What Metaphor Will Get You Through This?

What do you need to embrace the mess?

photo by JP Valery

What is your metaphor for this time?

Everyday, as I teach and counsel, I’m listening for the themes in peoples’ lives and in the collective. I’m wondering what’s unfolding in the subterranean space.

I have found myself talking with a couple of clients about the chrysalis, that in-between place that a caterpillar/butterfly goes when nothing is in form and everything is mush but something is changing. It’s a place of tremendous containment but absolute nothingness at the same time. What do you need to embrace the mess?

I’ve found myself talking with other clients about pregnancy. They are less facing the dissolution of old things and more just struggling against empty time and confusion. This is what Hexagram 5 of the I Ching calls “Calculated Waiting”: the long gestation before the birth, all hidden, all unknown, but still poignant. What do you need to embrace the waiting?

I’ve found myself thinking too about artist and writer’s retreats. What do you need to embrace the creativity?

About hermits, hermitage, convents, monks and nuns. What do you need to embrace the silence?

And about the alchemical retort, the vas, and the witch’s caldron. What do you need to embrace the transformation?

What is your metaphor for this time?

Something is cooking. This containment of slowing everything down has been alchemical, witchy, and hermit-like. This is the dissolving of the old form in preparation for the new. Something profound is unfolding here. It is painful, terrifying, comforting, insane, exciting, grief-laden, and unusual.

And somehow, for each of us, something new is emerging.

I’m seeing people set boundaries like never before. I’m hearing people commit to never go back to jobs or relationships that hurt them but that they couldn’t release on their own. I’m hearing people begin self-work they’ve been putting off. I’m witnessing folks finally, finally face pain that they’ve been too scared to face for years. For some, with effort, they’re beginning to make music, art, and poetry from the anguish. It doesn’t come quickly. It doesn’t always stay. But something may be emerging.

So, I ask you: what is your metaphor for this time? What image of containment—the chrysalis, the gestation, the hermitage, the witch’s caldron—do you need now in order to settle-in to whatever this time has brought you, to embrace the mess and the art too? What image will support you to endure this time, as well as to transform with it and the rest of the world?

xo,

Satya