Take a nice couple of deep breaths in your own rhythm place.
Adjust your posture to be comfortable if you haven't already.
Feel your body ground into the earth.
Do your best to be present.
Come with me today on a journey to imagine ourselves.
If you've ever seen a butterfly appearing out of a crystal,
This is an amazing moment or perhaps you've seen a video or a film.
It's a deep mystery that occurs in this process more than just the birth of something beautiful,
Of course.
And that is this concept of imaginal cells.
I want you to imagine now that you are a caterpillar.
You're a caterpillar getting ready to change.
And that means you're tucked inside your crystals.
Just take a moment now.
Be the caterpillar.
You've led a caterpillar life for a certain period of time.
You've done caterpillar things.
And now things are about to change dramatically.
At a certain point,
A moment in time,
Your caterpillar body begins to dissolve.
And I suppose in a certain way,
You're dying.
You're leaving this earthly form.
As you begin to dissolve into kind of a soupy mushy mix,
As scientists call it,
Something very miraculous occurs because while you're dissolving,
Something else begins to stir.
Something else is being born in the remnants of your former caterpillar body.
It's not just a death and a dying.
In fact,
It's an extraordinary rebirth.
Beating on and coming right out of your former body,
And it's dissolving,
And it's fluidity.
Our dormant cells start to awaken.
Just imagine you can feel those dormant cells now because you've become the soupy mush.
Wondering where you are,
What's happening perhaps.
But there's cells awakening now,
Almost turning on like light switches.
You never even knew you had or that they were there.
And these are called the imaginal cells.
And they carry the complete blueprint of what's about to happen.
And at first,
Of course,
They're separate from one another,
Over here and over there and up there,
Down there.
But then they start slowly,
Surely to come together.
And when they do,
The butterfly is beginning to form.
Wings the caterpillar never had,
Would never imagine.
A different body,
A very different body from the caterpillar body,
But made out of the very substance of the caterpillar itself in some miraculous way.
So now,
As the imaginal cells begin to gather,
You begin to let go of the memory of being a caterpillar.
You enter into the unknown,
Into the uncertainty and into the opening and discovery of the new.
Slowly,
Surely,
Your now butterfly body begins to take shape,
To grow in its womb,
So to speak,
Take its form.
You can feel it.
You can feel a different body that just not quite familiar with yet.
And when you stretch this new body as it's growing and filling out and creating structure,
You can feel that there's extension of something.
And we might call them wings.
You might recognize that you have something to stretch now.
And as you stretch those wings,
You bump up against the edges of the chrysalis.
And at first,
That's surprising and maybe even a little bit annoying because your wings want to stretch.
They just want to open.
And so you beat against the chrysalis until the chrysalis,
In one beautiful moment,
One final moment breaks apart and you emerge in all your glory and all your beauty.
Faint memories of the caterpillar but literally built on the back and on the life of the caterpillar you used to be.
And now your colors are showing in the sunlight and you feel the breeze and the wind and it picks you up and carries you off into the yonder.
And you have a distant memory perhaps of that other being,
That other creature,
That other energy that used to be that now has fed your very existence.
That moment of transformation.
That moment of birthing the new from the old.
That magnificent awakening to who you have now become.
And perhaps this is also the human story.
Perhaps you really are in a way caterpillars with unrecognized dormant imaginal cells just waiting,
Waiting to wake up,
Waiting to be called together,
Waiting for their moment to give you wings and color and flight.
Just imagine that possibility.
Feel that for both the caterpillar and the butterfly but also for you.
And now stretch your wings as you fly and fly and fly.
Be ready,
Give thanks,
Come back into the room and see if you can take a little bit of your butterfly nature into the rest of your day.
