Psyche is the Greek word for “butterfly”. It also means “soul”. The word “psychology” means “care of the soul”. Care of the soul is about “facing” our lives with the requisite compassion rather than “fixing” our lives with critique.
In a recent blog post I stated that “the musculature of resilience is, to a degree, built in the intensity of resistance”. It puzzled some readers so I’ll expand upon it.
As fate would have it, I heard Michael Meade give an analogy for this: that the caterpillar poetically speaking, “resists” the self-generated cocooning process in order to biologically function properly as a butterfly.
He was referring to a field of work called “bio-poetics”. It’s a term I’d not heard before but it rang in me with instant recognition. It’s a nod to symbolic language that offers analogies between the natural world and our psyches.
The resilience of the butterfly is “helped” so to speak by its resistance to being encased in its own chrysalis. In my statement I spoke about the “musculature of resilience”. We feel resistance, it is a muscular reaction: we push against what is and that resistance is part of the journey. When we meet resistance with care, resilience is a natural possibility.
The symbolic analogy here of the caterpillar is that it initially resists its transformation, that it pushes against the encasement of its own making and that resistance is a biological necessity that assures the butterfly functions properly.
Who among us has not been encased by the limitations of our lives and found ourselves symbolically left to hang upside down for a period of time?
Some years ago while living in Germany, I was working with a German Jungian Psychoanalyst. It was an intense period of inner work. During one session, Karl said to me “You are resisting the process!” It was a potent statement coming from a German! I exploded. I seethed, raged, and hissed at him. The end of the session was punctuated by my door slamming and pounding loudly down a long spiral staircase. My wish was to dislodge his home from its foundation.
I got on my bicycle finding relief in the fresh air and exercise. As I pedaled along the streets of Munich, I seethed, hissed, and raged some more and vowed never to return.
I did return. I clearly stated I saw no problem with resistance. Many of my key relationships in life have been shaped around struggle and confrontation and this one was no different. Real or perceived the enemy was the other and defiance defined me.
My resistance was an indicator of deeper things obviously, but it was now viewed as something we could face together not a problem I needed to solve on my own in order to meet his standards. In that moment of discovery, we saw one another.
I don’t have words for it—he had tears in his eyes. He expressed regret for pushing me. We both realized that I had found a strength in myself that could not have been surfaced any other way because for me it was the “way in”. His willingness and capacity to withstand and open to the pushback were healing.
In that moment we were both transformed. In the resistance was my resilience. And no, he never gave up on challenging me!
As I write, that healing is as vivid now as it was then.
CG Jung, Swiss psychologist, said that on the journey of committed inner work, all people involved are transformed. One of my mentors speaks of meeting what is present with hospitality and respect such that the psyche will reveal its wisdom to whomever is present.
It sounds romantic. It isn’t. Ask the caterpillar who symbolically surrenders to its own undoing in service to new life. Built into the caterpillar is the signature for transformation. To transform is to change from one form to another. Whether the causes and conditions come together for us to do so is another matter, but the blueprint for transformation lives in each of us.