Brains fascinate me. My brain. Your brains. Those of my family and friends. Point me in the direction of a brain, and I’ll become immersed in it if invited. This passion for understanding our in-body computers wove itself into my long career starting with Control Data Corporation and especially the last 15 years since launching Green Lotus. It resounds in my direct experience with meditation, yoga, psychology, and leadership. What does this have to do with the butterfly or Green Lotus, you might be asking?

Dr. Rick Hanson, noted clinical psychologist and Senior Fellow of the University of California - Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center, knows brain science and makes learning about it fun. (Isn’t that amazing?) Affable, whip-smart, and accessible, he focuses his work on neuroplasticity and how the default setting of the brain toward negativity affects it and on how to retrain it to better open to lasting happiness.

Some years ago, I spent a week at Spirit Rock, steeped in exploring how the brain works and how we can work with it at a retreat led by Hanson with a co-presenter, the wild, brilliant, a bit wacky Wes Nisker, author, radio commentator, comedian, and Buddhist meditation instructor. I suggest you Google (verb intended) both.

This preamble leads me to the subject of COVID and the ways it positively affected me and, by extension, Green Lotus. It wasn’t always easy to recognize positive outcomes in the age of the pandemic, given the brain’s preference for negative thinking. Especially in the darkest days our community faced together, all I focused on was absorbing the shock of the “unseen enemy” and its relentless assault. When Green Lotus closed for several months entirely only to face daily pivoting like a yo-yo, my brain could take a dark turn very quickly.

And still. Within a few weeks of the shutdown of life in Minnesota – and with an attention to turning to the positive experiences I could acknowledge thanks to training with Rick Hanson – my brain slowly recalibrated. During that time that felt frighteningly endless and endlessly frightening, the practice of acknowledging the positive in my life beat back despair, worry, anger, fatigue as we worked together for long hours to save our company.

In that cocoon of silence, enforced rest, and deep inquiry, I noticed new ideas floating to the surface in myself, MB, and the rest of our managers. As society ever-so-slowly reopened, our tight cocoon loosened, too. Little by little and day by day, like the butterflies of your dreams or your childhood or your neighborhood, we emerged, and Green Lotus did, too. Instead of pushing back against reality, we leaned into it. In the leaning in, we rediscovered joy in our mission, determination in our outlook, and an explosion in new thinking.

Gone were the constraints of time as we had understood it: This is the fall (winter, spring, summer) schedule. This is the length of time of an appointment. This is where people work, these are the traffic patterns. This is when, where, and how we deliver our integrative healing services, including yoga, teacher training, retreats – all of what we knew about time detonating until time as a concept denoted, too. By breaking the iron grip of time, ideas exploded just as the butterfly seems to finally explode from its cocoon in all its beauty, colorfulness, and lightness to take flight.

We layered in choices we’d never before considered: the use of a virtual platform for counseling, classes, workshops and events, long-distance learning, reiki, and more; the use of video to build an On-Demand Library with hundreds of titles; the creation of content nurtured in the silence and stillness – recipe books, on-line courses, a library of articles and references, more choices in classes and class styles to extend Green Lotus’s devotion to inclusion, and more.

And still the ideas flowed: the introduction this fall of Salt Therapy in three of our four Twin Cities locations; the launch of the School of Sound Healing and the School of Reiki.

Like a butterfly, Green Lotus emerged from its cocoon and took wing into September 2021. Like a butterfly moves from flower to flower to sustain itself, Green Lotus now understands that it must float from idea to idea, new concept to new concept, new schedule to new schedule to flourish in a world of constantly changing conditions and circumstances, including the one we never considered – the first worldwide pandemic in more than a generation.

Rather than being a new Green Lotus, it is an evolved one and committed to continual renewal and evolution. We used to talk about our “living, breathing” business plan and mission – never has this been truer or more necessary.

Butterflies sense changes in the environment very quickly, making them good indicators of healthy and unhealthy conditions. We set an intention for Green Lotus to mimic the butterfly the best that it can, to be a good indicator of healthy and unhealthy conditions and speak openly to them in its authentic voice, to take wing and to float with ease and precision, too. Like a butterfly, it cocooned, emerged, and flies again. Won’t you take wing with us?

An Easy Practice for Brain Health

Each evening before surrendering to sleep, devote the last five or ten minutes to acknowledging positive aspects of the day – not made-up ones or hoped-for ones. Real ones based on your direct experience. Repeat them to yourself, see any images associated with them. Then sleep. In a matter of weeks, your brain’s resiliency will improve, and it more easily will balance its tendency to hang onto negativity. It literally will light up in different parts and will float more lightly. Like a butterfly.

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Marcia Appel

In 2006, Marcia, a former journalist and corporate executive, wrote the plan that launched Green Lotus. In 2007, Green Lotus opened, and Marcia and business partner Merry Beth Hovey, who joined in 2009, planted the seeds of service that are the foundation of the Green Lotus philosophy. "As teachers and healers," Marcia says, "we meet students and clients where they are. We learn and grow from each other -- and have fun doing it."