Consider the battle between the caterpillar and the butterfly within it.

A caterpillar carries within it, throughout its caterpillar time, something scientists call imaginal discs.  These discs are grown while the caterpillar is forming inside its egg, before it hatches.  There are discs for each of the various body parts the butterfly will need- eyes, wings, legs etc. In some species, the discs remain dormant until the caterpillar’s transformation to butterfly begins, and in others they activate sooner.  

At some point in nature’s timing, when the caterpillar has fed itself on sometimes hundreds of times its weight in leaves per day, it hangs itself up, its skin begins to harden into a chrysalis or it spins a protective cocoon, and it starts to dissolve its own inner tissues. The imaginal discs activate and begin to feed on the soupy biomass inside the chrysalis.  What is left of the caterpillar’s immune system goes into defensive mode, sees the replicating discs trying to become imaginal cells, and  attacks them as outsiders!  It doesn’t recognize what’s happening as anything good and tries to stop the process.  Eventually the imaginal cells fight harder and overwhelm the caterpillar immune system with numbers and organize and grow into what we will see as a butterfly when it breaks free of the cocoon. 

I have been thinking about the glorious metaphor that is hidden in this process for us.  When it comes to one of the stages in our life when it’s time to change, we have inbuilt ways of knowing.  Usually it comes through some discomfort, whether it’s new or else a long-term unease we’ve carried stoically or awkwardly.  We usually don’t see this upwelling transformation as our inner beauty arising.  As we are either growing, stagnating or backsliding at any given time, we can expect to encounter transformative periods over and over.  We always have more love to give; we always have more ways to share our gifts with the world; we will always develop more power to live authentically and become a source of hope for others. 

Our ego has another idea.  It acts like our immune system, and it wants to keep us safe from change.  Its mission is to maintain what we’ve come to know as stable and familiar, and it’s naturally going to resist the greater self that’s wanting to come up for us.  Just having this awareness can be a big help in relaxing into the transformation times that can feel like complete replacement of all of our cells and an agonizing rebirth into something beautiful that can fly.  Know that the ego trying to suppress your dreams is a necessary experience for your own imaginal cells to be activated into growing, eventually overwhelming the inner voices of resistance.