Metamorphosis, Freedom, and Triggers: Choosing Relevance Over Convention

The turn of the year is, technically, arbitrary.

It is one more lap of the earth around the sun. The chosen start point is a cultural decision, not a cosmic one.

And yet, it feels different.

We remember “last New Year” more easily than a random date in March. Losses, separations, and turning points land more sharply in this zone. The days between years carry a weight that is disproportionate to their objective content.

That is the first clue:
Conventions can become energetically charged.
They shape how we feel, what we remember, and how we interpret our lives.

For leaders, that matters. Because so much of our world is built on conventions.

The question is whether we are using them consciously, or being used by them.

When reflection becomes metamorphosis

There is a level of New Year reflection that is relatively safe:

• “Where was I one year ago?”
• “Where do I want to be next year?”
• “What worked, what did not?”

This is useful, but shallow compared to what sometimes wants to happen.

Every now and then, the reflective phase deepens into something else:

• What used to be intellectual understanding begins to press for embodiment.
• Ideas you have discussed for years start to demand a place in your nervous system.
• The “theory” of your worldview wants to become your actual way of being.

It feels less like drafting new goals and more like metamorphosis.

You sense an internal process you cannot fully grasp:

• A pull toward withdrawal.
• A need for solitude, even if it feels uncomfortable.
• An experience of being “in between selves”.

Many leaders resist that phase, because it looks like non-productivity:

• Fewer meetings, more empty calendar blocks.
• Less outward drive, more inner processing.
• Less noise, more silence.

But if you look at nature, there is nothing optional about this.

A caterpillar does not become a butterfly by working harder.

The cocoon: dissolving before re-forming

Biologists describe something remarkable about metamorphosis.

When a caterpillar enters the cocoon, it does not just grow wings on top of its existing structure. Inside the chrysalis, the organism largely dissolves into a kind of cellular “soup.”

From that seemingly chaotic state, a new form emerges.

It is not cosmetic surgery. It is re-creation.

As a metaphor for human transformation, several aspects stand out:

• Retreat is necessary
  You do not metamorphose while staying permanently “on”. You need a phase where you are, to some degree, withdrawn, vulnerable, less defended.
• The old form must let go of itself
  If the caterpillar tries to stay a caterpillar, there will be no butterfly. Holding on tightly to the old identity makes the next level impossible.
• There are no guarantees
  The caterpillar does not receive a certificate stating, “If you dissolve, a butterfly is guaranteed to appear.” From the inside, it is a leap into the unknown.

For leaders, this describes the felt sense of genuine transition:

• You let go of roles, businesses, identities, or relationships that no longer fit.
• You do so without an ironclad guarantee of what will replace them.
• The process is often painful, stretching, sometimes lonely.

And yet, without this willingness to enter the cocoon, you stay in a form that your deeper evolution has already quietly outgrown.

Freedom, security, and the hidden role of fear

At the heart of many leadership dilemmas sits a polarity:

Freedom ↔ Security

• Freedom points to spaciousness, autonomy, the ability to choose in the moment.
• Security points to stability, predictability, the minimization of risk.

Both are attractive.
Both are, in full intensity, incompatible.

Security is quietly rooted in fear:

• Fear of loss.
• Fear of chaos.
• Fear of not having enough (money, status, belonging).

This fear drives us to create and uphold:

• Contracts and long-term commitments.
• Detailed plans and predictions.
• Laws, rules, and norms that manage perceived risk.

None of these are inherently wrong. The challenge is that they often become invisible cages:

• We cling to a job title long after it stops being alive.
• We stay in a relationship primarily because we once signed a contract.
• We keep repeating a business model because it feels safer than questioning it.

In doing so, we trade away large portions of our freedom for psychological comfort.

Conventions, contracts, and the loss of relevance

Think about the difference between:

• A stranger you meet by “chance” on a trip, and
• A person you see daily because you share a house, contract, or routine.

