About Cindy Butler

A Lifetime of Curiosity About Being Human

I have been curious about people and about life for as long as I can remember.

As a little girl, one of the questions I carried was remarkably simple:

How am I supposed to live life?

There were plenty of answers to that question. They were in the expectations, beliefs, roles and messages we absorb about how a life is supposed to be lived.

Eventually, I began asking a different question:

How do I want to live life?

That was much harder to answer.

There was already so much telling me how I should live that it wasn't always easy to hear my own answer beneath it.

So, for a time, I let my life lead.

And life did what life does.

There were relationships and choices, love and heartbreak, difficulties and losses, mistakes and discoveries. There was learning and growing, and then learning again.

Eventually another question emerged:

What is my life path trying to teach me?

I began looking at my life differently—not simply as a collection of things that had happened, or choices I had made well or poorly, but as something I could become curious about.

And beneath that curiosity grew compassion.

Compassion for myself, certainly, but equally for everyone else trying to make their way through a human life.

Because all of us have been shaped by something. We absorb ideas about how life should be lived. We adapt to what happens to us. We make choices with the understanding we have at the time. We encounter relationships and experiences we never could have anticipated.

And we keep living.

I Often Wished I Had a Map

Looking back, I sometimes wonder what it would have been like to understand more about being human while I was busy trying to figure out how to be one.

Not a map that would have told me how to live. I had already encountered plenty of those messages.

A map that might have helped me understand the territory.

A map could never remove every heartbreak, hardship, uncertainty or loss nor is that its purpose.

But perhaps some parts of life might have been a little less bewildering.

Perhaps I might have had more context for what I was experiencing, more self-assurance, and less angst about whether I was somehow doing life wrong.

For many years, I experienced what I called free-flowing anxiety—a little like being a ship without a sail. Looking back, I can see how much energy went into trying to find my bearings.

That has helped shape something I now believe deeply:

A map should help us find our bearings without deciding our destination.

Understanding our lives does not obligate us to change them.

Sometimes understanding is enough.

And when there is something we would like to experience differently, learning more about how human beings develop can help us understand how we may have arrived where we are—and what possibilities may still be available to us.

What we do with that understanding remains our own.

The Questions Followed Me

My curiosity about my own life gradually widened into a much broader curiosity about human beings.

How do we come to be who we are?

Why can two people experience the same world so differently?

How do relationships affect us?

What can we learn by paying attention to the body?

What happens as we move through different stages of life?

Why do our lives take the paths they do?

Those questions followed me into social services, adult education, leadership and program development. They came with me into decades of working closely with people through massage and body-based practice, and into my training in Somatic Experiencing.

They were there as I learned more about attachment and relationship, and as I had the extraordinary opportunity to accompany people and families at both ends of life—through birth and through dying and death.

Each gave me another place from which to observe, learn about and understand human life.

And through all of it, my own life kept teaching me too.

Then One Day, 12 Petalled Lotus Arrived

The idea came to me almost in a flash.

What followed didn't.

It kept coming.

As I began developing 12 Petalled Lotus, things I had studied, experienced, questioned and noticed over many years began finding their place.

Areas of my life and work that had once seemed separate began to make sense alongside one another—not because I had set out to combine them, but because each had given me a different way of looking at the experience of being human.

The questions that had followed me for so long had somewhere to go.

How do we come to be who we are?

Why have our lives taken the paths they have?

And if we want something to be different, what might still be possible?

12 Petalled Lotus grew from those questions, and the work continues to unfold.

What My Work Looks Like Now

Today, my work is centred in education, writing and the three distinct bodies of work I have founded.

12 Petalled Lotus is human development education. We explore how we come to be who we are, how our lives take shape, what influences us along the way, and what remains possible as we continue developing throughout our lives.

The Centre for Supportive Palliative Education (CSPE) provides non-medical education to strengthen understanding, preparation and accompaniment for consequential experiences, with depth in grief, caregiving, serious illness, dying, death and bereavement.

This Human takes the conversation wider through writing, video, audio and conversation about the things we experience simply because we are human.

They each have their own purpose.

What connects them is a lifetime of paying attention to human experience, learning from it, and remaining curious about the lives we live with ourselves and one another.

How I Came to Know What I Know

My understanding has been shaped by formal education and professional training, and by decades of working directly with people.

My background crosses adult education, social services, program development, leadership, disability management, entrepreneurship, bodywork, Somatic Experiencing, birth and end-of-life support, grief education and palliative education.

My professional training includes massage therapy and Somatic Experiencing, both of which gave me years of close experience with the body as part of human life and development. I have spent much of my adult life continuing to learn from fields that help us understand human development, relationship, the body, caregiving and the experiences that shape a life.

I am still learning.

I expect I always will be.

Perhaps That Is the Simplest Way to Understand My Work

I pay attention.

I ask questions.

I keep learning.

I look for connections between things we often consider separately.

And then I create ways for us to explore what I have learned together.

What I can offer is a map — a way of learning more about how human beings develop across a lifetime, how our experiences can shape us, and how our lives may have come to look the way they do.

You may simply understand your life differently.

You may decide there is something you would like to experience differently.

Or you may discover possibilities you hadn't considered before.

The life remains yours.

And after all these years, I am still following the questions that fascinated me at the beginning:

How did we come to be who we are?

Why have our lives taken the paths they have?

And what might still be possible?

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 Spend Some Time with Cindy

Sometimes a question, experience or part of our life is easier to understand when we have someone to explore it with.

One-to-one conversations with Cindy offer time to wonder, reflect, make connections and look at what you are experiencing through the lens of human development.

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