Yesterday, I painted a butterfly to honour myself and the healing work I’ve done. During the past few days I made another quantum leap in my healing after what had been a pretty rough time and it occurred to me that the right moment had come to honour all the hard work I’ve been doing for years and to celebrate in my own special way the beautiful butterfly I’ve become.
But I didn’t just sit down thinking “I want to paint a butterfly”. No. The butterfly was the intended result of a ritual I had come up with to celebrate what I’ve accomplished. Since you can’t know this: Rituals I invent on my own have always been a very important and healing part of my healing journey. This is what I did:
Step 1:
I sat down with a pencil and a notepad, connected with myself and wrote down all the things I’ve healed that came to my mind. I took my time and only when I felt the list was complete did I continue with the next step.
Step 2:
With a pencil I drew a heart on an A3 piece of watercolour paper. Since I already knew I wanted to turn that into a butterfly later, I placed it a bit higher to leave enough space.
Step 3:
I wrote every item from my list into the heart shape. The most important ones I placed where the body of the butterfly would be. The others I just scattered all over the heart.
I hid them in this and the following picture for reasons of privacy.
Step 4:
Choosing and preparing the gouache paint I would use.
Step 5:
Intuitively colouring the heart, switching colours when I felt like it but making sure not to paint over the words I had written down.
Step 6:
Taking a break to let the paint dry and because my mind was spinning and very eager to write this down up up to this point plus jotting down some notes on the various ideas/inspirations behind this ritual I wanted to tell you about. And yes, a cup of coffee and a little snack were part of this step as well.
Step 7:
Enter: Aztek gold gouache! I put it over every word I had written down and painted the outline of the heart with it.
Step 8:
With a pencil I drew the outlines of the butterfly wings.
Step 9:
Intuitively colouring the butterfly wings with the same colours I had used for the heart.
Step 10:
Lunch break and giving the paint some time to dry.
Step 11:
As a finishing touch I added some gold detail to the wings. Tada!
Step 12:
Really taking in the finished picture, while feeling so proud and in awe of and grateful to myself for the healing I’ve done. It’s been such a wild roller coaster ride and I know I’m not done yet but it’s important to celebrate your successes.
Step 13:
I tore the list into small pieces and burnt it. That felt sooooooooooo good! Closure!
It wasn’t the first time I felt closure, but it was pretty special nevertheless.
And now I’d like to explain this ritual a bit.
In my opinion trauma breaks the heart, so when I healed myself from a complex childhood trauma I mended my broken heart by putting its broken pieces back together. This is why I chose to start with a heart shape. Of course, the fact it can easily be turned into a butterfly simplified things a lot. The broken pieces are represented by the items on my list from step 1.
In order to put something broken back together you need some kind of glue. For this I chose the colour gold, because I admire “Kintsugi”, the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold and the wonderful philosophy behind it of treating breakage and repair as natural parts of a piece of pottery’s life and thus seeing repair as something beautiful and valuable. To me the process of healing is like repairing a piece of pottery with gold: I will always have scars but I’m whole again despite them, stronger then before and still beautiful.
The healing process is no easy thing. It hurts, it’s ugly and it’s hard and I’m not the only one to compare this to the transformation from caterpillar to butterfly. Of course, there is also the spiritual meaning of rebirth, growth and change for this metamorphosis that played a part in my choosing the butterfly. For I am no longer who I was. The old me doesn't exist anymore. I am the new reborn me who has grown so much and who continues to grow. I broke free of the cocoon I was in. I spread my wings and started to fly.
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