More than a few of us may recognise a feeling of becoming “unstuck” over the last few days or weeks or, another way of putting it, mentally and emotionally unhinged. If not so much us then perhaps another person with whom we are sharing the lockdown. By which I mean the kind of “low” mood that looks as though they (let’s keep this objectively in the third person) are spiralling downwards, free falling, no longer sure of their motivations for doing anything or even getting up in the mornings. It may come in so deep and so foundational that it doesn’t even manifest into thoughts but presents as deepest fatigue, like a spiritual or existential flu…why am I here, why do I continue, what’s the point? I’ve noticed all in our household go through a version of this in the last few days and, by hearsay, some of my other contacts, sometimes more than once or in stages.

But here’s what I found myself noticing the last time it happened, and this time it wasn’t me but someone I know minutely well, so I was able to witness it more clearly. Its as though we are in that “pulp” state of the chrysalis, necessarily so…in order to turn into the butterfly…only to do so we need to dismantle the old structures of our lives (or, more accurately, completely surrender them for at least a quantum moment, which is to take our own hands off the process…because this process needs to have the ingredient of absolute non-involvement, non-orchestration about it or we might secretly hold back what we most fear losing…). By which I mean letting go of all those things that gave us pattern and purpose and reason and excuse for just long enough to enable a perfect moment of recalibration, or a kind of rebirth, to occur.

As we do this, the fear wave comes in…yes, just like facing an energetic tsunami that might floor us, carry us who-knows-where, destroy us and our sense of “normal” utterly…yet we have no choice but to give permission to it, to end this horrible stalemate which feels like such pressure on all of our joists, just at the point they seem to be in the weakest load-baring state they have ever been in. But just the other side of “the mush” we start to notice new structures take shape, or at least we have to hope so or we will no longer remain in form (just as the butterfly replaces one set of cells for another) and so the very first version of that structure is the part of ourselves that goes looking for it. It is the intention to continue with physical life, whatever that may entail, that rises out of the swamp and this is how we begin again; only on a different footing.

Those new structures might seem like even more of the old-style structure, delivered in yet another authoritative voice telling us what to do; only, if we are more discerning, we can start to recognise where at least some of the inner coaching is now coming in a gentler and more resonant tone, a deeply familiar yet less-often adhered to voice until now…which is our very OWN inner voice or guidance system (it may present as more of a feeling around the gut and into the heart), the one we should always have been listening to as priority but it was drowned out by dogmatic and persistent others.

This “voice” is both firm and yet tender, like we might imagine the most nurturing of parents to be; because we can sense it has our back, through thick and thin.

So we quickly realise it has our best intentions at heart when it advises us (sternly) to get out of bed, to not be so hard on ourselves if we don’t feel like doing our daily yoga undertaking today (the one we promised ourselves would see us through lockdown…or perhaps suggests that we try it for just a minute or two…or even just lie on the mat), that instructs us just to “be”, to let things go, to take time with ourselves, to eat well, to nap, to ponder, to meditate, to let the thoughts pass; that, most of all, cautions us against self-beratement such as “whats wrong with me, why am I such a lazy blimp, why aren’t I using this time more constructively, why can’t I stick to my old habits when I need them, where has my motivation to work or use time constructively gone?”. Only this isn’t some internalised voice of our parent or our school training, some corporate job or “the system” talking at is; this is our own most conscious, heart-connected, balanced, healthy, wise, unconditionally loving, all-seeing self taking up the reins.

So what looks like coming unstuck, when we allow it time to “develop” like a lowly emerging photograph in a dark room, isn’t what we thought at all and is a necessary stage on the way to some new paradigm we have yet to explore. It allows us to sift through what really matters to us, like a sieve that only lets through particles of life that come from the highest motivators, such as love and joy and higher purpose. So, really, coming unstuck isn’t this thing we imagine, like all our glue comes away and our corners collapse, but much more like how a fly must feel if it somehow comes away from the flypaper.

