Shitting On The Caterpillar: Telling someone that they’re a caterpillar, which is obviously bad, to give them hope. Because being a bad thing is a necessary step to becoming a good thing. e.g. “it’s OK, right now you’re a caterpillar but soon you’ll be a beautiful butterfly!”

can we press pause on the happy cliches for a hot second please

There are a lot of knocks on the road of practicing yoga. And most of them, surprisingly, aren’t physical. There’s a lot of BS marketing and puritanical finger-wagging out there, a lot of telling people how to think and what it means to “embody compassion” or “live mindfully”. Or whatever. 

So it’s important we step back from time to time and really pull apart our positive-psychology meme-ing and messaging. We have to take some time now and then investigate what we’re really telling people when we are feeding them inspirational quotes or feel-good photos. 

I want to take that step back right now. Together. Let’s look at one of the Wellness/Yoga/Fitness Industrial Complex’s favorite metaphors; the caterpillar that becomes a beautiful butterfly.

YOU’RE ALREADY THE DAMN BUTTERFLY

I’m going to admit this straight off, I am a metaphor party-pooper. The other day one of our teachers asked if I’d ever heard of the Boiling Frog parable. (You know the one where you put a frog in cold water and slowly turn the temperature up? And the frog doesn’t try to get out because the change in temperature is gradual? That one.) I said yes I knew it, but I didn’t like it. So this teacher asked me why and I told her, ‘because it’s not true. The frog will jump out. Of course it will jump out. It’s starting to boil.”

I know. I’m kind of an ass. But the point remains. The frog-in-the-pot metaphor is BS. It isn’t based on anything at all. (See: Wikipedia.) We just say it because we think it sounds nice. It makes us feel smart.

It’s the same for the caterpillar. This cliche, too, falls apart when you actually look at it. I mean, this is really pedantic but… a caterpillar is the larval stage of a butterfly. Unless you are, like, under ten years old? You’re the butterfly. Butterfly achieved. Go pollinate something. Stop telling yourself you’re the caterpillar, that’s literally the infant-to-young-adolescent phase.

I’m sorry. I’m know I’m being kind of an ass again. But work with me here for a second. Language and imagery and mythology and ideas, these things are important. They shape the way we think and feel about the world. Sometimes this means pedantry is necessary, if only to slow us down and expose our assumptions to a bit of fresh air.

WHAT DO we THINK THE POINT OF A BUTTERFLY EVEN IS

Human beings have this weird this desire to “arrive” in life somehow. I know I’ve got it. We want to get the gold star, the sign of achievement, and then somehow be finished. Complete. Once we’ve completed the test of life we can rest or, heaven forbid, retire.

Unfortunately, that’s rarely how things work out. Life is by design in constant conflict with the relentless forces of entropy. The universe wants to fall apart and nature is working its fuzzy pants off to hold things together just enough to make it to the next generation. There’s no “arriving” at anything unless it’s a grave (and even then, who knows?).

But let’s just play this butterfly metaphor out. Say you’re a caterpillar and you’re all upset because you’re not a butterfly. Boo hoo. Then one day you are finally ready to make your big change and you crawl into your chrysalis and turn into some goo and then some seriously trippy reorganization happens and voila! Butterfly. Look at you, you’re a star. What do you now spend your whole life doing? (Aside from eating insane amounts of sugar…) Trying to create caterpillars. Caterpillars - to butterflies - are pretty much the reason to live. And life is short, remember. 

The ideology of the butterfly is a seductive myth. It promises a personal transformation that marks the good-person finish line, after which life is nothing but birthday cakes and protein shakes and red carpet movie premieres. “You’re going to become something wonderful” is, at best, a lie of omission.The whole truth is “you’re going to become something wonderful if you work hard, then you’re going to decay slowly (if you’re lucky), and then you’re going to die.”

Achievements, like butterflies, don’t last. Because nothing lasts.

quick SIDE NOTE

I’m sorry, this is a yoga blog. I feel like yoga blogs are supposed to be about, like, mindful breath and opening ourselves to cosmic awareness or shiny eternity or something. I don’t do that here. I don’t believe in that. Life is made meaningful amazing not by escaping hardship but by diving into it. “Nothing lasts” isn’t the same as “nothing is worthwhile.” On the contrary.

Hashtag end rant.

Hashtag continue rant.

BTW THESE BEAUTY STANDARDS ARE CONTRIVED

I am not saying butterflies aren’t pretty but if you think caterpillars are some kind of repulsive “before” mirror-pic version of an insect, you need to google them right now. There are some stunning caterpillars out there. Really. Stop body shaming them. (They can’t even speak English, how are they supposed to defend themselves?)

