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One of the metaphors for spiritual transformation that we hear a lot is that we're like a caterpillar

and a cocoon and that the awakening comes as we feel the sense of the cocoon and realize

it's time to go beyond and then we transform into a butterfly and fly into freedom.

And it's a really actually very useful metaphor individually and as a species in the sense

that we live in this familiar cocoon of our egoic thoughts and behaviors and so on and they

serve us, the cocoon serves us earlier stages of development and then at the time comes to go

beyond and if we don't the cocoon creates a pressure and we start getting more and more

squeezed because we're living into small space for our growing spirit and so that pressures

a reminder to take the chance and break open and it's damaging if we don't it's a rest of development.

It's even more useful if you think of it in terms of for these humans that we are it's not a one

shot that we're continually waking up out of a cocoon of you know illusion a cocoon of limiting

beliefs a cocoon of in some way behaviors that are keeping us small that it's a continual ongoing

process of coming into contact with a wider reality. So it's like shedding a skin and each round

that we shed a skin we become more we feel that vulnerability you know the new skin's more

porous okay than the old skin so there's more contact more flow through and there's a more of a

sense of vulnerability and so I'd like to take a phrase that I heard recently

and I really liked from the poet Mark Nippo who I love and he describes it this way he says

this shedding of a skin's like it's called taking the exquisite risk that every time we

kind of open up out of our cocoon our familiar cocoon to contact a wider reality to really touch

aliveness more fully we're taking the exquisite risk and I love it because exquisite canotes this

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