Depending on how you interpret the message you’re getting from white butterflies, you may wish to take some different courses of action. If the butterfly is offering you a sense of comfort, for example, there really isn’t anything you have to do upon seeing it.
However, if you’ve been going through a time of hardship, sorrow, etc., Van explains that white butterflies can be encouraging you to face your darkness. “Facing it, feeling it, being in it so it no longer frightens us and holds us back is generally the scariest freaking thing we will ever do, but it’s where our ‘treasure’ lies. It’s how we heal,” she says.
And thinking about the themes of transformation and creation, of course, white butterflies may also be pushing you to level up or evolve, particularly in terms of your spirituality.
On a more practical level, if you keep seeing white butterflies in your garden and they’re wreaking havoc on your vegetables, Van explains that this can actually be an opportunity to problem-solve in a creative way, figuring out a solution to benefit both your garden and the butterflies. “Plant nasturtium in the same bed as your cabbage, kale, etc. It adds an aesthetic element to your garden, but it also grows quickly, and cabbage butterfly caterpillars love it—[which] means they’ll tend to eat the nasturtium and leave your veggies alone,” she notes.
To that end, the message may be that a seemingly insurmountable problem has an easy solution, Van says. “Instead of treating the problem as something that must be attacked and destroyed, how can you add something to the situation that will bring everything into balance?”