This choice changes everything
It starts with this
Hello, sweet pea 💗
We’ve been talking about doing your SOUL practice. Every morning, going in and getting to know what’s floating in your “salad dressing.”
Over time, with a regular practice, four things start to happen.
✅ One, your self-awareness becomes your super power. Your ability to notice what you are thinking and feeling — what’s coming up in your mind and body — skyrockets, not just during your sit sessions, but throughout your day. Self-awareness is a rare treasure. Most people are so asleep they don’t what’s going on around them or inside. Not you. You are alive and alert.
✅ Two, you gain your own respect. After a while, you’ve wrestled through so many deep feels: your own anger, sadness, shock, despair, disappointment, all sorts of emotions have come up and you’ve listened to your own stories. You’ve paid attention. You’ve leaned in. Witnessed your wounds. Passed through your own wild emotional storms. And you keep coming back. There is power in knowing that you are the kind of person who keeps showing up. For you. Even when it’s hard, ugly, messy. You do the work of witnessing. You don’t give up on you. You show up. You’ve earned your own respect.
✅ Three, you see more clearly. In the processing of your daily SOUL sits, you start to really see yourself. You recognize your own patterns, discern familiar voices, see old beliefs that have been — literally — hiding in the fabric of your life. You start to see clearly what’s you and “not you” (old voices, old family patterns, old beliefs you were told) that have been floating around in your “salad dressing.”
Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.
— Carl Jung
You’re rendering the rudders visible: those silent influencers that have been invisibly shaping your life. You are flushing them out and capturing them in the pages of your journal. You can now see, on paper, what has been and you can process it from a position of adulthood and safety.
✅ Fourth, you increase your agency. By building a formidable sense of daily self-awareness, learning to trust yourself, and rendering the invisible visible, you are building a powerful foundation for a fresh, authentic future, un-muddied by the past.
»You free yourself to be yourself 💗
It may take a long time to get there, but this is the beginning of freedom and a new way of being.
Free to be
Weirdly, at first, your freedom may look more like boredom. An itchy readiness to move on.
I know it did for me.
After my messy train wreck, I sat in my SOUL sits for months, watching endless Netflix mind shows of how — and why — everything in my life had fallen apart: who did me wrong, whose old harsh voices I’d been listening to, how I’d developed invisible patterns that I had repeated over decades.
By SOUL sitting, I also recognized that I had Titanic-size icebergs haunting my “salad dressing.” I could see that the tips of those old icebergs had been popping up for decades, in my weird vacillations between extreme independence and overachieving approval-seeking, my patterns of anxious avoidance, self-isolation, depression, disassociation, flustery flashbacks and more.
Inner work is work. It takes time and fortitude.
I’m grateful for having the structure of SOUL to enter my “salad dressing” and learn to navigate my inner landscape — safely, slowly, securely — getting help to illuminate my darkest Mariana Trenches with therapy, EMDR and PTSD-releasing body work.
Bit by bit, I could feel the grip of my old stories, old voices, old beliefs loosen. The walls of shame and fear that I had built into a tight little bunker deep inside were crumbling. I could see that my old stories were so dark, claustrophobic and confining that I started to yearn for new stories.
I started to want real freedom instead of what I had built for safety.
Time to change
As I loosened and shifted, it felt like time to change the channel.
I had dissected Mr Busy-Busy a thousands times in my SOUL sits. Probably millions. But after a certain point, I did not want to keep replaying the old rom-com-gone-bad in my head in the same way I did not want his physical presence in my new home.
Time to go. Move along, not with an aggressive shove, more like a shrug.
Eventually, thanks to SOUL sits, I could sense Ursula without wincing and witness others in my “salad dressing” who had been similarly drained of their invisible power. Their sharp sting mostly gone. New events can still get me riled up (!) and I still cherish my daily SOUL practice to process whatever new and old “stuff” comes up. But my past no longer feels like a danger zone, an overstuffed closet whose contents can tumble out and drown me in mysterious, invisible avalanche.
At the same time as I was slaying those old dragons, I also became aware that I had de-fanged myself, replaced my own sharpness with a strange, odd humility, even a sense of humor. My usual self-righteousness and angry finger-pointing — at me and everyone else — faded a bit as I had witnessed my own mistakes and misjudgments. I am one player in a large, old complex web of interlocking relationships, with everyone’s past swirling in the mix.
