Hello dear friend.
I have been in a Cocoon Season of life. I don’t think we talk about these periods enough.
For the past year and a half, I have found myself wanting to pull back on so many things in life. I have felt myself wanting to be quieter. Less available. Less out there. More to myself and to the people that matter to me most.
This comes on the heels of years of needing to be out there to communicate messages, and promote my work. It’s a bit of a conflict to want to pull back when I simultaneously yearn to attract women to do the deep work of retreat, and to share messages via my writing.
So it’s been a wee bit sticky and conflicting to navigate. Perhaps you can relate. The pull to create something new for yourself. And the tender breaking off from what came before. And the drifting that happens in the middle of that.
The thing about a Cocoon Season is that it is characterized by being in between. You float between both cliffs, in the middle of the ravine. It is unfinished and undecided. A threshold. You don’t quite know what is next, yet you’re not entirely content living the same as before.
And this transition is live. Always changing. Not entirely easy to describe or welcome people into.
You mostly want to do it alone.
Quietly.
Caterpillering your way through it until your next metamorphosis you can proudly stand behind.
For me, this cocooning brings a lot of reflection on the quality of the energy from which I’ve been living. For so many years I’ve been driving, striving, working, creating, pushing and owning this life of mine, charging forth head on, and taking full responsibility for it all.
There is something recently that beckons me to let life do a bit more of the leading. Surrender to what is happening before me instead of forcing my will upon it.
While I absolutely believe the choices we make, our psychology and our actions, influence our lives, a bigger part of me feels that we have less control than we’d like to think. And our work is merely in our responses to life. And in keeping ourselves open.
How do I stay open even in the midst of this?
How do I stay open even now?
I think it is the hubris of youth and health that leads people to believe they have total control over their lives. When things go your way, it’s easy to think it was “all you.”
Yet, time shows us all that good people get sick or leave us too early. That seemingly undeserving people face unthinkable challenges. And that none of us is immune to this unfolding.
And so I find myself here.
Inside the cocoon.
Not gone. Nor lost exactly.
Just being rearranged in ways I don’t yet have language for.
Maybe this is the part we don’t talk about enough. Sometimes becoming does not look like expansion. It does not look like launch dates, full calendars, better branding, or some shiny declaration of arrival.
Sometimes becoming looks like disappearing for a while.
Letting old ambitions grow quiet. Answering fewer texts. Sitting in the strange discomfort of not knowing what comes next. Watching the former version of yourself dissolve before the new one shows inklings of who she’ll be.
I believe Cocoon Seasons are sacred places of undoing, uncomfortable though they may be.
They are places where life softens our grip. Where we stop forcing every door open. Where we begin listening for what is still alive beneath the noise instead of dictating it.
I don’t know exactly what is coming next.
But I know I want to stay open.
Open to beauty. Open to grief. Open to love. Open to the women I am still meant to gather with. Open to the words that still want to come through me. Open to a life that may be wiser than the one I keep trying to micromanage into submission.
So, I’m still here, inside the tender belly of the unknown.
Maybe you are too.
And if you are somewhere between what was and what will be, I hope you will be gentle with yourself. I am sure trying to be.
Not every season is meant to be witnessed.
I believe some are meant to remake us.
Quietly.
From the inside out.
To read more of my work or find out about my transformational retreats, please visit my website. xxo
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