There’s a butterfly within us. But unlike the butterfly that always involuntarily changes, the changes that occur within us often come from our choices, our desires to ease our suffering and to ease the many physical and emotional challenges we often bring to bear upon ourselves.
Adapting to a life filled with a sense of joy, a sense of emotional freedom and a sense of fulfillment is a path so much more easily traveled with a practice of Mindfulness Meditation. To those who never had formal meditation training, the idea of such a metamorphic practice is difficult to understand by concept alone. Reading about the delightful lingering taste of a particular food, the sight of a particularly beautiful region in the world, or even just hearing about the spectacular reviews of a particular artist or performer will never be fully appreciated until we experience it.
We can read all about the research that shows stress, anxiety, self-doubt, worry, depression, unhealthy relationships, and our overall physical health (chronic disease, psoriasis, hypertension, IBS, etc.) can be reduced or eliminated by a Mindfulness Meditation practice, but we won’t fully “buy into it” until we experience it by committing ourselves to a month or two of effort. Change and growth is instinctive to a butterfly, but we, as human beings, need to self-generate desire and determination to learn a more wholesome way to approach a feeling of happiness and fulfilment in our personal lives. We just have to MAKE the choice.
Mindfulness pioneer Jon Kabat-Zinn writes “Meditation is different from all other human activities. Although it takes a lot of work and energy of a certain kind, ultimately meditation is a non-doing.” Mindfulness is about learning to quiet our minds, to find some stillness and stop spending so much time listening to that unproductive, unhealthy, and misleading voice in our head.
When we allow our habits of thought and of the past to dictate our life, we keep feeding our same patterns of thoughts by perpetuating waves of personal destruction that may occur. With Mindfulness we allow spaciousness to arise. And over time, we begin to ease the suffering in our life and eventually find and become that beautify butterfly within us.