Sara Sweat, MA – Founder, Monarch
When my son was a few weeks old, I went to the grocery store with him for the first time.
Now, I am the kind of person who, when it’s time to carry groceries in from the car, would rather put every single bag on both arms – cutting off circulation to my hands – than make multiple trips.
No matter how many bags there are. No matter how much it hurts. One trip. Because two trips would mean admitting I couldn’t do it all at once.
Hello, hyper-independence.
So, when I pulled into the driveway with my newborn in his infant car seat and a trunk full of groceries, it didn’t occur to me anything had changed. I had absolutely no expectation that anything about how I carried out this logistical chore would need to pivot.
And I tried to do it exactly as I had always done it.
Bags on both arms. With now a car seat and baby dangling on one of them. Groceries cutting into my wrists. Making it work through sheer force of will because that is what I do, and this is who I am, and that is how this has always gone.
Except this time…it didn’t work. My arms weren’t long enough or strong enough to handle the extra load – let alone fumble for my house keys and pry open the front door.
That moment — standing in my driveway, overloaded and struggling, trying to perform the old version of my life with an entirely new one in my arms — was my first real lesson in what it means to try to fly before your wings are ready.
Without Rest, Butterflies Die
Here is something most people don’t know about monarch butterflies.
When a monarch emerges from its chrysalis, the transformation is complete. The caterpillar is gone. The butterfly fully formed. Every structure that needs to exist — the wings, the body, the entire architecture of flight — is already there.
And yet the monarch cannot fly.
Not yet. Not for hours, actually.
Because their wings, though complete, are wet. Crumpled and fragile from a life lived entirely inside a cocoon, they are initially useless for flight.
If the monarch tries to fly right away — if it launches itself into the air before the wings have had time to dry and strengthen — the wings develop deformities. They bend and warp and become completely useless for flight, usually leading to a very brief and miserable life on the ground.
What the monarch must do instead is rest.
For six to eight hours after emerging – a lot of time in a life that only lasts a few weeks – the monarch hangs still and lets the wind move through its wings.
It doesn’t force its wings to dry out. It doesn’t manufacture the strength. It simply allows the process to happen — slowly, naturally, in exactly the time it requires.
And then, when it’s wings have naturally to life on the outside, it flies.
The same is true for us.
You are not the caterpillar — you earned your wings a long time ago. You’ve survived the chrysalis — because the transformation has already happened. You have already survived the impossible thing, done the healing work, broken the cycles, built the life.
You are freaking butterfly. Fully formed. Every part of what you need is already present.
But, your wings are still wet.
Grounded Monarchs
You know what I’ve noticed about what grounded Monarchs do while they’re waiting — or more accurately, while they’re refusing to wait for their wings to dry?
They freak right out and start scampering around like someone is hunting them with a bazooka.
They hop from branch to branch trying to make something happen. Trying to stay busy, stay productive, stay useful — because stillness is absolutely terrifying.
For Monarchs like us, stillness feels like failure and rest feels like falling behind. In a vaguely dangerous way we can’t quite name – ease feels unsafe.
So, we try to carry all the groceries in one trip.
We go back to work a few weeks after giving birth — not because we have to but because we have no idea how to do anything other than what we’ve already done.
We say yes before we even know what we want. We fill every quiet moment with noise – podcasts, conference calls, tv shows, conversations – busy, busy, noise.
We perform the old version of our life and expect the new life we desire to just manifest right on top of it.
It’s like trying to carrying all your groceries in the house and balancing your baby on your head. It’s never gonna work. And, someone’s probably going to get hurt.
Because, monarchs don’t grow those big beautiful wings to scamper around on the forest floor. They forged those wings so they could do something no caterpillar could even dream.
Fly.
The Middle Is Messy
When I stopped trying to do life the old way it felt, honestly, terrible.
Slow. Wrong. Messy.
Like I was doing everything badly after decades of doing everything well.
And all that messiness felt like a big steaming pile of chaos. A sign that every ounce of stability I had created for myself had suddenly evaporated and I was alone, vulnerable, and at risk.
This part of the journey is genuinely hard for people who have been through hard things. Because part of why we became so capable and high-functioning was because it kept us safe. Competence was protection. Performance was armor.
Being messy, especially in front of other people, can feel like danger.
So the transition period — the time when our wings are wet — is really uncomfortable. Our nervous systems are sounding the alarm because it still reads imperfection as threat.
But, if you can ride out the discomfort (which, let’s be honest, you totally can because you’ve been through WAY harder things than this) – there is something really beautiful on the other side.
For me, it started with making multiple trips to the house with my groceries.
And somewhere in the middle of carrying groceries in two bags at a time, with my son in my arms, talking to him as I went — narrating the trees and the sky and the ridiculous number of trips it was taking — I found something I hadn’t been looking for.
Ease.
Not the ease of things being easy. A different kind of ease. Quieter, slower, more present. The ease of not fighting my own life anymore. Of moving at the pace my actual life required instead of the pace my survival skills demanded.
I was taking longer to get the groceries inside. And I was fully there for every single minute of it.
My son and I unpacked them together. He couldn’t help, obviously — he was a newborn — but I talked to him like he could, and he looked at me with those giant blue eyes and responded to my voice and we connected.
I stopped surviving the grocery haul and started enjoying it. I began to inhabit these small, ordinary, completely unremarkable moments of my life – instead of furiously managing them.
I got to live my life in a way that was more true to who I was becoming instead of who I had trained myself to be.
In those moments, I wasn’t a survivor. I was me.
The Monarch Method
The earliest threads of the Monarch Method were born right there in my driveway. And, it’s what I walk people through to this day.
The Monarch Method is not designed to make you less capable or less ambitious or less of who you are. Not to slow you down or force you to do one more freaking hard thing.
But to help you recalibrate. To take everything in your world down to the studs — the way you move through your days, the way you relate to yourself and others, the way you define success and rest and what is enough. And, to rebuild your existence around your whole self instead of just the survival skills you developed to make it through.
Because, precious Monarch, you deserve so much more than to survive your life. You deserve to fully live it. To inhabit it. To, dare I say, enjoy it!!
These three steps changed my life. And, I’ve watched them transform the lives of so many others.
Claim Your Identity. Get to know who you are now – who you really are, not just what you survived – and claim what you actually desire.
Find Your People. Build a true community of people who see, value, and support who you truly are.
Enjoy Your Life. Because, how dare you survive it all and accomplish so much and then not actually soak up every morsel of beauty and goodness and joy that you worked so hard to create!
This way of being – this “monarching” – is not a destination. It’s a new way to live. It’s the antithesis of surviving your life. It’s actually enjoying the flight.
It’s conversations you are fully present for. Food that you actually taste. Work that fits what you need and also lights you up! A moment with someone you love where you are not already somewhere else in your head.
It is groceries carried inside in four trips instead of one, with a child in your arms in no particular hurry, talking about the trees.
It is your nervous system finally learning that the crisis is over — and letting your wings dry to perfection in the wind.
It is not performing your life.
It is living it.
Your practice this week is a simple one. (In case you haven’t noticed – all the practices I use are – because enough with the hard things already.)
Notice one place where you are still trying to carry everything the old way. One place where you are forcing the one-trip version of something that wants to be done in four.
Then, try doing it in two instead. Slow it down just enough to notice what it really takes. And, see what happens when you do.
Monarch is coaching and community for people who are done surviving their lives. If this landed — share it with someone else whose wings are wet. And, subscribe to stay with me as we architect what comes after.
