videos on Instagram from 2020 to 2025.

Is that what I’ve always wanted to do?

It’s like being a Mets and Packers fan just because my dad is.

Did I even get a chance to choose this or was I just a little snowball at the top of a mountain who got nudged and kept rolling and rolling and building more momentum without ever stopping and taking space to question who he was becoming.

Now here I am, questioning it all.

In 2015 I was a civil engineer building buildings in NYC. I didn’t care about the work. I wanted to do work that mattered. That truly made a difference in the world.

I was so afraid of spending the next 40 years of my life as an unhappy and unfulfilled civil engineer I made a bold choice.

I wanted to spend more time doing what made me happiest. That was riding my bike.

I thought the best way to do more of what I love was to take the entire summer of and ride across America. So that’s what I did. In the summer of 2016 I rode my bicycle across America.

90 days. 5,019 miles.

At the end of that trip I declared my mission was to pursue a life of daily happiness.

That bike trip taught me that life could be energizing and beautiful everyday and I knew I could figure out a way to live a life I loved waking up to everyday.

No more Sunday Scaries.

No more Monday Blues.

No more Hump days.

And no more “Thanking God for Fridays.”

Despite going back to engineering in the fall of 2016, I was committed to pursuing new hobbies and interest after work so I could uncover what a life of daily happiness might look like.

That’s when I found CrossFit and got my coaching certification and began part time coaching.

I also grabbed the DLSR (fancy) camera out of my closet and learned how to use it thus leading to my love of street photography in NYC.

I was spending 15 hours a week doing what I loved after 40 hours doing work I couldn’t wait to escape.

After 2 years of this, I was clear on what made me happy and what didn’t.

In 2018, as one does in their heroes journey, I finally crossed the threshold.

I quit engineering to pursue personal training full time in Colorado.

Only by fully committing to personal training career path did I realize, it wasn’t exactly what I wanted.

I loved photography way more, so in 2019 I declared “I will become THE Colorado CrossFit photographer,” and it was working. I was becoming the photographer in the state for all things CrossFit.

In 2020 I even flew to Miami to be on the CrossFit media team and shot for one of their biggest competitions, WODapolooza.

I stood on the competition floor seeing my dream come to fruition when once again I realized, this wasn’t it. The voice in my head to really make a difference in the world was louder than “Dance Monkey” blaring over the speakers.

Photography wasn’t satisfying that itch.

When Covid hit one month later, it was a blessing for me.

I was forced to create my first online business.

Once again, I heeded the call.

“I just want to help people pursue their lives unapologetically. The way I have. And the skill I’ve developed that I think can help is content creation.”

So I created my first online course, The Brand Framework, with zero clue what I was doing.

“Anyone and everyone could benefit from building their brand. So I’ll help anyone do that.”

There was no niche and it was heavily based on teaching people photography and videography.

Fast forward 5 years and here we are.

I’m the content-storytelling guy.

And it’s just not right.

I have known deep down for a few years that just isn’t right.

But leaving all that behind, everything I’ve built, is scary.

The truth is when I’m in alignment and full of love and abundance, content has always been my art.

It’s marketing second, if it’s marketing at all.

Even when I was a personal trainer posting content, it has never felt like enough to, “just post something,” because I am supposed to market myself.

Before Instagram had videos, I would tell a story in my caption and pair that story with a beautiful photo.

I wanted people to feel my post, not just read it.

I wanted to feel my posts because my posts were me.

My content is no different than a caterpillar’s metamorphosis into a butterfly. A biological necessity written into my genetic code.

A caterpillar doesn’t need to be told to weave it’s cocoon.

It doesn’t question it.

It just does it.

Likewise, I couldn’t not create.

That’s why I wrote a blog every single day of my bike ride across America.

Not for followers or money, but because the process felt more full and fun as I expressed my experience with the world.

It wasn’t just about documenting it so I could look back on it all on eday.

I was doing my best to write beautiful stories after 6+ hours of riding my bike in sometimes 95 degree heat.

When I speak to the friends I met along that bike trip they are shocked by how much I remember.

I attribute my remembering to writing my blog—creating art.

It allowed me to fully soak in and alchemize the trip.

So many people I met tried so hard to “find themselves” on their bike trip and they never did. Creating art released my need to find myself. Instead, it allowed me to be so present with what was happening and how I was feeling in the now.

That’s what art does.

It slows down time.

It squashes the anxiety of needing to get to the next thing.

