Welcome back to Live Creative. You’re listening to episode number 235 Metamorphosis.

LIMBO or METAMORPHOSIS

I was thinking about calling this episode being in limbo, and then I looked up the definition of what limbo means. Of course, when I think of limbo, I mostly think. What feels to me like a fun game of trying to get yourself beneath the bar. They play the music, and you shuffle along in a line and go bend back as far as you can to get underneath the bar, and the bar gets lower every time.

Maybe because I’m a little bit flexible, I was always pretty good at limbo, and I’ve brought some of that into my adulthood feeling like I’m pretty good at limbo. What limbo means though, is a place of being stuck. And historically it was used as a word to describe the place between this life and the next between heaven and hell. When you’re stuck in the middle and you’re not moving in either direction, you haven’t. Passed through, so you’re stuck in limbo.

And maybe that’s some of where the game came from, that it’s, this difficult process to, to get underneath the bar or to pass through to the other side to get yourself out of limbo. Some of what I’m going to talk about today feels like limbo sometimes, but metamorphosis is a much more beautiful term that for the natural transformation from one stage to the next.

What is Metamorphosis?

A metamorphosis, I think, is most often associated with a caterpillar turning into a butterfly, and there’s lots of great descriptions of that and especially of this place in the middle where everything turns to goo. That’s what I want to talk about today, the transition from one stage to the next, but not in limbo, not the stickiness of it, the movement of it, the motion and the transformation, and the transcendence that occurs in the middle.

That’s the part of metamorphosis that I want to dive into today.

Segment: Mindful Moment

First, I want to begin with a quick, mindful moment. I want to invite you if you are somewhere that you can safely close your eyes, get comfortable in your seat, or pause what you’re doing for just a moment and settle in and close your eyes. Let them just fall shut and take a couple deep breaths with me.

Notice how your inhale becomes your exhale and then turns back into your inhale, and this is always happening usually without your involvement.

Let go of any resistance you feel to the movement of your breath in and out.

Changes occur in our bodies with every cycle of breath. Our shoulder blades widen. Our rib cage expands, and contracts allow these changes to happen. As you take big, full, deep breaths,

change is happening constantly in our bodies. Our cells die and are reborn. The food that we eat is processed becomes. To build our muscles and bones, our wounds are healing.

These are processes beyond our control. Let your body make its changes without resistance. From you.

Likewise, our thoughts become other thoughts and different thoughts and the beliefs that we have may transition and change over time. The desires that we have may even now be transforming into something new and different as easily as you allow your breath to. In and out. Allow the transitions in your emotions, in your ideas, in your desires to process and transform as you learn and grow.

We are not meant to be the same creatures today that we were yesterday or that we will be tomorrow this transformation. Is ongoing and can be beautiful.

The light changes, the earth turns let go of the resistance that you feel to the changing of the seasons,

to the turning over of days and weeks and months.

Deep breath and remind yourself of your ability to allow change to happen with ease and allow yourself the space to know that some changes are more difficult than others and some aspect of your life right now. You may be resisting a transformation that is entirely beyond your control.

Are you holding on to someone or something? As you breathe in and out, imagine yourself allowing that change to happen.

Loosen your grip open. Your palms, ready to receive and to release.

Breathe in

and breathe out.

Maybe you feel you’re just approaching a transition and you’re unsure, steady yourself with your breath. Maybe you’re in the messy middle right now. Come back to your breath. Maybe you’re launching onto the other side. Celebrate with a deep breath.

What transition are you experiencing now?

If you had your eyes closed, feel free to flutter those open. I hope that you feel a little bit more grounded and at home in your body and in your life, some of the different things that you may be experiencing. I know that even as I was. Guiding you through that meditation. I was thinking of my own life and a lot of my own current transitions.

Some of my past transitions, some of the metamorphosis that I’ve experienced and am currently in the middle of this episode came about because of this. And most of my episodes do the just relatable human experience of what is happening for me and might it relate to what’s happening for the people who listen to my show?

This idea of transition, and I’ve talked about this a few different times over the years and changing and releasing and letting go and knowing what that process can look like if you want it to. This is an interesting time for me personally, because I have some, I’m in transition with a few things that I planned and hoped for. And then I’ve also had transitions thrust upon me by life circumstance and by family and just change happens. Transitions are part of life.

I remember. The first time Milo slept through the night as a baby, which he wasn’t even that young. We had a hard time sleep training him, and he was maybe 10 or 11 months old by the time he slept eight hours at night. The first night I woke up and realized that he hadn’t gotten up to eat. At two in the morning, I was so delighted, and I thought, oh, we’ve crossed over, we’ve made it to this other side. And then the next day and the next day, and the next day, he woke up at two 30 in the morning to eat, just like he had before.

