Tending Your Garden

(If you prefer to listen to this newsletter instead of reading it then please click the photo below)

You are a beautiful, brilliant, and unique garden on this planet Earth! Your garden contains flowers, trees, bushes, and even weeds. How have you been tending your garden so far this year? Have you been watering, pruning, providing enough sunlight, and weeding, or have you left your garden unattended?

Give just a moment here as you breathe steadily in and out, go ahead right now... Now, let a vision of your garden come into view.

What do you see?

What do you smell?

What do you hear?

What do you feel?

Really give your garden the attention it deserves even if you haven’t done so in a while and it feels overgrown.

Do you want to know the key to lovingly and attentively attending to your garden with little work? Give attention to it every day! What that means is that instead of living your life on habitual autopilot, I am encouraging you to be attentive to your physical, mental, and emotional states. Don’t ignore yourself, your garden! It is precious and where you spend all your time.

You are worth the attention!

Yes, I mean it. You are worth the attention, but you must attend to it yourself to reap the benefits of a healthy, sustainable, and abundant garden. That doesn’t mean you cannot ask for help, that is quite literally why I offer the services I do, to help you. But, expecting your garden to flourish without your attention is like asking a flower to grow without the sun. It needs the light of your awareness to grow and spread.

Now let’s talk about those weeds for a moment because weeds grow in all our gardens. They were planted when you were young. Perhaps you were hungry as an infant, and you cried because you didn’t have words to say what you needed, and your caregiver put a pacifier in your mouth. Or maybe as a child someone who you thought was a friend rejected you. Or maybe someone you thought was safe betrayed you.

Seeds of fear, shame, rejection, and guilt are planted when we are young along with seeds that turn into beautiful trees, bushes, and flowers. What usually happens as we become adults is that we either deny those weeds are there and thus avoid circumstances and people that may remind us of them, or we vigorously try to cut them down every time we are triggered, and the weed seems to drown us out. Neither are good solutions. Cutting the weed back does not prevent it from growing again and again. You need to address these weeds at their source, the roots.

Why do you keep engaging in habits and activities that you know are not good for you? Because you haven’t cleared the roots of those seeds planted in the past. For example, if you tend to always eat everything on your plate and take extra servings even though you are not hungry, it may be because as a child, your brothers and sisters always got to the food before you and you never felt full. Or perhaps a caregiver told you that in order to get dessert, you had to clear your plate. Another example may be that you speak over and interrupt others. Perhaps that seed was planted when you were young and didn’t feel heard by important people in your life.

How do you pull those weeds out from the root, especially if you don’t see them? The answer was already given, you must give your garden attention every day. I can provide you with different techniques to help you do this, but it is ultimately and always up to you to do so.

It is your garden, and you are worth it!

In Loving Service,

Heather Indu Arena