Worth Reading – From Off the Web!

Luckily, I moved home a week before lockdown started. And like a lot of other people who are trying to keep themselves busy with no work to do, I have taken up a new hobby. Gardening. I’d never thought of myself as a gardener before this, but now it’s something I see as a kind of meditation.

When my spiritual journey started in 2018, I suddenly felt my mind open to the whole of nature. It was as if I was thrown into the world as a new human being, at twenty three years old, and I was in awe.

I would often stare at the sky with my mouth open during a thunderstorm, or stand fixated on a tree I’d seen a thousand times with tears in my eyes. I looked at every plant at the side of the road when walking home from work and wondered how long they’d been growing there. I couldn’t believe there was so much life on earth that I had ignored, or just never acknowledged before. Since then, I’ve made it a focus of mine to be more in tune with nature.

I’m not the best with knowing what to do with plants. Knowing when they need watering, whether they’re happiest in direct sunlight or in the shade, which side of the garden they like best, which are going to droop or grow tall, and so on. I’m lucky to have a mother that knows a lot more than me in the gardening world (and the real world, probably), so luckily, the plants we’ve grown have gone unharmed.
What I have noticed since spending more time outside is that nature can teach us a lot about our physical life on earth.

I was digging up the soil in the garden to make room for the new life we were ready to plant, and on multiple occasions I had to dig up roots that had overgrown and been left there, tangled and all over the place. No living plant was even attached to them, but they were still cluttering up the rest of the soil.

Funnily enough, that same morning, I had meditated on how to ‘unearth’ problems in my past to heal from them in my present. And here I was, literally unearthing the problems that made new growth in the garden difficult.

I thought about all the problems I had buried in my mind, left to be unearthed at some point later in life. I realised that if they are left, they don’t go away. Of course, it seemed easier to ignore things I didn’t want to think about. It was hard to think about them, and hurt sometimes.

But I found with the help of writing in my journal, that digging up these old rooted problems allowed me to acknowledge them. Sometimes, I didn’t even know they were there. But acknowledging them allowed space for growth and new experiences to be learnt that I might have missed before. It also allowed me to realise why things weren’t moving forward for me, and as soon as I got to the root problem, it was almost as if the healing started instantly.

With the overgrown roots in my mum’s garden, not to mention the occasional brick that my spade hit every five minutes, there was no room for new growth if the mess wasn’t removed from the soil.

The mind is exactly the same. There will be hidden obstacles deeply rooted until they are acknowledged, and by removing them, we allow space for growth into our higher selves. We just have to do some digging to know what’s hidden in there.
And as soon as we’ve dug them up and thrown them away, our minds instantly have room to heal and expand, with healthier surroundings and space to breathe.

Sending all my love and positive energy,
Grace x

back to my roots