One encounter feels spontaneous, even synchronistic.
The other can easily become automatic.

From a certain perspective, you could say:

• Every perception, every encounter has potential relevance.
• We simply notice some more than others, because they resonate with us.

Now ask:

How much of my daily experience is genuinely fresh, and how much is simply the reproduction of a convention?

For example:

• Going home each evening to the same apartment, because of an old decision, means you are not elsewhere letting new experiences find you.
• Attending the same recurring meetings because they exist in the calendar may block you from more relevant conversations that could arise in that time.

Again, the point is not to glorify constant novelty. It is to see clearly:

• Conventions structure your life.
• They can support you, or they can quietly prevent the very experiences you now need.

The critical leadership question becomes:

Am I spending my life in truly relevant moments, or simply fulfilling old agreements?

A different way to bond: every moment a new decision

There is a gentler alternative to rigid convention: continuous choice.

Instead of:

• “I once decided to be in this partnership / role / collaboration, therefore I must uphold it indefinitely.”

You experiment with:

• “In this moment, do I freely choose to be here?”

Carried into relationships, this looks like:

• Not relying on a promise made years ago as the sole justification for staying.
• Instead, re-choosing the person, the collaboration, the project again and again in the present.

Carried into work, this means:

• Not clinging to a role because of past investment alone.
• Re-choosing the work when it is still aligned, and having the courage to release it when it is no longer.

Paradoxically, this continuous re-choosing often increases appreciation and depth:

• Both sides know the bond is not held together by inertia.
• The connection is alive because it is actively chosen, not passively endured.

This does not imply volatile impulsiveness. It is not about running away at the first difficulty. It is about:

• Staying awake to your actual yes.
• Letting the present matter more than an old promise to a former version of yourself.

Laws, borders, and the Red Worldview

Zooming out, we can see a similar pattern at the collective level.

As humans, we have:

• Drawn national borders on maps.
• Created extensive legal systems.
• Built layers of regulation around almost every area of life.

These constructs are not natural laws. A bird does not care whether it crosses from one jurisdiction to another. A fox does not recognize a national border in the forest.

We, however, live as though these lines and rules were absolute.

Within a Red Worldview, this makes a kind of sense:

• The world is experienced as separate individuals and groups competing for resources.
• Protection, control, and enforcement feel necessary.
• Rules and borders provide a sense of order in a fundamentally dangerous landscape.

In a Green Worldview, the picture changes:

• The sense of separation softens.
• The first principle is applied ethics: “What serves the whole, not just my narrow interest?”
• Many external rules become redundant, because inner orientation replaces outer compulsion.

In a mature Green Worldview:

• You need fewer laws, not more.
• Fear, and the resulting obsession with security, naturally decrease.
• Freedom ceases to feel like a risk and becomes the natural state.

The difficulty is that we cannot simply flip a global switch from Red to Green.

• Individuals do not transform overnight.
• Collectives shift unevenly, creating phases of tension and polarization.

Some people feel an inner pull toward Green Worldview and begin loosening their grip on fear-based structures. Others, perhaps sensing this unconsciously, double down on control and regress further into Red dynamics.

From this angle, many current global conflicts and fragmentations can be understood as transition turbulence:
The chaos of a world that is no longer fully Red and not yet broadly Green.

Polarity and the invitation beyond judgment

Polarity is not the problem. It is built into the fabric of our experience.

We see it in:

• Positive and negative electrical charge.
• Masculine and feminine qualities.
• Conscious and unconscious aspects of the mind.

We could, in theory, think of “awake” and “asleep”, “Green” and “Red”, as just another pair of poles.

The trap is to fixate on the polarity and forget the underlying unity:

• To imagine ourselves as the “positive” ones and others as the “negative” ones.
• To see the “enlightened” as a group separate from those who are “lost”.

From that place, we are still in the very duality we claim to want to transcend.