What I thought was crossing over and becoming stable on the other side of that sleep training experience was the sort of teeter tottering in the middle. I was very much in the goo, and I remember feeling discouraged. I thought that we had this figured out and then we didn’t.

That just feels so relatable to me. Time and time again in my life, I think I’ve got it figured out. I try to pin it down what the system is, what the situation is, how I’m going to approach something, even my own identities, the way that I’m defining who I am and what I want, and who I love, and how I’m going to bring the things that I desire to pass in my life.

All of that is so much more slippery than it seems, or than I often want it to be. And the practice of coming back to a grounding place like breathing is something that has felt important for me, over the last few years and, especially in this last year, when there are truly moments when I feel like I don’t know what I can pin on the board.

Transitions are part of life.

I don’t know if there’s anything in my life that is completely solid the way that I thought that it was. And that’s okay. That’s part of the nature of life. It’s part of the journey to be learning and growing and pausing and reflecting and transitioning and changing. I think it’s a mistake that we make as adults and maybe as a culture in society to give adults this status of almost like having finished, like you, you cross all your boxes off your list and then you’re done.

And so, it can be surprising when life continues to change. There are a few different sort of milestone transitions that we expect young kids go through a lot. Milestone transitions that we’re looking out for, the textbook first word and eating solid food and walking and becoming potty trained and sleeping through the night and all those things.

And then we go through some other sort of milestone transitions. Adolescence is a big one, like hitting puberty and transitioning through from childhood into sort of young adulthood in physical and emotional ways. Then there’s of course all the schooling transitions that, that a lot of kids experience and adults too, but mostly as kids, mostly by the time you’re in.

I’d say mid-twenties, maybe early thirties. You’re through the system as far as school and are starting to settle into job opportunities and figuring out what you want the next stage to look like. And then there’s of course, family transitions of getting married or having a relationship.

And then the further transition of having children, whatever way they come into a family. Maybe getting pets and then there’s the home transitions and there’s like all these different aspects of our lives. That leaves aside like physical transitions of as a woman who has born children, going through the process of becoming pregnant and carrying a child and then bearing that child and then, processing through the transition the metamorphosis of discovering what my butterfly body post babies looked like and things like that.

And at some point maybe five years ago I felt like I was through a lot of that and had a little bit better of an idea of what my, the next 20 years would look like. And here’s just the funny thing. I have no idea what the next 20 years are going to look like. That’s just, things just change and that’s okay.

My current metamorphosis: graduate school.

One of the biggest transformations metamorphosis that I’ve experienced. I don’t know if that’s the right term, but a metamorphosis that I’m currently in the goo of is my graduate program that, at 39 years old I decided to apply for a graduate program. I was thrilled to be accepted. I have spent the last eight, almost nine months, in over my head, truly in a beautiful way.

Not completely drowning, but swimming and drowning a little bit, and then swimming along and getting stronger and getting better. And I was like, cocooned and just very much still in the goo of. What does this mean for me? I thought going into school that I had a clear idea of how I would use the new knowledge and skills and understanding that I was gaining and how that would apply to my life after I graduated, and I’m still very much in the thick of it and am feeling changes happen in what I want and what I envision.

I’m having this interesting thought process of how I become a new creature. Not just add this new learning and understanding and skillset and degree to my resume or to put it on like a jacket. It feels more like my insides are changing and me. Like I’ve wrapped myself in this cocoon and I don’t know exactly what kind of butterfly I look like.

I’m not sure what’s going to happen next. So, therefore I wanted to record this show because I have in my own life been feeling the dissonance of who I was and who I am going to be while at this very moment, being who I am, which is neither. Who I was, nor who I’m going to emerge as. And in some ways, you could say why even define that?

It doesn’t really matter. But we do love stability. We do. Our brains really need some sort of stability and consistency at a baseline level to be able to make predictions and make decisions and feel safe and. There’s a lot out there about, doing things afraid be afraid and do it anyway.

And I think that’s great. And I think it’s important to understand what part of the process you’re in when you’re making decisions, and to allow the space for a transition to occur to be what it is. A caterpillar doesn’t go to sleep one night and wake up the next morning as a butterfly.

There’s a process involved. There is metamorphosis that includes many steps and systems and time. It takes time and it’s a natural thing. Many people, you wouldn’t look at a cocoon and think, oh dang, that caterpillar died. Like it’s over. It’s done, but it also isn’t yet what it will be.