If a fly on a flypaper seems like a less than picturesque analogy then think back to how you, subliminally, thought of yourself in your old, stuck, highly-predictable life just a few weeks ago, when (for all of that life’s seeming reassurances and the strong impression of it not being not so very bad, at least at the surface where we all worked so hard to present our best angle) so much of what you spent your time doing and thinking was done according to some outside (or outside-internalised) dictate derived from an unhealthy collective consensus of what life was meant to look like…yet which didn’t make you feel, personally, happy or balanced or joyful at all. Now, by comparison, tune into how you are starting to feel and register, does that feel a little lighter, a little more resonant with who you really are, if only from having the freedom to spend more time with yourself and shake off some of the least wholesome routines? That’s not to say our old lives were completely wrong but we allowed so much into them that was not of our own making or guided by our higher choices, so now we get to audit what feels right to carry forwards into the next phase…all of us individually and together…which is how we give rise to a new kind of world based on healthier priorities. Like I keep saying, in parallel with all the tragedy (and I’m not getting into that; which isn’t to negate what many of us are facing at the three-dimensional level, but this isn’t that topic), in a multidimensional, evolutionary sense, this is such an opportunity. You could see it as, we are getting closer to our sacred geometry, our cosmic blueprint…because we are tuning into it (a knack we never lost but it became muddled, smoke-screened, distorted) once more.

At the core of our misgivings around “becoming unstuck” lies a belief (that has been fed to us across time immemorial) that the only thing that lies between us and a scary, unpredictable, predator-filled outside world, is a manmade construct of very tight structures and controls. Whilst we continue to grip so hard onto our ingrained reliance and belief in this paradigm, at all costs, we only feed a paradigm that controls us to the nth because we are, in effect, saying to it “we want you to control us”. Our shadow aspect is feeding its shadow aspect and so the paradigm continues to exist, self-justified by our believing in it. Until we do some major work to filter out distorted structures that go against our very nature, including a paradigm of fear and lack, separation and distrust, we remain its prisoners…and its contributors. Which means using this time-on-our-hands to do this deep shadow work, shining light into our own co-dependency with the “way things have been”, is so important.

The thing is, the phase in the middle is always going to feel messy to our structure-loving brains. Going through patches where there is, for even a nano second, an absence of structure…where the continuum is broken…terrifies us yet this is where all the quantum opportunity lies and its how we are making this upshift together (and, by nature of our collective contribution to this time of shift, we are not all going through the same “pause” phase at the exact same moment and so we, in a sense, carry each other through our individual quantum-leaps). We’ve lived our whole lives in neat little compartments designed that way so we could attempt to predict our next step and the one after that…but then they also dictated the scope of our view, which was often much smaller than it was ever meant to be, according to Nature and the sacred design of the cosmos. So many of us were stuck and yet not even admitting it until now, well, we feel overtly stuck and yet there is, as it were, a thin current of fresh air coming in around the door crack…if only we dare encourage it, explore it, see where it leads.

In other words, we were never meant to get locked-in and pinned-down by our own structures; they were only ever meant to serve us, not the other way around. Paradoxically, this is what lockdown is waking us all up to, at the subliminal level.

So as we dissolve all the glue at the corners of our life (or watch this being “done to us” as it may seem), we can feel a little unhinged and that’s ok…go with it, ride the wave but at least admit that there is a wave to ride. Then ride it like a dragon, you at its “helm”…the ride of your life, exhilarating, purposeful and now headed for wherever you most feel like yourself, which may not be as fixed-seeming as it was before.

And this is where it gets interesting and creative; just so long as fear doesn’t shoot us in the foot. Because creativity, as any artist knows, requires both form and inspiration together…inspiration being the invisible, expansive, unlimited force that “comes in” from a far wider picture of all that is.

By strange synchronicity I happen to have spent some of my free time deep diving the powerful healing properties of propolis (see my Goodreads list, right), which is basically bee-glue. Only there is so much more to propolis than “glue” since it is so multi-faceted (it sticks things together, protects, cleanses, heals, nurtures, nourishes and a whole load of other adjectives I struggle to find) not to mention its ingredients and the way it is “made” is so mysterious that no scientist can truly get its measure. Which is what gives it its power, its usefulness, its multi-facetedness…and its mystery.

Next time we glue ourselves together into some semblance of a way of life, we would do very well to remember this; that is, to become less streamlined and to incorporate some of the mystery of what we are into whatever we make, not just turning ourselves into the  predictable, programmable, fear-driven, habit-ingrained robots that we were in danger of becoming before this circumstance broke the train. As ever from me, just a few un-glued thoughts.