Healing and Recovery - " Like a dragonfly"

Welcome to my first healing and recovery post. I hope it is a place where anyone going through any kind of difficulty whether that be physical, emotional or mental will find hope and encouragement. Although my current experience is of mental health illness so far my images have proved to have a wider appeal.

Each week I will bring something based around one of my images which I have painted out of my ongoing lived experience of working through recovery from complex trauma, depression and eating disorders but hopefully this will be in a positive light that can encourage others to keep pushing forwards towards full recovery no matter how long or slow that process may prove to be. All the images are available in our shop as cards, prints and gift items.

Todays image is a fairly new one I painted last month and shows a dragonfly in flight. When you look carefully into the lifecycle of a dragonfly it speaks of the journey of recovery.

"Think of a dragonfly, laid into stems, leaves or mud hidden from view. To hatch as a nymph spending most of their lives hidden beneath the water with no beauty about them. Then suddenly without warning they shed their final skin, take their first breath of air, their wings unfold and they take flight. A flicker of iridescent beauty."

When we are trapped in the full force of our difficulties it can really seem to ourselves and others that there is little beautiful about our lives. Yet the lesson of the dragonfly is that the beauty is there deep inside us all along. My experience is also that we don't know how many layers there still are to peel off. It can seem like we are working hard to work off layer after layer. It can feel endless, yet one day just like the dragonfly we start to realise something of a fuller life is showing through the work is not for nothing, there is hope. It may only be a short flicker, or for a brief snapshot but it is there and for a moment at least we can glimpse another way of living, and a hope, a way out of out present circumstances. There is always, always, hope of a better place. People before you have trodden this path and come through it.

I am still very much working through that path. Rachel