Faced any chaos lately? Any rugs been pulled out from under you when you thought you’d found a safe place to stand?

Every day it seems I meet someone or hear of someone who feels like their world has suddenly turned upside down. Amazing people losing their beloved partners to illness. The exciting new program launch that doesn’t pan out. The awesome team you’ve worked so hard to develop and then when it comes to crunch time you lose your top talent to a competitor.

This is a time of massive and rapid change in the world.  We see it in the headlines of the business papers as well as in our personal journals. Businesses we grew up with are closing, displaced by e-commerce and a proliferation of consumer options. The beautiful state of California apparently has just one year of water left. There is a lot happening that can freak you out and knock you off balance.

When things shock your system for whatever reason, you might find yourself in a period of incubation. The word “incubation” actually means “to maintain at optimal environmental conditions for growth and development.”

Think of the lone caterpillar, gorged on leaves and feeling the need for something a little different. At some point its biological clock goes off and it crawls on to branch to form a chrysalis. All that activity and then…nothing. Stillness. No action. No discernable progress. Dissolving. We can’t see what’s happening, but from deep within some massive shifts are actually happening and all the caterpillar can do is just hang in there (literally!). Eventually, we witness a miraculous emergence of a completely transformed life form – a butterfly that can take flight! How magical is that?

A lot of us are going through incubation. To the Type A, action-oriented achievers out there, incubation can be an incredibly challenging time. I went through a period like this myself a while back where it seems that every success had thought I had in place as a building block for my future appeared to crumble simultaneously. Serious health challenges with my loved ones; a painful parting of ways with a community I had been part of for many years; getting deeply honest about who and what I wanted to be “when I grow up.” It all collided within me with a mighty and reverberating crash. My incubation period lasted literally for months and put me into a period of deep reflection, discomfort and surrender.

Here are 3 tips I learned that I offer to those of you that may be experiencing your own incubation period now to help you through this challenging, yet magical time.

1. Stop Gorging

When things feel like they are going off the rails, one of the natural reactions is to get more information.  When you’re feeling powerless or vulnerable, arming yourself with tactics, information and seminars might seem like it can help you tip the scales so you feel more in control of the situation. This is where the Spiritual Snacker Gremlin loads you up with data and keeps you so busy learning and doing, often because it can help mask what the discomfort, uncertainty or even anger, that you are truly feeling. It’s like the caterpillar in its newly formed cocoon feeling the start of its physical change and saying “Uh, oh, something feels really different and I don’t like this! I better break out of here and go eat some more leaves!”

When you’re in an incubation period, it’s time for more stillness. It’s time to digest all you’ve learned, all you’ve experienced. When you stop looking outside yourself is when you will truly find yourself.

I loved the story of Jack Welch’s meditation practice. Apparently he said that when he had a really busy or challenging day ahead, he would meditate twice as long, not reschedule or skip it. He knew that to bring his best leadership “out there” he needed to make the time to reflect and be still within himself. Incubation is an opportunity to let go of all the identities you’ve built up around yourself so that whatever your brilliant soul is calling you towards can ultimately become clear, take shape, and take flight.

2. Be Loving to Yourself

People pay a lot of lip service to the idea that we need to be more loving and kind to ourselves, but incubation is a fantastic opportunity to practice it at a deep, profound and cellular level. This isn’t about coaching or coaxing yourself through adversity and trying to “manifest” yourself out of a challenging situation. Being loving is not a tactic or a bargaining chip you put down to try to get the Universe to deal you a different hand of cards.

Incubation is an opportunity to choose to be loving to yourself as a vibrational imperative that you embody regardless of the circumstances you are experiencing. It’s easy to be compassionate, patient, kind and encouraging with young children or our pets, but not so much with our grown-up selves. When you’re in a period of incubation, you’ll feel squeezed, but when you choose to love yourself through it all you start to shift the nature of your relationship with yourself. This was a huge lesson for me as I had a very natural tendency to scrutinize and judge myself about practically everything, and my Inner Critic gremlin would always find me wanting.

But when you’re loving to yourself, you get in your own corner. You unequivocally choose yourself day in and day out. You need to toss out the old scorecards or conditions you have to meet in order to fully master and express your unique brilliance. When you take on this commitment of self-love on an energetic level, that’s when true magic and manifestation starts to happen.

3. It Takes the Time it Takes

When you are going through a dark night of the soul, it feels like you’ll never get to the end of the dark tunnel. “When will this be over?” or “What, I thought I had solved this problem and I’m still feeling stuck – why?”

Incubation takes the time it takes. I’m sure that when Michelangelo carved his famous David statue he never looked at his watch, tapped it and said, “Dang, I’m behind schedule! Creating this master work of art is taking too long!”

You are a master work of art and creative genius. We all are. How that gets expressed is unique to you. Likely it will change and get refined over the course of your life and career, which is pretty magical in itself. The fire and struggle of adversity help forge strength and skills we need for the next chapter. The butterfly needs the struggle to free itself from its chrysalis in order to develop the strength to fly. Without that struggle, it will die.

Honor your process of incubation. Don’t try to problem solve it or rush through it. Hold space for those around you going through their incubation period and know that something incredible and magical will in fact emerge from this.

STEP INTO YOUR BRILLIANCE

Have you ever experienced a time of incubation in your life? Perhaps it was when you went through a relationship breakup, or a change in career. Do you think you’re in a period of incubation now? Take 20 minutes this week to do some journaling around this topic. How can you apply these tips to your situation?