Enough felt like enough. I was ready for some new Netflix.
Time to change the channel.
Onward and upwards
The beauty of emptying yourself — letting go of the past — is enjoying the freedom to choose what fills you now.
Oddly enough, for some folks the idea of freedom from the past is so terrifying that it becomes its own paralysis. They don’t know who they would be without fighting their old battles, so they keep gnawing on the old bones, too afraid to look beyond the past and see a new future.
Not you, sweet pea 💗
This is where the magic happens.
Trust me.
You don’t want to miss this moment.
Science of change
Actually trust your elementary school biology teacher and the miracle of modern science. Both explain the process of metamorphosis more beautifully than I ever could in the transformation of caterpillars into butterflies.
According to basic biology, caterpillars eat their veggies for 2-4 weeks, then disappear into a cocoon and emerge in 7-21 days as butterflies.
Amazing, right?
It gets better when you look more closely.
For starters, inside the chrysalis, the caterpillar completely dissolves. Its entire body turns into a thick syrupy goo. No more furry caterpillar fuzz. No tiny rows of little legs. Somehow, spontaneously, the thing that was a living, breathing caterpillar deconstructs itself into a mess of soupy Jell-O.
Then, in that syrupy mess, a battle begins to rage between old and new, past and future.
When the caterpillar was pre-cocoon — living like a furry above-ground worm —the caterpillar’s immune cells maintained order. Like your own immune system, the caterpillar’s immune system wards off foreign invaders (fighting off viruses etc). Bizarrely, the caterpillar’s immune system also quashes some of its own cells called, imaginal cells, preventing them from proliferating inside the caterpillar. Now in the goo of the chrysalis, this handful of imaginal cells start to communicate with other imaginal cells. They signal to each other, beckoning other imaginal cells to join them and they all band together in the goo.
What’s weird is that these imaginal cells hold the blueprints for a butterfly inside their DNA. They’ve been holding butterfly blueprints the whole time that the caterpillar has been a caterpillar. They’ve been secret bits of butterfly inside the caterpillar.
Suddenly, in the dark goo, it’s go time.
The imaginal cells multiply like wild fire, reproducing from 50 cells to 50,000 to create a wing, using the old caterpillar goo as their fuel. They band together, slurp up the slurry and, in a matter of weeks, a gorgeous new butterfly is born.
Be your own miracle
Are you picking up what I’m laying down?
In your mess is your miracle.
Exploring your “salad dressing” — peering into your own goo, loosening the configuration of old voices, old patterns, old beliefs — is the fuel of your future.
You are your own butterfly.
Your most beautiful DNA, your birthright, your soul self, your whole self, your reason to be here on this planet, your purpose, your passions, your personality. It’s all inside of you. It’s been inside of you all along.
For a thousand reasons, it hasn’t been time. Was it too big, too impossible, too audacious? It doesn’t matter.
Now is the time.
You’re doing the work, you’re loosening, dissolving, letting go the old. You’re creating the conditions for your new.
Yes, it’s messy, dark and confusing. They call it the “dark night of the soul” for a reason.
But this is the way.
What feels like death is birth.
Believe in the impossible.
With all of your heart, soul and mind, choose to believe that in the syrupy messy goo — the goo that has been you — is your butterfly DNA.
Your choice to believe changes everything. It changes where you look. How you you look. What you find.
Mind is everything
— Yogananda
Choose to believe in your own miracle of metamorphosis, sweet pea 💗
Yes, yes, yes and yes.
More soon xxoo
Anne
What we think, we become
— Buddha
About this hungry caterpillar
Hey. I’m Anne Alexander. So glad you are here. I’ve weathered some “dark nights” and found my way to some better, butterfly days. “Woman of depth”, I love diving in deep, sharing treasure. Join me.
Author of two New York Times bestsellers, Editor of Prevention (twice), Editorial Director of National Geographic, Content Director for Mindful
Single-mother of three beloveds 💗💗💗 who are now adulting-ish
Interfaith minister - open, curious, with respect for all
Traveler - always and everywhere