You’re not doing it wrong
Let’s give some credit, recent conversations with Carri Munn and Bill Epperly have sparked this piece. Thank you friends, I love you and treasure our years of companionship on the path.
You’re not doing it wrong.
Transformation has stages and how we express those stages is a matter of our own personal truth. Our art you might say. Or maybe prayer. The physics is negotiable and the value system irrelevant.
When we move toward a truly life changing passage, a transformation, we withdraw from the phenomenal world of “out there” into our own bubble of transformation. To protect and minimize external influence. To cook.
A chrysalis. The butterfly analogy is apt, that’s why it persists. It’s not tired, it’s eternal. You’re tired. Sip from the eternal. We withdraw, turn to goo and then break out of the container to emerge into the world, different. Fundamentally, unutterably different.
This is transformation. Change is linear, like learning a new skill, transformation is when that change is so deep it becomes structural and affects our very beingness, the ground of our identity becomes new. Not everyone will notice.
A great many of us are going through this right now, the world is a chaotic and catalytic experience and we are being wholesale thrown into a transformational process. Individually and collectively.
There are a lot of opinions being offered about how to do this and what the “right” way is. What is getting stuck and what is not good enough and what is missing opportunities and what is too slow or too fast or too sparkley or too dull and frankly all of this is marketing for coaches.
You’re not doing it wrong.
Across a population of 10 million butterflies a few will get stuck. A few will flourish, dashing out of the smartly cracked chrysalis with brightly colored plumage, perfect balance, full crypto bags, flawless mascara, an ivy league phd, best selling books, a global leadership residency and be widely celebrated across a ginormous web of linkedin cross posts.
Others will die, or want to. Most of us will land somewhere between those poles and no amount of optimization, supplementation, networking or mouth taping will change that.
And it’s perfect. Every single one of us is perfect.
You’re not doing it wrong.
Still judging yourself and your own process?
How can you be sure that the bubble you think is too small today is not exactly what you need to build pressure for a later emergence, or to have lived experience in order to support another traveler years down the road that needs exactly that moment with you, so they can go on to save the world, entirely because you were there with your own well earned pain in a moment they needed to be seen and understood?
Our sense of good and bad, right and wrong has been deeply (understatement of the century) influenced by marketing. Are you clinging to the bubble? Bypassing something crucial in your eagerness to sell your badges of awakening? None of it matters.
You will be born, experience life in a myriad of ways, grow and die. We all will in exactly the same utterly unique way. None of us get out alive. Or unborn. Or unlived.
Our presence is a gift that moves mountains and heals the deepest wounds. The gift is an art. And it takes the heart of a warrior and the hands of a healer to live it. This too is you.
Be at peace, you’re not doing it wrong.
Butori Waterfall - Istria, Croatia