A more radical move is to recognize:

• Both poles are expressions of the same underlying field.
• The so-called “negative” is not outside of us, but inside as a potential and a history.
• What we reject “out there” is often what we have not fully met “in here”.

This is where judgment becomes a central theme.

Judgment segments:

• This is good, that is bad.
• This group is advanced, that group is primitive.
• This part of myself is acceptable, that part must be hidden.

Love, in a deeper sense, dissolves these divisions:

• Not sentimental affection, but the willingness to see everything as part of one reality.
• The decision to prioritize unity over categorization.

“Choose love over judgment” is not a moral slogan. It is a practical technology for moving beyond duality.

Triggers as practice fields

In daily life, this plays out in very concrete ways: through triggers.

A trigger is:

• Any situation, comment, or event that disproportionally disturbs you.
• A place where you quickly segment reality into “good” and “bad.”
• A signpost pointing to unintegrated material.

Most people experience triggers as annoyances to be avoided or suppressed.

Leaders who work consciously with themselves can instead treat triggers as practice fields:

• “This strong reaction is telling me something. Where am I still judging?”
• “What in me is being mirrored here?”
• “What segment am I defending?”

Working with triggers is demanding, because:

• They arise when you are emotionally aroused, not when you are calm.
• The natural tendency is to justify the reaction, not examine it.

And yet, when you do stay with them:

• Over time, specific triggers lose their charge.
• You do not become indifferent; you become more neutral and less reactive.
• Your field of awareness expands, and your instrument is tuned more finely.

As this process continues:

• Crude, obvious triggers fall away first.
• More subtle ones emerge.
• Eventually, even very small events can feel like meaningful invitations to deeper clarity.

From coarse noise to subtle signal: bandwidth and new senses

If we follow one more implication of this, we end up in a surprising place.

Imagine that:

• Everything you perceive is, in some sense, a trigger or relevant signal.
• Your current nervous system is working at full capacity simply to manage and interpret coarse sensory input: sights, sounds, smells, tastes, physical sensations.

Now imagine that:

• As you work through and dissolve more and more triggers, your system is less hijacked by automatic reactions.
• Less processing power is spent on defending against the world.
• More bandwidth becomes available.

Where does that freed-up bandwidth go?

One possibility is that it:

• Enables more subtle perception of what is already present.
• Opens space for forms of awareness that have been dormant, sometimes described as extra-sensory perception.

Not as a party trick, but as:

• Finer intuition.
• Deeper felt sense of situations and people, beyond the obvious.
• A more immediate resonance with patterns that are not visible on the surface.

Whether or not we adopt specific frameworks for this (ESP, fields of information, etc.), the leadership-relevant point is:

• The less you are driven by unconscious triggers, the more of reality you can actually perceive.

That alone has enormous practical consequences for how you lead.

The quiet courage to choose relevance

All of this circles back to simple but uncomfortable moves:

• Allowing yourself phases of cocoon-like withdrawal when your deeper system asks for metamorphosis.
• Examining where you are upholding conventions out of fear, not out of present-moment choice.
• Re-choosing relationships, roles, and projects from freedom, not obligation.
• Noticing where you are still judging, and gently practicing love over judgment.
• Treating triggers as invitations rather than only as irritations.

None of these are dramatic heroics. They are quiet, continuous acts of honesty.

Over time, they change the architecture of your life:

• Fewer automatic “yeses” to old contracts.
• More living time spent in truly relevant experiences.
• Less energy wasted on defending your identity.
• More bandwidth for subtle guidance and more mature forms of leadership.

In that sense, freedom is not the absence of all structure. It is the presence of conscious choice in how you relate to structure:

• A contract can be a container for growth, not a prison.
• A relationship can be a living choice, not a duty.
• A role can be an authentic expression, not a mask.

Metamorphosis is not comfortable.

But if you are honest, you may recognize that staying a caterpillar has quietly stopped working.

(This article was inspired by a Conscious Conversation with a dear friend & professional colleague on 4th January 2024.)(ID:CO|AF)