The Butterfly Effect

When I give my website address people always ask me, “What is Aponi?” It means butterfly I tell them. “Oh,” they reply “..that’s pretty.”

A few years ago, I found myself gravitating toward delicate images of these creatures again and again when looking for a logo for my new yoga business. When I found one I loved, it would come to embody what I was feeling at the time: transformation, freedom and quite frankly, beauty. The latter in the sense that beauty appears as the result of and is the outward manifestation of tremendous inner work.

That was two years ago. Recently I visited my website and got the urge to make some changes. The verbiage seemed outdated, which was exciting to me because it meant I was growing. Repeatedly mentioned was the definition of the word Aponi, which is the Native American word for butterfly. Part of my website retooling was adding a testimonials page. Collecting testimonials was a humbling exercise for me, a gesture of sheer grace from my students and one of my mentors who happens to be my very first yoga teacher. It was in this exercise that the meaning of Aponi changed for me.

The butterfly effect is defined by Wikipedia as “…a small change at one place in a nonlinear system can result in large differences to a later state. The effect derives its name from the theoretical example of a hurricane's formation being contingent on whether or not a distant butterfly had flapped its wings several weeks before.” Some of the testimonials mention thoughts, tips and musings that I have in the back of my mind when teaching. Whether shared long ago or recently, plainly or esoterically in class, I’m beginning to discover that these thoughts are landing in beautiful places and making a difference.