What am I doing here?
For the past 10 years, I’ve been in the middle of a continuous, massive identity shift. On every level. Professional, spiritual, physical…
For the past 10 years, I’ve been in the middle of a continuous, massive identity shift. On every level. Professional, spiritual, physical, relational, geographical…you get the idea.
The fact is, some days this shifting and constant change feels liberating, exciting, challenging, adventurous, and even fun. All those are things I normally want to feel and enjoy feeling. But other days, this feels like dying a slow, painful death. It feels like my heart is adrift on a raging, merciless ocean without an anchor. It feels so out of control and scary as fuck.
This mortal experience is all about the life-death-life cycle. Dying and being reborn, and then dying again, much like the annual seasonal cycles of earth, or the monthly moon cycles. Just when I think I’ve got things figured out, and I feel warmed, safe, comfortable, alive, fruitful, and grounded (spring and summer)…the earth moves under my feet once again, and I start the dying process (fall and winter).
I’m in the middle of another death right now, the perfect time to put my feelings out there and process them out loud. I hope you will be able to relate to my journey here on some level, and feel our common human struggles, rather than judge me or distance yourself from me for how you feel different. I hope you don’t let your experiences and beliefs or values get in the way of hearing my heart here, and how we are more alike than we are different.
This also isn’t just about me. I’ve got two loves in my life who are going to be contributing their part of this story and their own transformation tales. I’m just starting here with my version, but they’ve got their powerful, vulnerable, heartfelt versions, too.
Butterfly loves caterpillar. As we grow and experience, we are always hopefully moving to a better version of ourselves, becoming more loving, thoughtful, conscientious, “awake,” liberated human beings. Awake in the sense of becoming empowered over fear and systems or “domestication” (as explained in the book, The Four Agreements) in order to own ourselves, and to find the Divine Spark that lives in each of us. This is why we are here.
But the most important thing we can do in this becoming process is to love and include all previous versions of ourselves, AND to love and nurture the currently “acting out” or unbecoming versions of ourselves in the new matrix. To exclude any previous version of ourselves, or to judge the smaller self that keeps cropping up at the most inopportune times, is a failure to truly transform. It all belongs here…the lovely and the ugly. The chaotic and the ordered. The self-controlled and the out of control. The generously loving and the self-protecting. The down and dirty slogging on the ground at a painfully slow pace and the soaring on the sunshine-filled breezes of floral scents and sweet nectar.
As one contributor of three, this is my own personal story of caterpillar. Nobody needs to hear much about butterfly because we know that’s all good (it all works out in the end for all of us). What we need is to know and feel that caterpillar belongs here, and has a voice, and is not being stepped on or rejected. And that at the most basic level, the pain of transformation feels very familiar to all of us, and we can share in the isolation and darkness of cocoon life in a way that gives us hope.