Patience
I wake up feeling a familiar restlessness. Time to get working, fulfill my life’s purpose, make meaning happen.
Some of this impatience is motivating. But much of it is punishing, my ego’s fears manifesting in a rolling belly and twitching leg.
My achievement-driven personality is especially apt to feel anxiety when life is bumpy and the future feels uncertain. “It’s all up to me.”
A guided inner journey I once experienced helped me understand this in a new way. I traveled inside to what practitioners of shamanism call the lower world. Down the roots of a beloved tree through dark tunnels of earth. Then out to a grassy slope and an open blue sky.
Invited by spirit to open my inner eyes to see a lower world guide, I saw a caterpillar on the grass, eating, resting, and doing what it needed to do before transforming into a butterfly.
Up came impatience! No! I want to be a butterfly! NOW!
Instead, I became the caterpillar in a green, translucent cocoon.
An invitation to patience.
I wanted the beauty and freedom of the butterfly.
Instead I was shown the necessary magic of the cocooned caterpillar.