Midlife - From Chrysalis to Butterfly

In ancient Greece the word for soul, psyche, was often described as a butterfly.  The transformation from caterpillar to chrysalis to butterfly is a perfect metaphor for what is happening in midlife.  It is a psychological chrysalis for us.  All living things go through cycles of growth and change.  Caterpillars spend almost their entire lives feeding and growing.

We can look at the first half of our lives when we developed our egos as a time of absorbing our cultural, familial, religious ways and beliefs about who we are and how life works.  During the transformation of the caterpillar into the butterfly, the caterpillar’s skin is incapable of stretching, so it has to accommodate its expanding self by shedding or molting its skin. 

The final molt produces the chrysalis.  It is a stage when the caterpillar comes to rest.  As it hangs from a tree inside the chrysalis, the caterpillar begins to dissolve and create the fluid that will become the body and wings of the butterfly.  When the adult is fully formed, the skin of the chrysalis splits open and a butterfly crawls out.  It pumps the fluid from its body into its wings and begins to fly.

It would be nice if this transformation automatically and biologically just happened to us the way it does for the caterpillar, but it doesn’t.  We have to participate in our own transformation, our own awakening to the potential of butterfly.  A part of ourselves (the socialized self) is disintegrating.  We have outgrown it.  It isn’t satisfied being a caterpillar anymore.  Our inner butterfly, our authentic self, our soul, our psyche is crying out in many ways trying to get our attention with this message that we have outgrown some of our old assumptions and beliefs about ourselves and the world.  They weren’t formed from the inside out anyway, but from the outside in. We have lost ourselves in the world.

That’s why our transformations often startwith those uncomfortable feelings of irritation, frustration, deep sadness, a desperation to find meaning, passion, and purpose in our lives.  The onset of this transformation often comes as some kind of loss as well, but not always.  We can experience divorce, job loss, the death of a parent, financial issues as well.  Life as we know it has stopped and we are in between who we were and who we are becoming.  We humans hate change.  We hate the unknown.  We like to be in charge and in control of things.  So this can easily give us panic attacks, make us feel like we are going crazy, get us into deep depression and so on.

Instead of resisting the changes and feelings, if we want to truly transform into the butterfly, we have to “go into” them, listen to what our lives and feelings are trying to communicate to us.  Resistance, bracing against them, wishing they would go away and shoving them down will only bring us pain and agony if not now then later in life.  We have to step into the abyss (the chrysalis) without a clue as to when and how we will emerge from it.  This is the hero’s journey that we are always reading about except now you are being called to go on this courageous adventure of rebirth and renewal.

In this hero’s journey we are required to sacrifice the caterpillar – our ego and all of its illusions.  Sacrifice is derived from the Latin sacrificium.  It means forfeiting

something important in the service of receiving something of even greater value.  It literally means “to make holy.”  We do this in order to experience our potential, our authentic, true sprit free from the restraints of the ego.

Feed Your Spirit and Free Your Soul

By feeding the spirit vs. our socialized self while we are in the midlife chrysalis stage of change, we can end up freeing our authentic soul to live as a free spirit during the second half of our lives.  I invite you to participate in your own conscious evolution so that you can have this experience of transforming into the butterfly.  By entering the chrysalis consciously and participating in your own awakening as a butterfly, you are working with the powerful psychological and spiritual forces that are urging you toward individuation and the evolution of your soul.  The process cannot be hurried or be on any timetable.  It’s all about going within, doing deep introspective work, getting in touch with and listening to your intuition, and taking actions from this deep inner place within yourself.