You Can't Tend to a Garden You Refuse to Look At
A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post titled, Asking Better Questions, and my imagination created this beautfiul visual of a garden to really paint the point of that post in technicolor. Here it is!
If you haven’t read that post yet, it is centralized around the idea that our reactions may be a distraction from the truth our subconscious brain is trying to hide from us. It may be helpful to give that a read first here, or because rules aren’t really a thing here… you can just dive right in and enjoy the ride and read that one later. Choice is yours!
As I was saying….
Go with me on this, you can’t tend to a garden you refuse to look at. You can’t pull weeds (limiting beliefs, conditioning, and scarcity-based expectations, toxic habits, hollow self-care and conditional community) where you don’t know they exist and you certainly can’t replace them with flowers (value-based beliefs, maintainable habits, and intentional support and care to foster sustainability) if you don’t understand the conditions you’re working with to create a thriving ecosystem and sustainability aka a balanced life that BELONGS to YOU.
Meaning…
Not everything you want is going to be possible with the current circumstances of your life. Such as:
the people you currently surround yourself with, or the gaps in the kinds of people you haven’t surrounded yourself with ….
The food you eat
The sleep you get
The movement you engage with
The money you make, don’t make, or even how you currently make money
These things are like the water you water the garden with, the fertilizer you pour into it, the quality of the soil, and the amount of sunlight the space gets.
You may be saying, well these are all things I can change. Yes, but what did we learn from last week’s post on change and how the nervous system responds….
On top of the fact that sustainable change is often slow, there is something else to consider if you are trying to uproot your situation and change as much as you can as fast as possible to a more nutrient rich environment, you’re still bringing the weeds you started with babe even when you change the amount of light they are getting.
Picture this:
You take the energy necessary to change your friend group, you take the energy to change your diet, you take the energy to change your sleep schedule, and you take the energy to be more intentional about your finances…. even with a 50% acheivement “succes” rate (however you are trying to mesaure that)… you’re putting your nervous system through the mill.
What energy do you have left to uproot the weeds of self-doubt, limiting beliefs, and replace them with the flowers of value-based beliefs, build maintable habits around those value-based beliefs, and address the support and care you need to keep those habits and routines sustainable to get what exactly? Just writing all this triggered my brain into feeling burnt-out.
To get what? A life you’re constantly exhausted from for how long? I can tell you the answer is for as long as it takes you to quit.
This is the, how about we try this instead section…
You energy is better spent taking a look at what we are working with, where we are. Is this going to be fun? Easy? Asbolutely not, I won’t lie to you. Is it going to be a bit exhuasting at times too? Definitely. But this energy exerted is much more easily managed then the former example.
We get to remove the weeds from the roots, i.e. the stories keeping them in place to begin with. In the process of doing this work we change adjust the conditions of our environment as it feels necessary for the next level of change. Then we can make informed choices on what feels like success for us, i.e the flowers/ value-based beliefs, we’d like to plant instead.
This is the process of truly getting to know yourself by tending to what does and doesn’t work for you or support the version of you you’d like to grow into.
I always write in my journal, daisies are a pretty flower and they might be in other people’s gardens and they may have intentionally planted them there but daisies aren’t in the garden of my mind. That’s just me and that’s okay.
Daisies might represent being the kind of person with habits and routines that support the outcome of wanting to Summit Mt. Everest. I have no desire to summit Mt. Everest so those habits and routines (i.e. daisies) are just not for me.
When you consider the garden of your life as an entire ecosystem, the energy you spend where counts for long term thriving and sustainability.
The other cool thing about doing it this way?
When a storm comes, because they inevitably will, you have the exact right root structures to weather it with resilient and value-based deep, authentic, roots.
I read something somewhere recently about how some team of guys were conducting a study where they built an enclosed area to do research on environmental sustainability and they found that trees they planted would always fall over after they grew to a certain height.
This happened because the trees (and plants in general) need wind i.e. resistance to grow stronger and deeply rooted root systems. How cool is that?
In the same vein, I recently learned that it’s really good to shake your Fiddle Leaf Fig plant in your house on occasion to help the leaves become stronger and reinforce the connection they have with the trunk/stalk. Again, how cool?!
And here’s the final truth of it all. I think the best we can hope for is not a garden with perfect conditions and no weeds (not gunna happen anyway - hello trauma!)
I think it’s that when we look at what we have created and cultivated with our lives that we did it intentionally and with pride knowing that we will have seasons of thriving and seasons of surviving and all the shifts in between. That as long as we tend to it, living can reap some beautiful bounties.
P.s. and no garden is nearly as rewarding if you don’t have people who will marvel at how you’ve grown it.
Love You, Mean It,
Xx,
C
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