Butterflies Have Memories, Too 🦋

For the past few weeks, I've been teaching a class about how the stories we tell can determine how we experience our experience: the meaning we make, and often the feelings we have about our lives and about ourselves.

I read an article recently that showed how the power of memory and story is not just for humans: it's found in other species, too.

The focus of the article was a 10-year-old boy in Japan named Jo Nagai, who raises butterflies in his backyard. He began to notice that many of the butterflies seemed to remember him, and he was curious about why.

So, he wrote to an entomologist at Georgetown University, Dr. Martha Weiss. Together, they devised an experiment to learn more about what was happening.

In the experiment, Jo had two caterpillar groups: a control group and a group that was exposed to the scent of lavender oil while also getting an unpleasant but not painful electric shock. The second group of caterpillars learned to avoid the scent of lavender.

Jo discovered that when the caterpillars in the second group went through metamorphosis and became butterflies, the butterflies also avoided the smell of lavender. And successive generations of these caterpillars and butterflies did, too!

So, even caterpillars and butterflies tell stories ~ and they carry stories in their bodies about things that didn’t even happen to them!

Why am I telling you this? Well, for one thing, I want to normalize the fact that we living creatures do this: we have experiences and we make associations because of those experiences.

On one level, this has to do with how our brains work: we are wired for survival, so we want to avoid experiences that were painful. We also create stories and generalizations and repeat patterns because it’s a way to conserve energy and reduce decision fatigue.

And just like those butterflies, we also have stories and memories encoded in our DNA of things that didn’t actually happen to us. Some of our stories are likely based on what happened to our great grandparents! Again, I suspect this is rooted in the survival impulse/imperative that we all have.

I know that it can sometimes be hard to have patience with yourself, and that it can feel frustrating to keep doing things in a way that you wish you could change.

Hearing about Jo's butterflies, I hope you can have a greater sense of belonging and curiosity about the confounding patterns you may see in what you think or do. The butterflies have good reasons for avoiding lavender, and we have good reasons for the things we do, too. We just might not know what our reasons are ❤️

Curiosity is a potent form of kindness. Partly that's because when we're really struggling, it can be near impossible to do a 180 from shame-spiraling to self-compassion.

But curiosity can be a real bridge: an accessible way to quiet the inner critic and interrupt the pattern of self-judgment. I recently recorded a short video where I talk about this. You can click below to check it out.

A questioning spirit is a kind of aikido move when facing the inner critic: it's disarming in a non-confrontational way.

I hope in that today you find ways to be warmly curious about your experience.