Alright, let me tell you about this little practice I started calling ‘chasing the butterflies into the medicine jar’. It wasn’t anything too formal, just something I kinda fell into doing.
I found myself getting swamped, you know? Thoughts buzzing around like crazy, good ideas, bad ideas, worries, little sparks of something interesting. They’d appear for a second, bright and fluttery like butterflies, and then poof, gone. It felt like I was losing stuff, things that might have been useful or just nice to remember. It was making me feel a bit unsettled, like my mind was too messy.
Getting Started – Finding a Jar
So, I decided I needed a way to sorta catch these things. I didn’t want to squash them or analyze them right away, just… hold onto them. I looked around and found an old, small notebook. Nothing fancy, just sturdy. I decided this would be my ‘medicine jar’. Why ‘medicine’? I guess because maybe these thoughts, collected, could somehow help me feel better, more organized, later on. It felt right.
The Chase – Catching the Thoughts
Then came the ‘chasing’ part. This was the active bit. Whenever one of those ‘butterfly’ thoughts popped into my head – could be anything, a random memory, a solution to a small problem I hadn’t even realized I was thinking about, a line for a story, anything – I made a point to grab my ‘jar’.
- I stopped what I was doing, if possible. Just for a second.
- I grabbed the notebook and a pen. Always kept them close by.
- I scribbled the thought down. Didn’t worry about perfect sentences or neat handwriting. Just the core of it. Sometimes just a word or two. The goal was capture, not perfection.
It felt a bit silly at first, like I was interrupting myself constantly. But I stuck with it. Some days I caught a lot, other days only one or two. Some thoughts felt big and colourful, others tiny and plain.
Looking Inside the Jar
After a few weeks, I started looking back through the notebook. It wasn’t about making sense of everything immediately. It was more like acknowledging what I’d saved.
Here’s what I noticed:
- Some notes were just junk, honestly. Dead butterflies, you could say. I just skipped over them.
- Some made me smile, remembering the moment the thought came.
- A few actually sparked something bigger. I could see a connection between two different scribbles from different days.
- It wasn’t really ‘medicine’ in the healing sense, but it did calm the feeling of losing things. The jar felt like proof that the thoughts had existed.
What Happened In The End
So, what came of it? Well, I still do it, though maybe not as intensely as when I started. The main thing is, it helped me become more aware of those fleeting thoughts. It trained me to pay a bit more attention to the inside buzz.
It didn’t magically solve big problems, but it did make my mental space feel less chaotic. Having the ‘jar’ meant I didn’t have to try and hold everything in my head at once. I could jot it down and trust it was safe. It’s a simple thing, really. Just noticing the butterflies and giving them a temporary home in the jar. Made a difference for me.
