Almost everyone loves and admires butterflies, they captivate us with their beauty and their elegance. They have captured the hearts of children and adults in books, poems and in song. Their dazing brightly colored wings and their amazing graceful dances are a awesome sight to behold. We are both fascinated, delighted and charmed as they float effortlessly, nimbly and daintily in the soft gentle breeze like delicate flowers that have come to life. They remind us of prima ballerinas twirling and spinning as they pirouette through the sky.

But what is interesting about butterflies is that they do not start their life out like beautiful living flowers with wings, in fact before they transform into butterflies there is very little that is fascinating or elegant about them.

Butterflies begin their lives as slow moving worm like creatures that crawls around on their bellies to get where it's going. In it's early stages of life, it looks a little awkward and clumsy, it seems so helpless and vulnerable, it has very few defenses against predators. Especially while it is in it's larval stage, its life is very hazardous and dangerous.

The odds against it surviving and becoming a butterfly is very great. It will face monumental, enormous challenges for such a small creature. There will be great hurdles and obstacles before it reaches the final stage of it's life when it changes and transforms into a beautiful butterfly.

To such a tiny creature the world must seem overwhelming and intimidating, and the little creatures has good reasons to be cautious, nervous, anxious and worried, because very few caterpillars survive to become butterflies.

Because of it's size compared to the world around it, every inch of ground that it must crawl, every pebble, every stone, the slightest dip or bump in the road can be monumentous, very intimidating and scary, and may seem like an impossible predicament. It will have to face many huge obstructions and impediments before it can become a butterfly 

A caterpillar spends a lot of time eating and growing, as it grows it's skin stretches, but it can only stretch so much. When it can no longer stretch anymore it grows new skin and it sheds the old skin. Caterpillars will shed their skin about four or five times as their bodies grow.

In the larval stage it's skin is soft and it is very vulnerable to predators, to disease and to parasites that will lay their eggs inside it. If they are successful they will  hatch and then eat the caterpillar.

Did you know, that when a caterpillar is in it's cocoon, it releases certain  enzymes that actually dissolves  it's own body? An enzyme is a substance that causes chemical reactions, it is a fluid that breaks down the caterpillar's old body so that it can make a new one.

Once a caterpillar has disintegrated it's old tissue, it turns into a sort of a soup, everything is dissolved except for certain disks or cells. It uses the soup to make and form it's wings, it's eyes, it's antennae, it's legs and the rest of it's body. It's old body dies so that a new one can be born.

Once the caterpillar breaks free of it's cocoon it is reborn a butterfly, with big beautiful colorful wings. The final transformation into a butterfly makes everthing that the caterpillar had to go through and overcome to get to this stage in it's life, worth all the effort, the hard work, the growing pains and the difficulties that it had to face to get here.

When it was still in it's larval stage it had to crawl, but now, it can fly, it's big beautiful wings can carry it thousands of miles, and it's feet never have to touch the ground, except to stop and drink the sweet tasty nectar of flowers. It's wings can carry it anywhere in the world, it's heart desires to go.

We begin our lives like young inexperienced caterpillars in the larval stage crawling around on our bellies, as we learn as we grow, we too, will  face obstacles and challenges as we grow. As we grow stronger an wiser, we begin to stretch our minds and hearts, we shed our old skin, by out growing our old habits and our old ways of thinking and doing things, they restrict and prevent us from growing and transforming.

Once we have shed our old ways of thinking, our negative emotions, our fears and doubts by dissolving them, we can begin to grow into a new creature and a new person, we begin to grow new skin, we stretch and grow out of our old skin, which we may have to do several times before we are ready to enter into our cocoon.

But once we emerge from our cocoons we will be transformed into beautiful butterflies with big brightly colorful wings and we will no longer have to crawl around on our bellies, we will be able to fly. 

The stress and the tension along with the troubles and struggles that we face everyday helps, to break down our old habits and our old ways of thinking and they force us to adapt and change, they stimulate new growth in us. Once our fears and doubts and our worries have dissolved away in the soup, so does our old limitations, our negative thoughts, emotions and ideas, we grow wings and we transform into something more, something better, something wonderful, something more beautiful and precious.