What are the properties of a transition?

And that middle piece is the transition. I looked up a couple different article. Talking about transitions. What does that even mean? Do they have def defined properties? How can we aid ourselves? How can we give ourselves the best possible scenario of. Going through our own personal metamorphosis in different areas of our life at different times.

I found a great framework from some; it was a meta-analysis looking at a bunch of different academic articles around people experiencing. Great transitions. Some of them were like adolescents moving from high school into college and what that transition looked like. Some were people who had received a medical diagnosis and they were going from one state of health into a different state of health.

There were about five or six different examples of transitions that had been studied for other reasons. These authors brought them together and started to look at what are some of the similarities and the patterns that we see in the process of transition itself. And they pulled out five different points or characteristics to consider when you’re thinking about a transition or a metamorphosis.

And I thought that I, it was helpful. Reading them for my own personal experience helped me think about where I am with each of these and what. I can expect moving forward and maybe some ideas around how to feel held, how to hold myself, how to feel supported and surrounded as I’m going through transitions, whatever they are.

And the transition in and out of graduate school is one example just from my own life. You probably can think of a handful of examples of transitions you’re experiencing right now. Some that you want, some that you’re resisting, some that you aren’t even aware. So that’s where we’re going to begin with these five properties of transitions.

1. Awareness

And the first one is awareness. Awareness is the moment where it comes into your cognition, into your knowing that you’re experiencing a change. I think that. Lots of times it’s when we are well into a transition that we realize that’s what’s happening. We sometimes assume that things are just going to be the way they are, and we are operating out of systems that we’ve that, that have worked well up until now.

We don’t know that we are changing until we are aware of it when it comes into our awareness. And that can happen through a lot of different ways. Maybe you can think. Transitions that you’ve experienced in your life, and the moment when you realize that was happening, and it may be a moment where physically something changes, you’re sick.

Like when I was pregnant, I, I was like eating so many graham crackers. I was working as a nurse my very first pregnancy and my very first. Nursing job. I was working at this rehab center, and they had little like two packs of graham crackers in the drawers, for snacks or if patients were nauseous and I was just downing them.

I had them like in my pockets of my scrubs all day long, and I was just eating graham crackers constantly because I had this low L level nausea, and I wasn’t aware. It was probably two weeks of eating. Boxes worth of graham crackers in those single serve packets before I was aware of the possibility that I could be pregnant.

And that awareness was the moment when my, when the transition really began for me, because it, I became, it became known to me what I was experiencing. So, awareness is the first property of a transition.

2. Engagement

The second is engagement. This is how we are involved ourselves with the change. Are we learning through the process, actively seeking out information about what we are experiencing?

Are we seeking help, looking for mentors, looking for friends? Enlisting a medical professional if it’s a physical change, enlisting a mental health professional. If it’s an emotional transition, enlisting a mentor. Like maybe it’s a fun transition, like you’re thinking I want to start a business for the first-time and.

You, a lot of the women that I work with in my creative mentorship have this awareness of, I want to start a business, or I want to start a podcast, or I want to grow my business, or I have a new offering that I’d like to create, and they enlist me as a mentor to add support, accountability and help walk that pathway with them through the transition from idea to execution, engage.

Is referring to what sort of resources are you utilizing to support you in your change?

3. Change

The next property is the change itself. It’s what becomes different. And the authors made a distinction in this article between the transition. They use that word to talk about something changing over time or the processing of an event, and then they use the word change.

To be the instant of flipping the switch. Now, not all transitions will have that moment, but some do. For example, a marriage is a transition that the processing of it happens over time. There’s a whole courtship and in a lot of traditional love stories falling in love and dating and the lead up.

And then there’s the moment was. Sign the papers. That’s the moment of logistical change, and then there’s probably processing that continues after. So, the transition of getting married is different than the moment of change where you’ve signed the papers. There’s also a question here of. How you’re approaching it, and this also goes in with the engagement piece of do you like what’s being changed?

Is this a change or a transition or a metamorphosis that you’re hoping for or that you’re looking forward to, or that you are desiring? Or is it something that is happening not because you want it to, maybe because you know that it’s the right thing for you, like it’s good for your growth or your healing, or.

It’s happening because of someone else’s choices or because of something outside of your control that you’re the, you’re experiencing the byproduct of something out of your control that will change the process of the transition and the way that you emerge from it.

4. Timeline

The fourth property of transition is the timeline, and the authors talk about this in the steps. There’s the stability of pre-transition. Whatever was happening that your feet were on solid ground, and then there’s the unstable middle. This is the goo. This is wrapped up in the cocoon, and your whole self has turned to jelly, and you don’t really know what’s going to happen when you emerge.

