Entering the Cocoon (or How Initiation Works) Part 1: An Introduction
Photo by Gabriela Tamara Cycman on Unsplash
“This is your body
Your greatest gift.
Pregnant with wisdom you do not hear
Grief you thought was forgotten,
And joy you have never known”
You probably didn’t notice, but I went quiet recently.
Around the end of May this year, I was invited into a reverent hush. A pause. A deep silence of soul. A reflective space for turning inward, retreating, practicing the art of hiddenness. The invitation came from the hand of Divine and I know enough these days to accept invitations sent my way without arguing.
Very recently, I learned not to question, struggle or fight the process that inevitably follow these invitations – but just to go with it.
I am writing to you tonight from ‘The Other Side”, the wide and spacious place I now find myself in, which is sometimes described as a desert, or emptiness, or poverty of spirit.
It is a good place to live. Simple, quiet. Solid. Unaffected by weather patterns. Untouched by the designs, desires, and projections of others.
This place might sound sad or lonely to you, if you yourself have not been invited to live here. It might even sound terrifying.
It is not sad. It is many things, but sad isn’t one of them.
“It is wild and generous, untamed and scandalously beautiful. It echoes with many millennia of sacred songs, thrums with the beating of a million hearts and two million feet dancing the ancient mandala of life and love and bearing witness to the unfoldment of all of creation. It is holy and unspeakable and I never want to leave.
I don’t think I will.”
I now understand that I was invited into a great hush to enter more deeply into the experience of living in this place. To empty out more and more and more, to be filled deeper and deeper with the vast silence of cosmic belonging.
The pulsating song of the stars.
The curl of the wave over the reef under the moon.
The swelling of the bullfrog crooning her evening lullabye.
The warm snuffle of a sleeping child curled into my own wild body.
These are the manna to sustain the one who chooses to live in this place. They cannot be stored until morning. There is only ever just enough for today.
When you decide to accept the invitation to live in this place, you say goodbye to some things that you used to hold on tightly to. The things you used to build your old façade, the face you show the world. Things that look good on your CV, or in your Instagram bio. Or on your Facebook feed. Affiliations which match your personal ‘brand’. At the time, this feels like a brutal sacrifice. But later, you will find it hard to remember how it even felt to care about these things:
Your favourite ideas and mythologies about who you are and who you hoped you people would see you as.
Being known and understood by a host of acquaintances.
Being applauded or noticed for being excellent at things that are valued by your culture.
Your reputation.
Being beloved by the power-brokers in your world.
Being thought highly of.
Being needed or wanted.
Being esteemed, valued, sought-after.
Belonging. In your family, in your key relationships, in your neighbourhood, in your professional spaces, in your faith community.
You might get to belong to some of these places still, but the chances are slim, and you may feel the need to give others an ‘out’ of having to affiliate with you…so you do. And many take the chance to slip away from your presence quietly and you bear them no resentment for it.
You settle instead for this one thing; you settle to be your own.
To be a fool.
To start a fool’s journey into the great unknown and trust that each step will be attended to by the great unseen benevolent universe, whatever name you choose to ascribe to it.
You settle for the wild frontier within. And your own company.
You discover that in order to start the journey of the fool, before you begin, as you let your old life die, you must first enter into the cosmic cocoon.
This is a place that looks snug and warm and neat on the outside, but on the inside, there is a fierce and fiery alchemy that places you in the crucible of your own becoming.
Did you know, that when the caterpillar is inside the cocoon, its body liquefies? It actually turns to a slip of caterpillar goop. There is only one thing in this process that anchors the caterpillar to its future iteration as a butterfly.
Photo by Agata Kaczówka on Unsplash
I bet you don’t know what that one thing is. I do, I Googled it.
It is a ‘they’ and they are a highly complex set of very clever cells called ‘imaginal discs’. These are like breadcrumb trails encoded into the caterpillar’s DNA at its inception. They are the cells which know that inside the goop, they have a task to accomplish. They are to become antennae. Or wings. Or legs. They know exactly what’s up, they will make shit happen and there will be no messing around. Those imaginal discs are in charge of the caterpillar’s future and that is all there is to it. The caterpillar must just submit to this process and trust that its own incredible body will do its job.
Caterpillars learn the wisdom of the body, from inside the cocoon.
Turns out, so do humans.
The human cocoon phase is similar to our caterpillar cousins’ phase. It is an initiation, a transformation, a dying and re-birthing. There is being pulverised to an unrecognisable state; human goop. From that stage, our own imaginal discs; our spiritual DNA starts to sing to us of mystery and paradox and awakens a new dimension of experiential understanding that shifts our internal landscape permanently. Our spiritual DNA delivers us into a new embodiment of powerful archetypal patterns laid down before the dawn of time, which function like railway tracks driving our transformation forward in the pattern which is uniquely our own, and yet which links us in a powerful web to the rest of humanity. Finally, there is a struggle against the encasing of the cocoon in which we at once fight to stay the same, and fight to transform. This stage is the most brutal and exhausting; it can be likened to the transition phase women experience right before their baby is delivered. Ultimately, this is the part which strengthens and beautifies us. And then, there is re-birth.
The next four instalments of my blog will be extensions of this first post after the great hush of the cocoon, which is really just an introduction to lay the groundwork for what I now understand to be the next stage of my life’s work.
For me this recent period of being quiet, hermiting away and going silent meant slipping away quietly from social media, from many relationships, from having a public persona, from giving explanations, from showing up, being present. I was asked, by Divine, to shut up for a hot second and watch and wait and be very still. I was like the baby fox learning to hunt from its mama. Attending closely, watching, practicing, fumbling, failing, learning. Burrowing deep into the ground for warmth and safety, hiding from predators and the waning moon. I made my world smaller than it had ever been before. I disconnected, I reconnected. I simplified. I said no, thankyou, I will not be coming to your potluck / birthday party / farewell drinks. I drove away into the forest for a week by myself. I wrote and wrote and wrote. I sang and sprawled in the sunshine with my boys and slept and listened some more.
On the other side of this cocoon season, everything has changed. I have changed the way I live, where I live, how I live. I have radically reshaped my future in a way which leaves room for both limitless possibility, and a hollow grief for a fourteen year marriage to a wonderful man, which came to an end before I entered the cocoon. I have re-framed my family’s own story in light of the Great Big Story I’ve been invited to live inside of, and I’ve changed the way I choose to co-create with Divine.
Truth be told, I didn’t really want to return to this public space after such a long silence, but I was compelled and directed to. I understand this is because there are many of us who are -right now - also undergoing the alchemy of the cocoon and it is a fearsome and feckless place. So if my words can be a breadcrumb trail for you through your own journey, well, that’s the whole point isn’t it.
See you next week for the first installment.