What A Very Hungry Caterpillar Can Teach Us About Trusting The Process Of Transformation

A caterpillar eats 5x its weight a day.

By the time it has stripped the kale in your garden naked, it will have grown 1000x in size from the moment it hatched. It will stop, spin a cocoon, and hang in a chrysalis like a beachside tourist in a hammock.

Don’t let that fool you.

The caterpillar is not snoozing; it’s floating in a stew of digestive enzymes, literally dissolving itself. It’s hard to believe that anything as miraculous as a butterfly could emerge from such a gooey mess.

Nature may dole out miracles, but she also has a plan.

That goo contains “imaginal discs” (who said scientists couldn’t be poets?) that hold butterfly construction blueprints. These discs use the ooze to fuel their growth, quickly stretching and morphing into their respective butterfly parts like eyes, antennas, or legs. 

It’s mindblowing.

The caterpillar destroys its old self in order to become a new, more evolved and mature self. But even when it’s goo in a hammock, it never loses its way. The caterpillar carries within the butterfly blueprint, guaranteeing its transformation will be successful, even though it has never done it before. The caterpillar trusts the process.

What if humans are the same way?

We sometimes need to tear apart an old self that no longer serves us, and that gooey mess of an identity shift is disorienting.  We lose hope that we will ever be able to spread our wings. When we’re “in the soup” it’s hard to remember our voracious appetite for life (if not kale). We lose faith in our abilities, and we doubt that we can ever reassemble ourselves, much less into a better version.

But “imaginal discs” also live within us.

Inside our deepest self, spirit, soul, whatever you want to call it, we too hold the blueprint for the next stage of our life. We can always find our way home to our next best self, if we trust the process.