Do you feel restless? Even edgy at times?

Not so much waiting for the other shoe to drop, but like something is in your shoe, rubbing poking, refusing to let you go one step further.

You know what I mean, don’t you?

It’s happening to a whole lot of people these days. Yeah, there is illness, loss of job, divorce, and the usual tough stuff that grabs our attention, but I am not talking about those outer and very obvious show-stoppers. I am talking about the ache deep inside to show up in some brighter way.

Some stellar way even, if you dare to admit that to yourself.

One of my heroes was a man named James Hillman, part scholar, part mystic, and his popular lectures were often part performance. Hillman made big waves in the psychotherapy community right from the start, questioning the widely accepted assumptions about the roots of pathology, and radically celebrating deviance.

Hillman believed one of the greatest of mysteries to be the question of character and destiny. In his bestseller The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling
he proposed that we are born with a calling in life and that it's our mission in life to realize its imperatives. He called it the “acorn theory“, the idea that our lives are formed by a particular image, just as the oak's destiny is contained in the tiny acorn.

Bill Ballenberg

Hillman adapted Jungian ideas into a model he called archetypal psychology, rooted in the aesthetic imagination, which was irresistible for many artists, poets, and musicians.

As a graduate student at Columbia U., studying clinical social work, I embraced his ideas, and find that I return to them often as I work with people whom I call Light Workers who are here to have an impact in the lives of so many who need the support.

Many of you know who you are, and realize why you came. Others of you are just not so sure, or simply… afraid… terrified at times. I see it all the time in such awesome people. I see it in myself. I have made a decision not to let all its many forms of resistance stop me.

Take a moment and look at the short video, which has a quickened view of the miraculous change the caterpillar goes through in the process of becoming a butterfly. Call me sentimental, but when I saw the struggle, I was utterly moved!

The work of ethnobiologist Elizabeth Sathouris, provides an exquisite framework and potent message for our times. Sathouris spent years studying the transformational process of caterpillar into butterfly, uncovering what she named imaginal cells.  Because the imaginal cells contain the DNA of the butterfly, which is slightly different than that of the caterpillar, the immune system of the latter views them as foreign objects and attempts to destroy them, the same way it would a virus or bacterium.

In a similar way, humanity has done the same to our prophets, lightworkers and truth-speakers, such as Jesus, Gandhi, and Dr. King, to name but a few.

There comes a time however, in the life of every caterpillar, when they heed some innate call to begin a feeding frenzy, in which they devour everything in sight. During this time, the caterpillar basically dissolves into a nutrient soup, becoming a blob of goop. This hyper-eating phase triggers a hyper-production of imaginal cells, which begin popping everywhere, and they start gravitating toward each other, coalescing into imaginal clusters. Once the imaginal cells join together, the immune system of the caterpillar can no longer destroy them, no matter what it does.

In many ways, that is where humanity is now. Systems are imploding all around us, disintegrating in front of our eyes.

What we thought we could put our faith in has failed us, and it is time to activate the innate design within each of us and within the collective — to awaken to our full potential, refusing to live mediocre lives of frustration, or to hide our light under a bushel. No more excuses. We must find one another, and as we join in a deeper communion with one another, we can no longer be destroyed.

Whether we collectively survive the metamorphosis and transform into an exquisite butterfly depends on each one of us, the imaginal cells of the planet.

But back to the fear I mentioned above. Listen, you will feel afraid to be all you can be and shine your light as the star you were born to be. That doesn’t mean you don’t take a step…one after the other.

I love this quote by Steven Pressfield from one of my favorite books, The War of Art.

“Resistance is directly proportional to love. If you’re feeling massive Resistance, the good news is, it means there’s tremendous love there too. If you didn’t love the project that is terrifying you, you wouldn’t feel anything. The opposite of love isn’t hate; it’s indifference.”

That resistance is part of what makes for the restlessness, the rock in your shoe rubbing you over and over.

Stop, take your shoes off. Walk on something God made, like sand or dirt, and feel how you belong here. Feel the love. Feel how you came here for some reason. It doesn’t have to be way out there and grand, but there is a reason. And you will remain restless until you are fully living it. That is part of being human.

We are born to unfold like a butterfly whose blueprint was formed long before its wings could fly.

In the words of one of Rilke, one of my favorite poets:

I want to unfold.
I don't want to stay folded anywhere,
because where I am folded, there I am a lie.

Here’s to unfoldment, turning into a blob of goop at times, if that’s what it takes, so that your soul’s code can show you the way.

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