Becoming Gaia – ReBalancing the Feminine
[bctt tweet=”Show me your worst, the Earth said to the storm, and I will blossom -Unknown”]
Butterfly & The Cocoon
When a caterpillar comes out of the egg it is extremely hungry and eats nonstop, shedding it’s skin several times to compensate for it’s increasingly larger body size.
Then, one day it stops for a rest and begins creating a silky cocoon or molting into a shiny chrysalis.
Within this chrysalis, the caterpillar starts digesting itself, releasing enzymes destroying all of its tissues, until it no longer exists as it once was.
It loses all of its form and turns to an unrecognizable liquid. Certain highly organized groups of cells survive this process, however, and begin to rebuild themselves into eyes, legs, wings and so on.
Until it is ready to emerge but it is not done yet. It still has more to overcome.
The Struggle
Once a little boy was playing outdoors and found a fascinating caterpillar. He carefully picked it up and took it home to show his mother. He asked his mother if he could keep it, and she said he could if he would take good care of it.
The little boy got a large jar from his mother and put plants to eat, and a stick to climb on, in the jar. Every day he watched the caterpillar and brought it new plants to eat.
One day the caterpillar climbed up the stick and started acting strangely. The boy worriedly called his mother who came and understood that the caterpillar was creating a cocoon. The mother explained to the boy how the caterpillar was going to go through a metamorphosis and become a butterfly.
The little boy was thrilled to hear about the changes his caterpillar would go through. He watched every day, waiting for the butterfly to emerge. One day it happened, a small hole appeared in the cocoon and the butterfly started to struggle to come out.
At first the boy was excited, but soon he became concerned. The butterfly was struggling so hard to get out! It looked like it couldn’t break free! It looked desperate! It looked like it was making no progress!
The boy was so concerned he decided to help. He ran to get scissors, and then walked back (because he had learned not to run with scissors…). He snipped the cocoon to make the hole bigger and the butterfly quickly emerged!
As the butterfly came out the boy was surprised. It had a swollen body and small, shriveled wings. He continued to watch the butterfly expecting that, at any moment, the wings would dry out, enlarge and expand to support the swollen body. He knew that in time the body would shrink and the butterfly’s wings would expand.
But neither happened!
The butterfly spent the rest of its life crawling around with a swollen body and shriveled wings.
It never was able to fly…
As the boy tried to figure out what had gone wrong his mother took him to talk to a scientist from a local college. He learned that the butterfly was SUPPOSED to struggle.
In fact, the butterfly’s struggle to push its way through the tiny opening of the cocoon pushes the fluid out of its body and into its wings. Without the struggle, the butterfly would never, ever fly. The boy’s good intentions hurt the butterfly.
We as Women
Why do I tell this story you ask? Well, are we as women, that different than the caterpillar and the butterfly?
Our bodies are constantly changing. We go through transformation every month.
Many of us watch our bodies growing in size and we yoyo diet to shrink them back again.
We try to fit in smaller boxes just to please others. We shed our old identities as our lives unfold and we are forced to adapt.
Often, we are reinventing ourselves regularly because if we don’t we will succumb to being devoured by our competition in the survival of the fittest.
Just look at the constant flux of fashion and the latest beauty trends. Then there is the everpresent demands to be super mom, career ninja, and sex goddess.
We better already know this season’s hot handbag and have our hair blown out Brazilian style while speaking text lingo with our teenagers, gracefully running our own company and nonchalantly seducing our husband over coffee each morning.
Otherwise, someone else will.
Just like the caterpillar and the butterfly, we struggle but we do it every day of our lives just to be able to keep up.
We squeeze ourselves into spaces that do not fit us anymore and justify it as the way things are. We digest ourselves until we are unrecognizable even to ourselves.
We are expected to transform ourselves daily and the sad part is most of us are consuming and disembodying ourselves in the process. Ultimately we are to blame. We are the ones that have stopped living authentically.
Ultimately we are to blame. We are the ones that have stopped living authentically.
How did we end up here?