It may not feel like it right now, yet who you were born to be is already alive in you… just reflect on that for a moment. Isn’t that potent?
Similarly, what humanity can be is already encoded in the collective psyche as pure potentiality. The issue being: we cannot make that happen from our old self. So we must all receive, gestate, allow, have patience… and within that gestation, just as in a pregnancy, there are distinct phases of development.
Waiting may feel frustrating to a human self yet infinite possibility is the undeniable truth of life. Right now, on this planet we are the at the zero point – in the liminal space between old and new. In this phase, what you choose matters!
It is said we live on the only planet of choice. Yet life directs & moves our consciousness in myriad ways, doesn’t it? For me, new life often lands as an impulse or knowing, many times as an image. So, when I woke up one morning last week and immediately saw the image I needed to write this blog, I wasn’t surprised. I simply had to act on it.
My recent focus has been to reflect on the passage of Uranus into Gemini, the initial stages of which take place between now & next April. The image I received was a chrysalis and its interior. I recognised immediately its relevance to this planetary shift & that I’d written a piece about the process of egg-caterpillar-chrysalis-butterfly in the Psyche chapter of my book Sacred Pathways. The transmission was expanding on this & is relevant also to the next seven months, when we are in liminal space between the end of many cycles and actualisation of new ones.
Nature’s mirror is a wondrous reflection for our own human nature and the means of its growth.
Butterflies and moths reveal to us the processes of transformation. Each phase brings different forms and unique requirements. The egg stage represents birth and the potential of growth. The caterpillar stage is where the work of eating and digesting happens; for a human being this represents our journey through experience, how we digest it and what we learn from it. We need experience to mature. The caterpillar stuffs itself with leaves, growing plumper and longer through a series of moults in which it sheds its skin. It is constantly transforming itself. Don’t we have the same journey: digesting what we’ve taken in, then opening to new possibility?
The next stage for the caterpillar is not a transformation; it’s transmutation – a phase where the caterpillar disappears completely from its old form. One day, it stops eating, hangs upside down from a twig or leaf and spins itself a silky cocoon or moults into a shiny chrysalis. The chrysalis represents the resting and developing phase of new life. Within its protective casing, the caterpillar radically transmutes its body, eventually emerging as a butterfly or moth. This transmutation process is a radical reinvention. It requires the caterpillar to digest itself. Cutting open a cocoon or chrysalis at just the right time, we’d discover caterpillar soup! There is no trace of the caterpillar.
Don’t you feel like this at times. That you are digesting yourself, that the ‘old you’ is disappearing fast yet the new one is not here yet?
Within the caterpillar soup, imaginal discs survive. These imaginal discs are the template for the future form of what was once a caterpillar. The imaginal discs use the protein-rich soup all around them to fuel the rapid cell division required to form the wings, antennae and all the other features of an adult butterfly or moth. One study even suggests that moths remember what they learned in earlier stages of life as a caterpillar.
Human beings do not have imaginal discs. We do have adaptable stem cells though. Cells switch on and off according to the body’s needs. Adult stem cells can become whatever type of cell the body most needs. The brain also has a remarkable ability to reorganize itself by forming new neural connections, known as neuro-plasticity. Genes can switch on & off throughout life, All these physical adaptations reflect our ongoing wondrous capacity for transformation. For me, the imaginal cells of humans, lie within our consciousness. Our task is to allow their true function of transmutation to arrive in us in right timing. Everything in nature is made to be involved in this evolutionary journey, including us, for we are nature. Even mountains are growing.
How is what I’m writing about relevant to Uranus’ entry into Gemini?
Uranus is the light-bringer, the catalyst of unprecedented change. For those who are awake already, Uranus is exhilarating, delivering long-awaited breakthroughs. For others, its energy feels chaotic, disorienting or jarring as change challenges what we are holding on to. Gemini is the sign where the human & spirit twins connect. This is the potential of Uranus in Gemini over the next seven years. Yet this new phase is not fully grounded until next spring. Right now, we are in the soup of past-present-future selves where nothing is clear. Yet past-present-future exist in the vastness of pure potentiality.
Even in chaos, even in uncertainty, we can be more awake in choosing where we act from – the past that is already dissolving or the presence of the moment.
New forms come into being from both the process of evolution & moments where insight, imagination, intuition, idea & vision, simply land in us as pointers? If we are open to receive, Uranus in Gemini is the catalyst that naturally re-programmes our human systems with light. We simply need to open to the potential that’s already in us.
More to come on this at the potent New Moon in Leo in late July.