Because it all must be put back together again, and it’s not going to be put back together the same way. It’s going to be put back together into an entirely different creature. That unstable piece is the, is part of the transition. It’s a necessary part. And then the third one is emerging into stability again, but it’s a different type of stability.

It’s like crossing over a gorge and you’re on one side and then you’re on like the teeter tottery hanging bridge. In the middle thinking that you may fall at any moment and then you emerge onto the other side where you have your feet on solid ground. Again, the ground is different because the change has taken place.

What I’ve been noticing in my own life come up for me in my own personal transition specific to school is that. Feel I’m in this unstable place. I’m making decisions. I’m trying to pause and be aware of desires arising in me and what I see happening, what changes I want to make in my business and in my life because of this program.

And my instinct is to jump the gorge. It’s to get from stability to stability as quickly as possible and to let go and just cut off what was, and to grab onto whatever stability I can see in the future, even if it’s not the thing that I ultimately want, just for the sake of feeling that ground under my feet and that rush eludes the entire.

Process that the unstable part of a transition is the transition. That is the process. Allowing myself the space to not know what comes next is exactly what is going to invite what I need into my life. Not jumping to choosing something that is available right now, just because it’s available. And, not sitting on my heels, for five years and saying I don’t really know yet.

There will come a point of decision, but the, it’s not really time to make a bunch of big decisions yet, because I’m still in the middle of it. Literally I’m not done with school until July. So it’s okay that I don’t know what it looks like yet. It’s okay. That I’m not sure what the next 20 years are going to be.

It’s okay. Jumping to a different transition in my life. I’ve talked a little bit about our house. We moved into a house about 18 months ago now and haven’t done a whole lot in terms of redecorating and redesigning and. Part of it is good that I’ve waited. I intentionally waited while I was studying so that I wouldn’t divide my time too much Further.

I’m positive that the choices that I will make for our home will be different because of the time that I’ve spent waiting and living in it and feeling into it and making sure that I am aligned in me. Life that I am aware of what I want and of my values and of the things that I love, and just coming back home to me will make those choices a lot better.

This is just a moment for me to give you permission to feel like you’re in the goo and know that it’s okay that. No one has it all together all the time. No one is only on stable ground. And if they are, it’s probably because they’re not doing a whole lot of progressing. They’re not doing a lot of learning.

Development is supposed to be over the lifespan. We are meant to grow. We are meant not in a like forced self-development sort of way. Not in a chasing progress for perfection’s sake, but in a naturally what is emerging in us as we learn things and as we are aware of new desires and as we are interested in the world around us, we’ll want to move in new directions, and it’s okay to not know the end from the beginning.

5. Critical Markers

The fifth property of the transition are the critical markers or. That mark turning points in the process. And these looks different depending on the person and depending on what the transition is that you’re experiencing, the metamorphosis of a butterfly begins with the stage of egg. And then when the egg hatches, the turning point there is that the larva emerges.

And a caterpillar is considered the larva of a butterfly. So, it’s like an adolescent butterfly, even though it has its own name. And then the chrysalis, the forming of the chrysalis is another turning point. When the caterpillar slows down, it’s been eating, and it slows down and it hooks onto a branch with its, Bit of glue and starts to build itself this soft encasement so that its tissue and limbs and organs can all basically dissolve and restructure themselves and reform themselves into an adult butterfly.

And this is another turning point when that process is finished. And the chrysalis starts to open, and this butterfly emerges, and it hangs on and stretches out its wings and flops around a little bit and rests, and then can fly away and lay eggs, and the process begins again. There are these distinct turning points or markers in the.

Metamorphosis from egg to adult butterfly, and each one of our own personal transitions can have some of those same turning points. And I want to mention here something that I’ve been thinking for myself of how so often rituals are involved with the beginnings of things. We begin with a ritual, and sometimes when we’re making transitions in our lives, we may need to invent rituals for the transition out of things.

Graduate school is actually a great example of a transition out being ritualized. Graduation itself is this big celebration of the process being complete and finished. It marks the moment when you emerge. So many of our other life transitions don’t have the same ritual for. For the letting go. And I think that we would feel a lot better about some of the changes in our lives if we did have those types of things.

If we had a ritual that we invented to say goodbye to a house that we had loved when we moved out, that, I don’t know what ex you can be creative about what that looks like but thinking of some of the ways that we want to emerge into new beings. How are we ritualizing what we are leaving behind?

And acknowledging and being grateful for it and marking it in some way. I’m going to just quickly review these properties of transitions.

