Be the Butterfly!

Video 3 of the Chasing the Present Summit was an interview with Matthew Watherston, who has studied Amazonian medicines and currently runs an ayahuasca healing retreat in Peru. Ayahuasca is a psychedelic concoction that has been used in ceremonies and spiritual healing. Matthew says that using it helps the person see their true self, demons and all so they can heal the things that keep them from happiness. This was the shortest of the videos so far and it was packed full of good stuff. I’ll try to highlight some points that really struck me. We seek outside validation because at some point we felt our parents didn’t give it to us, and because our society is set up in a way that encourages material success, we strive to achieve that thinking it will fulfill us but it doesn’t. That’s because we are a marriage of the physical and spiritual but most of us have forgotten about the spiritual part of ourselves and that is the part that feels the sense that ‘there’s got to be more to life than this.’ I have felt that so so many times but wasn’t sure what to do about it. Anyway, he tells a story about a butterfly. A man walks by a park on his way to work and sees a butterfly coming out of the cocoon and it looks like its struggling to get out so he helps crack the cocoon open so the butterfly can get out. Feeling good about his deed, he goes to work. On the way home he walks past the same spot and sees that the butterfly is in the same spot, lifeless. He looks up what happened and finds that the struggle to get out of the cocoon is part of what makes a butterfly’s wings strong enough to fly. Without the struggle they can’t thrive. He says that the only way we can find what really makes us happy is to go to those places where we struggle and face what is truly there. We are used to finding ways to block out unpleasant feelings with a multitude of physical distractions and that’s part of what keeps us feeling stuck in a rut. When you face the dark stuff head/ go through the struggle, you transform. WE ARE the butterfly story. We are struggling and looking up at the butterfly not even realizing that we can choose to become that, but most of us have no idea that there is so much more to us than we believe because we never go inside ourselves to face these struggles head-on. He uses the Ayahuasca for this but meditation also works. Lastly he gives a Rumi quote that is so great: Your task is not to seek love, but merely to seek and find all the obstacles you’ve built against it. Meaning, we have a habit of standing in our own way to happiness. Some of our thoughts are so conditioned that they feel genuine to ourselves but even those can be changed. This is where my example with the mad lady comes in, by letting her get me irritated and then passing that onto others, I am not making a choice to transform into the butterfly. Being so negative and complaining so much is something I really dislike about myself and now I do believe it’s a character flaw borne out of bad habits passed down and me not having worked on it consistently to see what’s driving it and how I can fix it. By continuing the cycle of what’s familiar and automatic- emotionally reacting to situations instead of choosing not to be drawn into the negativity, I am keeping myself stuck in a miserable rut. So today I decided to practice letting these things go. I had plenty of opportunity on social media, at work and even on the radio. I am retraining myself how to be OK with someone else having a different opinion than mine, even if they are forceful and reacting emotionally, I don’t have to buy into that drama if I choose not to. That is very liberating! I can tell I am going to begin my transformation because now that I can see my flaws in how I handled this before, I can’t un-see it. I am ready for change. I am grateful to have found this tool to use!