Art by Josephine Wall

Butterfly Journal, month 7 prompt: We’ve all grown over the past half-year. We’ve come to understand ourselves better by looking deep within. From this depth of understanding, we can now begin to grow outwards into our personal environment and into the global environment. We have learned from our growth process the challenges, pains, and struggles that others might also be suffering with. Our empathic understanding of others’ suffering opens our hearts to compassion.

For the seventh month, meditate on opening up your heart and look for ways, in your interactions with others or with how you live your life, where you can bring in compassion and understanding. How does that affect or change things? It’s time to start breaking out of the cocoon and connect on a deeper level to the world.

Since I began this second journey through Butterfly Journal six months ago to return into the cocoon, my life has changed a lot. I returned to travel deeper into the waters of my psyche and unconscious and hence to continue healing childhood, ancestral, and other/past life wounds, and to reflect back upon my experience here to gain a deeper understanding from my own experience that I can use to help others on their journeys. This month, synchronistically with this month’s journal prompt, I broke open the cocoon and moved out of the family home after three very intense years of inner, spiritual, healing, and metaphysical work on so many levels.

Whenever I felt overwhelmed, frustrated, irritated, or even trapped during the experience and process of the past three years (which, as I see now, was an intensification and zeroing in on the wounds or the deep healing my psyche – personal, familial, and ancestral – was screaming for), I would try to embrace the way of the bodhisattva and find compassion and understanding for others, physical and spirit, to whom I was directing those emotions. They were only doing what they knew how to do. These actions, behaviors, and energies were their own pain and wounds crying out for help, and by me releasing those limiting emotions and instead by understanding their pain through compassion, I released some of my own. In Tibetan Buddhist Medicine, compassion and love is the antidote to all pain and suffering.

It hasn’t even been three weeks since I moved, yet in this short span of time in a fresh nature environment, I have also developed greater compassion for myself, for the “Julie” identity that at times I had also been frustrated with. This compassion for myself has unexpectedly brought about a different layer of healing, one that feels very freeing. I seem to be easily releasing and cleansing things, mentally, emotionally, and physically. I feel lighter, and I feel free to expand my wings and reach out more to others around the world with love and compassion.

What if I should discover that the poorest of the beggars and the most impudent of offenders are all within me; and that I stand in need of the alms of my own kindness. That I myself am the enemy who must be loved.    – Carl Jung

From Shantideva’s, Bodhicharyavatara (The Way of the Bodhisattva):

May beings everywhere who suffer

Torment in their minds and bodies

Have, by virtue of my merit,

Joy and happiness in boundless measure.

As long as they may linger in samsara,

May their joy be undiminished;

May they taste of unsurpassed beatitude

In constant and unbroken continuity…

May those caught in the freezing ice be warmed,

And from great clouds of Bodhisattvas

Torrents rain in boundless streams

To cool those burning in infernal fires…

And may the stooping animals be freed

From fear of being preyed upon, 

And may the famished spirits have such joy

As those who dwell in [heaven]…

May those who go in dread have no more fear.

May captives be unchained and set free.

And may the weak receive their strength.

May living beings help each other in kindness. 

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To learn more about Butterfly Journal, Click Here. Also check out the Full Color Photo Edition Here which is filled with my own butterfly photography.