The Five Stages of Transition

The first is the awareness coming into knowing of the change in the transition. The second is engagement. This is the level of involvement that you have, the resources you seek, the mentors that you are working with.

What are you learning and how are you growing and changing? What level of involvement and engagement do you have in the process? Some people don’t feel very engaged and that impacts the transition. If they’re ignoring it, rather than engaging with it, it’s going to have very different outcomes on their wellbeing than if they engage with it.

Number three is the change itself, the difference that is being made. Do you like what’s changing? Do you not like what’s changing? How do you feel about that? And is there a moment? Change and a longer transition process. Defining those things and just being aware of them can be helpful. Number four is the time span.

Moving from stability to instability back into stability. Knowing that the land that you were on before is not going to be the same as the land that you are on moving forward. Both can be stable though. Both can feel consistent and can feel solid. And there’s that middle piece of just being in the goo.

That is also part of the process. It is the process. And if you’re there and you feel badly that you’re, you don’t know yet. You don’t know what’s coming, you don’t feel, certain, if you feel like things are a little bit unstable in some areas of your life because of transitions, know that is normal and.

Fifth, are these critical markers or turning points that happen where a ritual may be helpful? One thing seems to be clear with people experiencing transitions that the level to which we’re able to stay connected to others really benefits our transition process itself. This is where that engagement can be helpful.

How are you staying connected? Do you have someone to share with? Do you have someone to bounce ideas around with? This is where having a coach or a mentor or a therapist or a good friend that you can call and just process with, talk through what’s happening. Even doing meditations and mindfulness to allow yourself the space from what’s happening, know that it’s going on, and especially if it’s difficult being able to have a place in your breath.

Where you can just let it go for a moment and find that rhythm of breathing and settle your nervous system back down to a baseline and recover, close some of those stressful loops and allow yourself to have the rest, transitions, weather, good or bad. Pretty exhausting. They take a lot of energy.

The number of muscles you employ walking across a teetering bridge over a gorge is going to be much higher than just a regular stroll on the hard ground. So, know that these transitions can be taxing and that the level of support that you have will benefit you. 

The Importance of Support

One of the studies that I just have been fascinated by is the idea, and I’m sure I’ve mentioned it before, but it’s a study about support systems, about connection and friendship. And they had people come into the lab and look at an incline like a hill. And answer questions about the difficulty of climbing the hill.

They didn’t have to climb it. They just had to answer questions about, looking at that, how it felt and people who had a friend or support with them saw the hill as less difficult and the actual incline like their, the way they saw it, the visual of the hill looked less steep than people who didn’t have the same.

Having a friend, a support system, an encourager, a coach, a therapist a book group, a spouse, a mom, and sister. You can talk to, whoever. Having the connection makes the challenge easier. It looks easier. It feels easier, and transitions, metamorphosis can. Positive. They can feel like something that we want, and they can also feel hard and negative, like something we don’t want.

Even the difficulties that we go through can change us for good. I’m going to say that again. Even the difficult challenges that we experience can change us positively. If you’re listening and you’re going through something difficult, I’m so sorry. It is hard to be in the goo. It is hard to be suspended over that cliff and not know what happens next or not know how to get to the other side.

Not even know how far away the other side might be or when. It will feel like there’s solid ground under your feet. Again, I want you to feel a little bit less alone in that process. What I’m experiencing is different for sure than what you’re experiencing. And I mentioned graduate school is a, as a personal example of transition and I’m experiencing some other unexpected and difficult transitions in my life right now as well that don’t lend themselves to share publicly.

I just want you to know that it’s okay to not feel okay sometimes, and it’s okay to be excited about a change that’s happening, and it’s okay to be bummed out about a change that’s happening, and it’s okay to not know where the pieces are going to fit back together.

Or how you’re going to emerge at the end of this. I’m just truly in the middle of it with you and using some of the knowledge and understanding and skills that I’ve learned over the last nine months to find beauty in the process and to acknowledge the hard and be grateful for the good. I invite you to consider that as well as we’re all on our process of becoming the beautiful butterflies that we are meant to be.

I hope this episode has resonated with you, and I want to thank you so much for lending some of your time and attention to me as you tune into live free creative podcasts. I know there’s a lot of shows you could listen to. There’s a lot that you could be doing with this, 30 to 40 minutes a week, and I, from the bottom of my heart, am so grateful that.

Turn some of that attention this way, and I hope that I support you by sharing things that are interesting and uplifting and help you live a little bit more aligned with the life that you want to live. I hope you have a fantastic week. I’ll talk to you next time. Bye-bye.