One part of us may want the butterfly thought to elude us so we won’t have to face up to a regret or loss. If we took a given new idea seriously, we might have to abandon a relationship, leave a job, ditch a friend, apologise to someone, rethink our sexuality or break a habit.

Knowing who you are is grounding; it gives you a sense of trajectory. But when we assign words and meanings to what we know we like and value and want, we create attachments. We then strive to keep things within the parameters of which we’ve already accepted. Out of that, we create failure. We create suffering over self. We begin to believe that a

We find that we have very contradictory feelings about dissolving our chronic patterns, even if we believe they are causing us suffering. Most people, it turns out, are actually heavily invested in their problems. From the developmental point of view, we understood this investment as arising from our best efforts to protect and take care of