Soul Evolution: Becoming the Butterfly

 

Years ago, I lived on an organic vegetable farm that was on county property. The unfarmed land contained fields of wild milkweed plants, the host plant of the beautiful monarch butterfly.

The monarchs lay their eggs on the leaves of the milkweed plants because this is the food the caterpillars need to eat when they hatch from the eggs. They can’t survive on just any plant. They must have the milkweed.

Periodically, the county would come and mow the fields with their large tractors, which would destroy the caterpillars and their host plants. So, prior to mowing, we would go out and harvest milkweed with eggs and caterpillars and bring them into the “Monarch Maternity Ward” so they could complete their life cycles – from egg to caterpillar to chrysalis to butterfly.

It was a beautiful experience, and visiting the maternity ward brought joy to adults and children alike when they came to pick up vegetables or volunteer at the farm.

One day, I was moving some of the plants with chrysalises on them, and one of the chrysalises fell to the ground. It splattered. A green liquid spilled out. That appeared to be all that was inside. So how does a caterpillar turn into green goo and then somehow become a butterfly?

It’s a mystical experience, even scientists don’t completely understand, and it has many analogies to the human experience.

 

It’s a mysterious process that even scientists don’t fully understand – a mystical experience with many analogies that help us understand and appreciate our human journey and soul evolution. Share on X

 

The caterpillar consumes, consumes, consumes. It eats and poops and expands, eats and poops and expands. The monarch caterpillar goes through 5 broods – it sheds its skin and emerges to its next stage of growth – all the while continuing to eat and poop and expand. It has no regard for whether it’s consuming too fast or running out of plant matter. It is just eating to grow.

Then when it reaches its maximum expansion as a caterpillar, something mysterious begins to happen. As it readies itself to turn into the chrysalis, it travels to a high leaf or stem and attaches itself securely and hangs upside down by its tail.

Then when it’s time to transform into the chrysalis, it secretes an enzyme that literally digests itself. The excrement of its own digestion is the green goo. The only thing that does not get digested are these invisible cells called imaginal cells. The green goo becomes food for the imaginal cells. The digested self becomes food for the imaginal cells, which grow into the body parts that make up the butterfly, which will soon emerge in all its beauty and fly away.

Think about this – when we see the wormy caterpillar, especially when we don’t know what it will become, what’s the first instinct? Maybe – ooh, yuck! Don’t eat my plants! But the butterfly brings delight, fills us with beauty, lightens the heart.

You can’t have the butterfly without the caterpillar – and the digested caterpillar becomes the food that nourishes the imaginal cells that make up the butterfly!

The butterfly holds beauty and also knowledge – generational knowledge. The monarch butterfly is a migrating butterfly.

Each year, the monarch butterflies overwinter in Mexico or California or Florida. Then in spring they make their way north to the northern US and even up into Canada. Each year they take the same migration paths. Yet the life span is only 2-6 weeks.

It takes 5 generations of butterflies to make the trip from south to north and back south again to overwinter for the next year. Not only that, the 5th generation is anatomically different – it has longer wings so they can fly higher and farther to make the trip back to Mexico. And somehow they know to take the same path and overwinter in the same places each year.

This meditation guides you to be present with your life where you are now, to call on your Source, angels and guides for support, to be present and digest the matter of your life to date – whatever comes to you at this time. Then allow the knowledge and wisdom that unfolds to feed your imaginal cells that form the butterfly that is waiting to take flight.

Bring your prayers and intentions and whatever is on your heart with you today to our Prayer & Healing Circle.

 

If you’d like support with this process or anything it invokes for you, you’re welcome to schedule a free 30-minute breakthrough session. I’d be honored to support you.
THANK YOU!

 
 

 

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In the future, if you’d like to join us live, there is time for Q&A and sharing at the end of the call – off the recording.

Hope to see you there next time…

 
 
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