TRANSFORMATION CULTURE IS BAD AND CRUEL AND NEEDS TO DIE

When you tell somebody, “hey, pretty soon you’re going to turn into a beautiful butterfly!” you probably mean something like, “hey, I believe in you and want you to persist because your goal is worth it!” And that’s an awesome thing to say to a person. Seriously. Goals are great. Persistence is great. Encouragement is great.

But… 

But underneath this caterpillar/butterfly thing is a hidden message, something that is drilled into us day after day in the world we live in. When you tell someone that soon they’ll be a butterfly, you’re telling them that right now they aren’t enough. When we preach the value of transformation, or tell people how they’ll turn into something gorgeous on the other side we are simultaneously telling them they’re currently not gorgeous or valuable as they are. Or we’re telling them they have value, but only because of their future value. We’re telling them an imaginary version of themselves is more meaningful and valuable than their present, real way of being.

And that’s shitty. Partly because we don’t mean to shit on the caterpillar at all. We just toss the cliche out there like it’s good news or something.

Our culture of not-enough-ness is deep-seated. It’s how we sell cars. It’s how we put butts in pews. It’s, frankly, how we sell yoga. We tell people we want to help them become something better, something complete, so they buy our products. The pitch goes like this: we know you don’t feel whole, friend. You feel like a caterpillar, don’t you. You feel like a stupid, blobby, incomplete project, right? Never you worry - the pitch goes - you can buy/work your way to butterfly. Use this whatever-it-is right here. Or this movement-only-I-know over here. Or this secret-method-slash-serum I have on sale. Just $50. Limited time offer.

This is all BS. We know it’s BS but we don’t want it to be BS. So we buy the BS, like lottery tickets, just in case lightning strikes and the BS happens to work this time.

STOP OBSESSING ABOUT ONE IMAGE, KYLE

I know, this has been a long road on this one stupid concept. I feel like I should apologize. But I wanted to unpack it together, because it reveals something deeper about our thinking and our culture. These ideas; transformation; purification; rebirth; before/after; caterpillars & butterflies, they run deep. They’re built into our economic and educational structures, they’re part of our religious legacy, they’re central to the American Mythos (“Make Something of Yourself”) And if we don’t catch ourselves we’ll get swept away in the lie because it’s everywhere. Marketing companies are built on retelling it. Many religions thrive on it. Countless schools motivate students with it. The empire of New Age Spirituality was built on this lie.

It’s everywhere.

So here’s the pushback

Hey. You. Reading this. I’ve got fantastic news. Seriously, you might want to sit down.

You’re never going to turn into something else.

Things will change, to be sure. Conditions will shift. You will feel better and you will feel worse. You will break down and rise up and break down again. You’ll lose things you didn’t think you could bear to lose, and you’ll go on. You’ll fail. You’ll succeed. You’ll gain weight or lose it or both. You’ll get sick. You’ll heal. You’ll receive gifts and blessings beyond your capacity for gratitude. You’ll wake up early for no good reason and catch a winter sunrise and gasp at its color. You’ll hurt people. You’ll get hurt. And none of it will transform your nature. It’ll still be you.

You, too, will change. Your likes and dislikes, your morals, your sense of style, your relationships, all of it. Your sense of who you are may shift, your personality may evolve. You might try on dozens of identities in your lifetime. Things might get weird. (And I kind of hope they do.) But you won’t turn into anything different.

You don’t need to, you’re already Human. The blessing of this species is we are dynamic. We adapt and create and shift to meet the demands of our environment, and we do this better than any other animal on the planet. We have an innate, inborn capacity to change course, reform, grow or shrink to the meet the circumstances. In fact, you’re doing all those things right now. All the way down to a cellular level. Not because you’re going to end up in some grand Final Form that you’re working towards, because you’re a goddamn Human Being.

You’re not a caterpillar, don’t you see? You’re a chameleon. Your biology, your evolution, your destiny - whatever you want to call it - is ongoing reconstitution. When you “transform” or whatever, you’re not altering your basic nature you’re expressing it. So ‘done’ never happens. ‘Done’ would mean you lost your defining trait. ‘Done’ is just spiritual consumerism peddling the lie that a person can become a finished product - Me Version 2.0. What nonsense. If a chameleon gets stuck on purple, there’s something wrong with the chameleon.

So while you’re out there playing the development game, remember; you can’t change your nature and have no responsibility to try. Your super power, that ability to adapt and transform? It runs on instinct not intellect. It’ll operate just fine on it’s own, just let it go.

See my friend, you’re already here. Whatever this is, it’s already happening. (Fast.) You’re already you. There isn’t a butterfly or a Version 2.0 or a “Yogi” inside of you. You’re a human being. Always will be. And your astonishing capacity for joy and adaptation and connection and creativity is already alive in there. It’s here, fully functioning and breathing and reading these words right now. It doesn’t need a chrysalis. It doesn’t need a “new you”. It’s not waiting for anything to wake up.

It just needs some practice.