“How ironic that the difficult times we fear might ruin us are the very ones that can break us open and help us blossom into who we were meant to be”
~ Elizabeth Lesser
The last of the Ten Questions to explore in moving toward psychological wholeness is:
In times of struggle or crisis, how do you reconnect with your sense of purpose and identity?
The one constant in life is change. We see this every day in the cycles and seasons of nature. We are natural beings and, as with everything in nature, will encounter transitions and turns, ebbs and flows, a continual waxing and waning of our human life cycle.
In the waxing and waning of our life experiences, we can encounter times of great struggle or crisis. As happens with the monthly changing cycles of the moon, during the waning phases there is less light and as this transitions to the waxing cycles we see the full brightness revealed moving predictably toward the full moon.
This is an apt metaphor for the darkness of confusion and uncertainty in times of struggle, yet as we persevere through the challenges we can find ourselves on the other side of the darkness with a newly emerging perspective. The light of an expanding consciousness is often experienced through enduring the process of being broken open, per Elizabeth Lesser’s quote above.
There is an abundance of wise authors and teachers who have described this as an integral part of the human condition.
From Leonard Cohen’s “There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in,” to
Hemmingway’s “The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places”,
to Pema Chodron’s “Compassion is knowing our darkness well enough that we can sit in the dark with others”.
In resisting life’s changes and challenges, whether large or small, we interfere with and can interrupt actualizing the inherent potential we are born with.
There are various terms for this inherent potential…. a pattern that lies in our DNA. Aristotle called this principal ‘Entelechy’, a blueprint that exists in the DNA of all organisms carrying the life force.
Within the caterpillar lies the potential, or entelechy, for a beautiful butterfly. Within an acorn there is a remarkable capacity to become a mighty oak tree. And within every human being there is this same potential. The Greeks called it the Daimon; the Romans saw it as one’s personal Genius.
Metamorphosis is a process of something being broken down and ultimately transformed into a new expression of life. The classic metaphor demonstrates this magical transformation when the caterpillar follows an instinct to weave a chrysalis around its entire body.
Being tightly held in a constricted container for approximately two weeks, in that timeframe the body of the butterfly completely dissolves and from that dissolution of liquid, the ‘imago’ cell that holds the DNA for the butterfly is at the center of a reorganization process. Ultimately, if the fragile butterfly survives this process it will claw its way out of its chrysalis container and emerge in a new expression of life.
So, through our times and experiences of great struggle and challenge we are given the opportunity to discover the Light within our cracks, the strength revealed in being broken by the world, and the compassion that can arise from sitting in our own darkness so that we may be present to the darkness of others.
This is where we meet an unshakable identity that is foundational and from here we can often discover a parallel purpose.
“Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose” ~ Viktor Frankl