It gives you the space to feel exactly where you are right now.

It enhances your joy for the present moment as you entrench yourself in your souls expression.

I got to feel each day all over again as my words touched the page.

I got to love it twice.

I am so grateful for that.

I have always created art.

From building card houses out of my Pokemon collection to snow forts in the driveway with my brother.

You did the same when you were younger.

Sadly, we get older and convince ourselves we don’t have time for it.

We have to get back to work.

We have to be productive.

We have more important things to attend to.

It’s the biggest myth of them all.

We will get back to doing the more important work so that one day we can slow down and take a deep breath by the ocean and watch the children play, couples canoodle, birds glide along the breeze, a palm tree sway in the wind and feel the sun on our faces as we breath to the rhythm of the waves.

But that moment is available here, now.

The love, joy, play, excitement, zest, awe, wonder you want to feel from life is in the room with you at this moment.

It’s those feelings living inside of you begging to be expressed.

We know the taste of it every once in a while when we hear a song that makes our chest tight or when a movie makes us cry.

But you can experience so much more of that love by creating your own art!

Don’t you want more of those moments?

I know I do.

To feel it all so wonderfully and profoundly and then transmute those feelings into my best work. My art.

Yes, even the hard times too.

Especially the hard times.

I want to be the 26-year-old who rode his bicycle across America, not because he would “arrive” at the top of a metaphorical mountain top, but because he just loved to be on that bike even if it was on a never ending road in the middle of Kansas.

I want to make a promise to all entrepreneurs who have ended up detached from the thing they love that they can fall back in love with it.

Creating a business around the thing you love doesn’t have to mean falling out of love with that thing.

It doesn’t mean you have to sacrifice your most exciting, joyful, loving life for some day in the future.

It’s the opposite.

Life and work are not separate.

When you allow the two to dance with each other they become one beautiful source for pleasure and love.

You fall back in love with life while you pursue your wild dreams that make you feel like a kid again and then you tell those stories through your unique lens.

You allow your soul to sing it’s song.

That’s your art.

The more love you experience, the more capacity you have to create you greatest work and experience more love.

It’s an upward spiral of infinite love.

That’s when you become a Soul Creator.

This is what makes all this so scary for me.

I’ve been the content guy for over half a decade, but this is so much more than content.

What the hell even is my business if I don’t promise you consistent content and building a brand that grows your business?

I have to let part of that go.

I have to become something new.

I have to make a bigger promise.

The promise that I will guide you back to life.

Then, and only then, when you are exploding out of your heart with love, will you begin to create your best work again.

That’s a big promise.

It’s the promise I’ve made to myself.

How do I know this is the right shift?

As Joseph Campbell says, “If it’s a true call, you will know that responding to it is… a facing of something difficult, something unknown and frightening that summons you. Far from looking to you like an opportunity for escape, a call feels more like a compelling need to walk into the mouth of a whale, or out into the night and into a storm. You have a profound sense that something essential is waiting for you in the mist of a wilderness and your one true life depends on you being willing and able to find it.”

This is less of a shift and more of a remembering.

I’ve tasted it before.

10 years ago that day on the 12th floor of an office building in the financial district of New York City when I knew I had to ride my bike across America.

The kid who blogged every day of that trip and wrote beautiful stories, not for followers or money, but because he was living a life that he loved.

The one who didn’t need to be anywhere, achieve anything, but was just happy doing what he loved and sharing that love with the world.

He was the one who remembered who he truly is.

I miss him.

I want him back so badly it hurts.

I didn’t know what I was going to write about this week except that I just wanted to share my experience of being off Instagram and this poured out.

This article is an external expression of my internal journey and it’s changing my life.

This article is my art. Not content. Not Marketing.

But it wouldn’t change my life in secrecy.

In order for your art to transform you, it must be observed by others.

So please, create something this week and share it with at least one person.

Your soul is begging for it.

It’s begging to express your current internal feelings in song, poetry, painting, photography, a novel, a meal, the way you dress, do your makeup, create a spreadsheet, swing a tennis racquet, or maybe even your next Instagram post.

I want you to take “too much time” out of your day to do it because this is the real work.

Everything you seek exists in the act of creation.

This is where the joy you keep waiting for exists.

Release the idea that your art needs to be perfect.

When has anything ever been perfect?

You’re the only one putting that expectation on yourself.

What is your soul asking you to create today?

Listen to it.

Make it messy.

Share it.

You won’t ever regret it.

Love,

Matt

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