I’ve gone through a lot of transformations in my life. I have lived enough lives for seven people, and each new direction and trajectory has taken a lot of work, focus, and commitment. The process of my life has been full of twists and turns, change, re-organization, and temporary chaos.

When I look back on my life, there’s one thing I often forget about transformations; the amount of pain I feel during them. I often see past transmutations as the divine plan and growth that they were, but I rarely remember just how much pain I was in at the time. But when I go through the next stage of change I'm reminded that pain is a huge part of the process, and it’s easy to question why so much agony is necessary.

There’s a reason that the symbol of transformation is the butterfly. There is a massive amount of struggle the butterfly has to go through before it metamorphizes into that beautiful creature we love.

It is a long and painful process, but not without reason. When a caterpillar enters its chrysalis, its entire structure has to be broken down and turned into goo so that the wings that were forming on the inside of its body can break free. The molecules of this soup are then reformatted into an entirely new framework that looks completely different than it was before. This process can take up to 21 days, which in the span of a butterfly's life, is a very long time.

The final emerging process takes hours and if you were to watch it you might feel the desire to help the butterfly out with the last steps of getting out of its shell. It looks so uncomfortable and you might think that it would be helpful to spare this poor creature the slow and tedious pain.

But if you were to do that, you would be removing the creature before the vital fluids in the chrysalis finish forming the wings. The process of breaking free gives the wings the final shape and strength to fly. If you took the butterfly out prematurely, the final result would be a creature that’s deformed and crippled, not able to fly or go out into the world as the beautiful butterfly it was meant to be.

Much like the butterfly, any sort of personal transformation has to take the same steps.

Firstly, ideas and beliefs you thought were “truth,” have to be completely broken down. You have to let go of a dream, a way of being or a connection, often without knowing what’s coming next. You have to let your past desires become goo, and this process will always run the gamut of emotions. The ability to let go of something that was so valuable to you in order to accept a new and different vision will often cause a lot of pain. It’s important to feel the grief around this because if we’re not honest about the real difficulty, we shut down to the world around us and can’t be open to the next phase.

After breaking down your past beliefs, you need to then go through the process of growing something; of breaking those new wings out from somewhere deep in your body. You need to create and attach to a new idea for your life. This will take a lot of experimentation, seeking and discomfort as you go through the process of figuring out what’s right for you.

The final process will be breaking into your direction. You’ve decided what you want, but you’re starting at the beginning of something new. This will take commitment as you learn a new skill, engage in a new relationship or start implementing a new belief. It will be a lot of hard work at this stage, and you may be tired of the work and pain you’ve been going through. But if you don’t push through this last process, then just like the butterfly, your new dream will become crippled and malformed. But if you really commit to this new process, this phase will be where you make your new direction strong and viable.

At the end of all of this pain and hard work, you get nature's true gift; you get to fly into your new direction open and free, more beautiful than you were before.

I’m not sure why nature has decided that metamorphosis needs to be so painful. Maybe it's a way to ensure that those who level up really want it. All I know is, if you don’t fully engage with it and be present and open during the stages, then you’ll be missing out on the next incredible shape your life will take. And I don’t know about you, but I would like to fly.

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