The lesson of liminal change

A message from the Hanged Man Tarot card this Monday

Hey there, Soothers. Every Monday I pull a card for my Sunday Soother Slack community. I ask what we all most need to know for our highest good. This week, it was the Hanged Man.

I wrote a little note in the Slack and felt really called to share it with this group at large, too. So settle in for a bit of a message from this upside down dude, and the wisdom he has for all of us….

Here is my Slack message, cut & pasted:

hello dear Soothers, and happy monday. i hope you had whatever kind of weekend you needed. maybe you protested, maybe you rested, maybe you had beautiful times with friends or maybe you felt alone or the weight of the world. wherever you are, hello! you are worthy and wonderful and always doing your best. i pulled a card for us this week, what we might most need to know for the week ahead for our highest good, and got the Hanged Man. 🙃

i'm in a Hanged Man year and really feeling this energy... it made me think about this piece i wrote a long time ago on the sunday soother about why change can be so hard, using the metaphor of the butterfly's transformation:

But at the start of this month's lesson, I told the women to expect that they might deeply resist this change, this transformation, desired as it was. They might avoid it with every cell of their being. They might procrastinate. They might doubt they'd pick the right archetype. They might avoid the assignments. And this was all normal.

I illustrated this concept with a story about perhaps the most common but powerful example of change: the caterpillar into the butterfly, and the cells that spark the first shift from the caterpillar into the butterfly, named imaginal cells.

The imaginal cells are the parts of a caterpillar that hold the information of the butterfly. They are latent within the cell, until it is time for them to grow.

From opendoor.io:

As a caterpillar prepares to transition, almost every cell in a caterpillar’s system starts freaking out, because suddenly the system is failing, nothing seems to work, and it’s clear that everything the caterpillar understands about how its world works is now unsustainable and obsolete. At this critical moment, the imaginal cells awaken, to show everyone else how to become a butterfly. At first, these individual imaginal cells are attacked as heretics by the caterpillar’s immune system. But the imaginal cells find one another, and when they do, they cluster together in the same place, and grow stronger together. They don’t wait for permission, they just start creating a butterfly. Finally, as the rest of the caterpillar dissolves into goo, it stops attacking the imaginal cells, and begins to follow their lead. In the darkest hours, the imaginal cells can not only inspire others, but they can create and execute a plan to make the future more beautiful than anyone else can possibly imagine.

Do you see that? The very cells that are the spark of transformation into a butterfly are literally trying to be killed by the caterpillar itself.And so is it for change.

When you desire change, when you want to step into a new archetype of your own, it is very likely that parts of you will resist it, shame it, fear this change. They may try to sabotage it. They may even try to kill this new, emerging part.

And that is normal.

So my advice to you today is, as you change, as you feel the butterfly part of you emerging, and other parts resisting that very change you so desire, have compassion for all parts of you. [read the full piece]

This is the kind of energy of the Hanged Man - you're in the goop of the chrysalis, kind of freaking out, resisting the very change that is hoping to burst forth, and it can feel a very uncomfortable place. So my invitation to you is just to have compassion around this fact, if it resonates.

Where are you feeling this hanged man energy, this resistance, this goopiness, this freak out about imaginal cells?

i invite you to share below in this thread if it resonates.and know that everything is working out just as it's meant to; the timing is correct; and all is going to be okay 🐛 ✨🦋