The Butterfly That Stamped by Rudyard Kipling — A Calming Bedtime Story for Sleep & Insomnia | Books at Bedtime
A soothing bedtime story to help you drift off tonight: Rudyard Kipling's warm, funny Just So Story The Butterfly That Stamped, read slowly and gently for sleep and insomnia relief. Kipling wrote the Just So Stories specifically as bedtime tales, to be told "just so," word for word, until his own daughter drifted off to sleep — which makes this collection some of the most naturally calming listening in the whole Books at Bedtime strand, also known as Coffee Break for the Soul, from the Calming Anxiety podcast.
For the full library, plus ambient night-light features for the small hours, download Anchored: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.martinhewlett.anchored (Android) or https://apps.apple.com/us/app/anchored-panic-anxiety/id6785035669 (iPhone).
Narrated softly by Martin Hewlett, clinical hypnotherapist and former paramedic, this reading follows the wise King Solomon, his 999 quarrelsome queens, his beloved and clever Queen Balkis, and one very small, very boastful butterfly who claims he can make the whole palace vanish with a single stamp of his foot. Gentle, playful, and quietly wise about marriage and pride, it's an easy, unhurried listen for falling asleep, insomnia, or quieting an anxious mind at the end of the day.
First published in 1902 in the collection Just So Stories for Little Children, Rudyard Kipling's The Butterfly That Stamped is in the public domain worldwide (Kipling died in 1936); this reading is Calming Anxiety's own narration of the classic public-domain text.
This episode joins the Just So Stories already in the Books at Bedtime strand — How the Whale Got His Throat, The Sing-Song of Old Man Kangaroo, The Elephant's Child, How the Leopard Got His Spots, How the Camel Got His Hump, The Cat That Walked by Himself, and The Beginning of the Armadillos — alongside Oscar Wilde's fairy tales, classic short fiction from Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf, and Kate Chopin, and longer serialised reads including Alice in Wonderland, The Time Machine, and The Hound of the Baskervilles, with new instalments added regularly to the main Calming Anxiety feed.
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