Embracing Transitions

Hey, welcome back to your Daily Mindfulness. In this session, we're going to discuss how to embrace transitions. So I'll start by sharing a story from my own life. When I was a kid, I was fascinated with butterflies. Starting around age six or seven, the earliest summers I can remember, I'd take this 10 foot butterfly net run around my backyard and catch as many butterflies as I could.

It's mainly monarchs, tiger swallowtails and black swallowtails. And I had this little kid's tent from Toys R Us. Every time I caught a butterfly, I'd put it in the tent until it was filled with, I'd say about 20 or 30 butterflies. Then at the end of the day, I'd go into the tent, lie down and watch them all fly around and land on me. Afterward, I'd let them go and then repeat the experience the next day I did this almost every day during the summer.

And I wasn't only fascinated with the butterflies themselves, but their entire life cycle. Especially the transition from caterpillar to butterfly, which to my little kid mind seemed like magic. One day in my childhood wonder I peeled apart the chrysalis of a Monarch butterfly. I was just curious to see what was inside and to my horror, there was nothing but mush. I'm not sure what I was expecting to find, but it wasn't that.

I tried to tape it back together, but needless to say that caterpillar never turned into a butterfly. And as an eight year old, I felt terrible and spent much of the next several years of my childhood, uh, helping to raise, nurture, and even take care of the butterfly population. In much the same way though, as a butterfly's metamorphosis, we all go through stages of growth. Sometimes where a caterpillar, sometimes where a butterfly and sometimes we're transitioning from one to the other. We're just a pile of mush.

The mush stage can be disconcerting and makes us think maybe I should go back to being a caterpillar or I need to hurry up and become a butterfly already. And I think it's helpful to remember that this stage is a part of a larger process of growth and certain processes must unfold in their own time. And as you go through your own journey of discovering and deepening presence and mindfulness, you'll inevitably transition from one way of being to another. This is exciting, no doubt. But it can also be scary.

If at any point in the process you're confused, uncertain or lost, remind yourself that this may just be your chrysalis stage. Try to be patient with yourself as you grow. These transitions are opportunities for self-care and inner exploration, compassion, and perhaps most of all trust. So see if you can give yourself the permission to be in that stage. The maturation may happen, have to happen in its own time and you'll emerge when the time is right.

So we'll do a meditation practice to connect more deeply to this. As always, thank you for your practice and I'll talk to you soon. Take care.