Transformation can feel like:
Every bad choice you’ve ever made rising up to throttle you.
Spending the morning in bed.
Anger blooming up out of nowhere.
Old wounds doing a rain dance on your liver.
Crying in the middle of an outdoor mall.
Wondering if you’re too damaged to get any of the things you want.
Events you thought you'd made peace with mooning you on the freeway.
I may or may not have experienced every one of these symptoms in the past seven hours.
It’s been a fun Thursday.
I know I’m going through a transformation, but it’s easy to forget that and just feel like I’m failing at life.
Failing at life A LOT.
Like everything I thought I knew is in question and all of the divine timing messages I get are complete bullshit.
Because obviously I have failed. A LOT.
But failure is a judgment and self-judgment never shows up more powerfully than when you’re about to burst into something new.
So if you’re in the midst of a WTF-is-going-on-and-when-will-this-end? phase, you’re probably transforming.
It’s not super fun. It’s rarely easy. But it’s worth it.
Transformation is how we do what we’ve never done before, how we step into our next evolution.
Transformation takes a lot out of you. Sometimes laziness is called for, as your entire system re-boots and your brain re-patterns. You’re doing quite a lot, even if it feels like you’re mostly just watching Netflix and eating half-off Halloween candy.
But the more chrysalis processes from which you emerge, the faster the transformation goes.
The first few cocoons I crawled into were long, drawn out, painstaking, and painful. Now I can move through something relatively quickly - in a few days or even a few hours. It’s still painful, but I can usually see my way through it or beyond it.
So even though I spent a few minutes worrying that I was going to need years of therapy to work yet another uncovered trauma (good lord, do they never end), I got that nudge that said, “No, you don’t. Just keep moving through the feelings and being gentle with yourself in the process and this will quickly pass.”
It’s easy to make multiple “I Have Failed” arguments when most of your work is in the 5th and 7th dimensions and most of life happens in the 3rd. But if you’re arguing with yourself, it means your brain is far too involved in the process, and the brain mostly just operates as a 3D recording device.
Brains are certainly useful, but not so much in deep processes of transformation for which your brain has zero reference.
Hush, brain hamsters.
In the midst of a transformation, the best you can do is take care of yourself. Lots of gentleness, lots of care for your body and nervous system, lots of nature and water, lots of rest. Zero judgment of your path, your process, or your results. Just let yourself transform.
Times of transformation are not times to expect a lot from yourself externally, because you’re switching worlds and moving internal mountains and getting ready to emerge anew.
Caterpillars halfway to becoming butterflies aren’t getting much done, I guarantee it.
Halfway to butterfly. Hence, totally fine that I have a sink full of dirty dishes.