I love old adventure games because doing something as silly as picking up a few rocks from the ground can be absolutely crucial to winning the game. It’s easier to find solutions in these games versus life, because your perspective is not, “I am an adventurer trapped in a forest full of monsters with no money and nothing but the shirt on my back and a handful of rocks.” Instead, you think, “Wow, some rocks! I’m sure I can use these.” Because real life has way too many rocks in it for all of them to be useful (and plenty of other useless items and experiences), we tend to never look at these mundane, or negative things as anything useful.
Metamorphoses is about transformation. It’s not about throwing out all the rocks in your life and getting diamonds handed to you. It’s about using all the things we have in our “inventory” (experiences, friends, skills… rocks) to find our way to the place we want to be, and the person we want to become.
I recently watched a video by Marie Forleo featuring Dr. Cathy Collautt about how our subconscious minds can trip us up to getting where we want to be with our careers. Collautt explained how fighting your subconscious is a losing battle because this aspect of your brain runs far more of the time that your conscious mind. Instead, it’s important to transform the goals of your subconscious mind to match your conscious desires.
Teal Swan (a well-known contemporary spiritual teacher) talks about this principle in a slightly different light. She explains how improving yourself by denying aspects of yourself that you don’t like, has been a religious tradition for hundreds of years. Instead of working with everything we’ve been given as a person–fears, bad habits, negative emotions, selfishness, and everything else “wrong”–we remove these things from our personality and go on without them in a strange dysfunctional metal state. Actually, it’s not that strange, because I’m sure you do it all the time.
All this being said, I am not a proponent for sitting still and never improving yourself or your life. But we have to learn how to go about this change in the true form of metamorphosis. Very often, our unhealthy habits or lives have something very important to say about who we are and what we want in life. Don’t be that unconscious fool who can’t figure out why his friends won’t stay, his relationships won’t last, and his jobs self-destruct. Self-sabotage is a real thing, and it’s easiest to nip in the bud when you see it staring you in the face (when most of us habitually shove into the background). Metamorphosis is about staring right back at those unhealthy aspects of ourselves until we can truly see them for what they are.
Please share your thoughts and comment! This is my first blog post like this on my public art website, and I would love to know what you think.
