I wrote this a week ago and couldn’t finish:

“Here it is again. Or rather, here’s another one. It’s not the same as before. It’s another place that feels stuck, that has an intensity of wanting to pop or move or unstick. It feels awful, and I can’t even figure out how to be with it. I know I might need support to shift it.

I know it’s important because I can’t seem to go into it, and I’m so exhausted from trying to manage the resistance that I can barely stand to do it anymore. There’s no technique or anything I can do and I just don’t even want to. I sense that if I could give up resistance to it, it probably would shift.

Just hearing Adya a second ago talking about devotion. Devotion to practice, to silence, to the timeless. Reminding me to come back to right now.

I’m excited because it feels like something important is about to happen again. And it’s amazingly painful because I can’t go back or forward. I think I understand why people go and do things like Ayahuasca or other mind altering journeys when they have a lot of trauma history.”

I’m still stepping forward through the discomfort, wondering what it’s all about…any of it. The heaviness of dark mornings, and colder weather coming, and the layers of body memory of it all: being so cold it hurt, morning dread of school torture, the lack of joy and meaning, and lack of safety and support for a person so young dealing with such difficulty.

I know that gratitude and connection are part of the way out, and yet sometimes it’s so hard to access them. The more contracted I feel, the more difficult it is to access those things.

Here I am sharing with you my purposeful effort to connect to those things right now.

I’m appreciating the wide space that felt opened up after having just a single cancellation today. I decided to receive it and turn away from wondering whether it was a true emergency and I was owed anything for the time.

I’m reflecting on impromptu, good conversation yesterday with a good friend, about the importance of slowing down, the possibility of relating to myself in the mornings in a different way, and the support for clarifying purpose and intention in personal and professional work.

I’m appreciating the sun, and the ability to be indoors out of the wind and chill, the hot cup of spicy ginger tea with raw honey, and knowing I have warm layers I could put on if I want to go outside for a bit.

I felt the pull to listen to some of the recordings on the Gina Sager web conference on the roots of modern dis-ease even though I had low expectations, and found a bit of clarity and inspiration, and a resource for a client, that I was not expecting to find in the day 4 interviews. I don’t know how the things I need seem to find me at just the right time. Such a delight.

The title of this post comes from the reminder about the butterfly…when it goes into the cocoon, and who knows how it knows to do that???, it doesn’t just grow wings. It becomes a liquid goo, that somehow is miraculously transformed into a butterfly.

We are so aversive of messes. They freak us out, disorient us, and we do anything we can to get rid of them. We don’t often consider them a source of transformation or truth. We don’t think of our breaking down as becoming the goo, like the caterpillar, that will transform into something else, possibly something beautiful with wings.

It’s making it a little easier for me to be in the mess, hold a curiosity about all the invitations being offered me by life right now, and notice the reflexive stress reaction to the  goo. I wonder what all of it will look like later, with my new wings.