The Transformer

Our latest focus for our Archetype’s blog series is The Transformer. 

What have you had to let go in your life where you only much later recognised that it was a blessing in disguise? 

The Transformer understands the process of life, death and rebirth. For many of us, our journey with the Transformer is about finding our own way to deeply trust this process. This means learning to trust in the apparently bad times and in the apparently bad things that happen to us. Just as trees shed their leaves in autumn, so there are many times over the course of a life where we too, are asked to shed our old ways of being, our old ways of working and/or our old ways of living.

Many of us may be so attached to these old ways that we cling on as long as we can and then only let go resentfully. But this attitude will not help and indeed it can consume our available energy in an unhelpful way. When we get caught up in fervently wishing that something happening to us or around us was ‘not so’, we need to pause and ask ourselves some important questions:

Is what is happening a mistake that needs to be corrected – and if so, do I (or those around me) have the agency to make that correction?

OR

Is this a sign pointing towards an important transition that I need to make? In which case, however uncomfortable it may be at first, what is the right way for me to embrace it and allow it?

Often, we only recognise these Transformer blessing in hindsight; whether it was the death of one career that eventually led to a more fulfilling one, or the end of a relationship that opened a path for a deeper tone later (or any other ending). Then we might think or say: “Oh, now I see why that needed to happen – I wish I had known that then!”.

But the Transformer is the part of us that does know all endings to be blessings. This Archetype embraces deconstruction and even death as the compost out of which new beginnings will grow – over time. Looking at our lives as a constant process of budding and shedding and budding again is working in tune with nature. It also allows us to embrace whatever happens to us as something we can work with and learn from.

“What the caterpillar calls the end of the world 

the master calls a butterfly.”

Richard Bach


You can learn more about The Archetypes in our online immersion training taking place across November and December. You can sign up to deep dive into all Archetypes or just concentrate on this one, find out more

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