I am historically not good at stillness. The silence, the being with myself, the RESTING has always felt deeply uncomfortable for me. It makes me feel exposed, raw, like I’ve had all my defensive mechanisms stripped from me and am now being forced to sit naked and shivering in a cold dark room.
A tad melodramatic perhaps, but true.
In the few months since my graduation, I’ve been forced to face this struggle of mine head-on. I’ve twiddled my thumbs and stared at the ceiling. I’ve busied myself with a laundry list of tasks that are unnecessary and tedious, but keep me feeling just busy enough to feel worthy.
I’ve also spent a lot of time doing precisely what I’d always tried my hardest to avoid – being with all the parts of me. I spent time in meditation; I deleted social media off my phone and consciously stopped myself from turning to my old coping mechanisms of checking e-mail or falling down Internet rabbit holes. And after a while, something very surprising became clear to me. This thing I’d been so terrified of and had spent my life avoiding was actually not so bad. In fact, it could feel really great.
In her book Untamed, Glennon Doyle writes about the process of cocooning. How there comes a moment when you need to shed your old skin and allow the old patterns and systems that are no longer serving you to burn. How sitting in the discomfort, really feeling it all and really BEING IN IT, is the only path to becoming. To transforming. To creating who you are meant to be.
It’s uncomfortable to stay in the cocoon. We want answers – when will this cocoon phase be over? We want the exact date and time when we will finally be allowed to emerge into the beauty we can feel is around the corner, that magical moment that everything suddenly makes sense.
And yet, that is the work. Staying in the cocoon even when it’s dark and scary in there. Even when you feel restless and frantic and every part of you feels ready to emerge into the world.
Trust that you are still in the process of becoming. This is a process that cannot be rushed. You will know you are ready when you are no longer fighting to leave. When you realize that the cocoon is really not all bad. That when you peel back all the layers and dig deep, there is an endless supply of love and joy and tenderness that you used to think only existed outside yourself.
You start to realize that this thing you’ve been resisting and avoiding for so long, the quiet and stillness and the sitting with yourself, is nowhere near as bad as you’d always feared it would be. Most importantly, you realize that the alternative – never doing the deeper work, never recalibrating, never tuning in to make sure you are still living a life that is most true to you – is no longer an option.
No questions. Just your thoughts.
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