Be a Butterfly!

It’s quite a journey from caterpillar to butterfly. Have you taken it?

Soar Like a Butterfly

Have you ever watched a pupa struggling to get out of its cocoon and take flight as a beautiful butterfly? Would you agree that the result is worth the effort insofar as enjoying a beautiful insect in our garden or around our flower beds?

Can you Identify with Life in a Cocoon?

Many people are in struggles with serious implications. We are caught up in a tough, unyielding cocoon of emotions and negative thinking. We resolve again and again to burst out of the prison we’re in; but again and again, we give up, usually before the struggle starts, and slowly slide back down in the darkness of our hopelessness. If we don’t get free, the emotions may eventually destroy us.

Take a moment and describe your personal cocoon – from the inside. What is it that defeats you again and again? Why is it that you can’t soar in the bright sunshine like everyone else? It really does seem that everyone is soaring except you, doesn’t it. Is what binds you actually happening again and again or is it just the emotional handcuffs of thinking about something painful in your past.

Or someone you love dearly is trapped in their own emotional cocoon.

Wouldn't you like to help them escape?

Its hard watching someone we love hurting; watching them fight against the emotions that shackle them. It’s tempting to try to make the pain go away.

What would happen if we snipped the end off a literal cocoon so the butterfly could slip out and soar? The simple truth is that he wouldn't soar – he would die. The butterfly needs the exertion of opening the cocoon to strengthen itself for life as a butterfly.

Who of us would not snap our fingers and release a friend from bondage if we could? It just won’t work. One needs the experience of beating the odds – of winning the battle – to make the habit of living the role as a freed person. Emotional prisons have to be opened from the inside.

Look at the cocoon

Have you examined an empty cocoon? Look at the frayed opening and you’ll see the thousands of tiny threads that have been cut from within by the baby butterfly. You could think of the threads as the negative emotional thinking that entraps you in your emotional cocoon.

Breaking free

Unless we deal with each of those emotional threads ourselves, we can’t escape the cocoon.

Somebody said, “My problems are too big.”

Dr. Richard Carlson (see the book list at the right) wrote a book entitled “Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff” with the subtitle, “It’s all small stuff.”

It’ can be overwhelming to consider everything as a whole – to always look at the big picture. It’s much more feasible when we realize that the emotional cocoon is made up of many tiny emotional thoughts; and if we deal with those thoughts one at a time as they recur, we will eventually have dealt with all of them.

And dealing with a single thought gives us a tiny bit of emotional peace. The thought may come back and we deal with it again. But it’s not long until the tiny moments of peace become connected and you have developed a habit of peace regarding that particular issue.

Our mind is an incredible thing; but it always works one thought at a time; if we slice things small enough. We can deal with some really big things by handling just one piece at a time.

I've just described the working premise of Finding Personal Peace in three paragraphs.

You don’t have to continue to be trapped in your own emotional cocoon. You can be free to soar in peace.

Go for it!



www.findingpersonal peace.com

Thanks for reading our blog today. I invite you to respond in several ways: (1) Comment in the space below if you agree or disagree with what I’ve said. A dialogue could be interesting for all; (2) Share the post with your friends. There are buttons below for Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites; and (3) sign up for an email with each new post. There’s a place to do that on the right. Then you won’t have to remember to look for our subsequent posts. Thanks again!

We Need Your Help!

Finding Personal Peace has been published for about two months now. The response has been gratifying. Just today a pastor who reviewed it described it saying, “This is incredible. It's so well done and the potential for helping people is enormous.”

We'd like to make an effort over the next few weeks to seriously validate the course.

To that end, we're posting the following advertisement on several of the social media sites and forums.

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Would Some Personal Peace Today be Nice?

We're looking for 100 volunteers to help us validate a promising new on-line course, Finding Personal Peace, that shows you how to find some personal peace in just about any emotional circumstance.

We will make it worth your while to volunteer by offering some valuable coupons that you can redeem. The value of the coupons may be as much as $500 or more.

If you want to know more about the project and about volunteering to help, please send an email to volunteer@findingpersonalpeace.com. We'll send the details right back to you.

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If you know someone who would be willing to help us, please pass this along to them.

We need a strong test to make sure the course works under the kind of load we expect to have as the word gets around.

If you know someone who would like some personal peace; or who would like the chance to redeem some pretty valuable gifts; or who would simply like to help us help others; please send an email to the email address below. Thanks

All the best!



Rod @ Finding Personal Peace
volunteer@findingpersonalpeace.com

Do You Have Emotional Pain?

We all understand physical pain. We get hurt; it heals; the pain goes away. Very few of us relive the physical event again and experience the pain again. It remains in our mind as“an awareness that it was indeed at one time painful,” says Dr. Kip Williams from Purdue University.

On the other hand, emotional pain tends to linger, in no small part, because we continue to rethink the emotional hurt that caused the pain. The event remains fresh in our minds; and, in fact, may become more intense with the replaying of it.

In the brain, pain is pain.

Studies show that to the brain, heartbreak and emotional torment are no different from having hot coffee spilled on your hand. The stimuli produce nearly identical brain reactions." The understanding growing among pain researchers is that, in your brains, physical and social pain share much the same neural circuitry. In many ways, in fact, your brain may scarcely make a distinction between a verbal and physical insult.

CNN reported that “getting burned and getting dumped feel exactly the same.”

Researchers at the University of Florida found that acetaminophen (the major ingredient of Tylenol) relieved emotional pain similarly to how it relieved physical pain.

Emotional Pain is Natural

Emotional pain is as natural as physical pain. How can we not feel grief at the loss of a loved one or remorse at the loss of dreams? How can we not be resentful when we are ill-treated? Who isn't sad when circumstances cause us to be alone or financial loss causes us to fear for the future?

The danger is not in feeling the natural emotional pain. The danger is reliving the emotional pain through rumination with the impact of the emotional pain growing until it becomes debilitating.

Most physical pain is temporary – it happens and it heals. Some people of the ability to absorb an emotional blow, hurt temporarily, and then let the wound heal just as if it were physical.

Many, if not most, of us don't handle emotional pain so readily. My own story is that I carried around anger for years against someone who had hurt my family. I replayed that pain every time a thought popped up that reminded me of the hurt.

Can you identify with that? Do you know someone living with recurring emotional pain?

We've already seen in earlier posts that negative emotions can lead to depression, stress, and physical illness. They can lead to broken relationships, shame, and guilt; even to self-mutilation and suicide.

Common wisdom says that pain must be pursued to its source and dealt with much like a wound has to be lanced to clear out the infection.

The irony is that such treatment causes us to explore and relive the event and thus reinforces the pain rather than relieving it.

A better way might be to learn how to properly handle the negative thinking that launches us into episodes of reliving the pain. I handled my negative thinking and was so impressed by how well it worked that I wrote the online course, Finding Personal Peace. I want to share this concept with anybody in the grasp of emotional pain.

Click here to learn more.

God bless,