Don't Rush the Cocoon

Someone recently suggested I read a parenting book called Listen by Patti Wipfler. Its core idea is that children’s emotional storms and tantrums are healing processes, not misbehavior to shut down. When adults punish or soothe a child’s emotions too quickly, they interrupt a nervous system cycle that’s trying to discharge stress. Instead, parents need to offer calm containment and presence while the child completes the cycle.

I’m not formally a parent, but the book reminded me of something meditation has taught me: that the mind also knows how to heal itself if we don’t interrupt it. When we sit and follow the breath, restlessness, anger, and grief can surface. Our instinct, often, is to force calm or escape into distraction. But that just puts us at odds with the mind instead of in harmony with it.

One mark of growth as a meditator is learning not to chase results, but to stay with the step you’re on. If you’re just counting breaths, count them fully. If you’re watching an emotional eruption, watch it fully. Whatever the step, lose yourself in it, as Shunryu Suzuki said, like a bonfire that burns itself up completely, leaving no trace. Let yourself disappear into what you’re doing.

In the rest of our lives, too, real growth often looks like disappearance. You might have to go to a cabin in the woods to make strange new music. You might have to stay in a relationship that lacks clear definition until you truly understand it. You might have to step back from posting or performing to sit with the unresolved questions of your life.

The urgency we feel about growth is an illusion. The part of us that wants to be finished with the work is an old part that doesn’t actually want to change. It’s just the ego, scared of disappearing. On a nervous-system level, ambition is often the refusal to let an inner cycle complete. Paradoxically, it’s by coming into contraction that we expand.

Don’t rush the cocoon. Stay there as long as you have to. Meaning: longer than you think you need to.