Planting in the Autumn with hope for Spring. In the Celtic Calendar, the New Year begins at Samhain the darkest time of year, we are reminded that all new life begins in darkness.
I originally wrote this in 2015 and was reminded of it recently when chatting with a friend.
I’m pretty sure I haven’t yet earned enough green fingers to call myself a gardener but I do love growing things and working in the garden is something I really enjoy.
Over the last few years of growing a few herbs and vegetables I have observed a few things that I often use to explain personal growth, and the journey to physical, mental and emotional well being. Some of these may be analogies that you have heard before, whilst I was in Millie Fiori today looking at the beautiful flowers they came back to me.
1) Gardening & Growing takes patience, so does healing.
2) Seed’s need to be placed in dark soil in order to sprout, once they sprout they need light to help them grow, they need to be nurtured, and supported and given time and space to grow we are pretty similar.
3) When weeding a garden you could just pull of the leaves and the above surface part of the weed and for a while your garden would appear to be free of weeds, however if you really want to clear out the weeds, you need to get to the root. We are the same, we can solve the problem on the surface or we can go a bit deeper and look at the root cause. (Sometimes there is a place for doing one or other or both)
4) Cycles, rhythms and seasons are important for plants & flowers, they are also important for us.
5) Sunshine without rain creates deserts, for growth we need both.
6) Covering over holes doesn’t make them go away, in fact doing that might make them more dangerous, as they can trip us up when we least expect it.
We are very familiar with linking our mental health problems to our emotions, we aren’t so familiar with linking physical health to what is going on for us emotionally and in my experience it is when we have courage to get to the root cause and heal beneath the surface that we truly can experience good health & well being.
On and off for a couple of years, I lived with the fear of emotions catching up with me and becoming too much to bear, waking up and wondering if today might be the day.
Thankfully the path that I was guided to take has meant that for the last 4 or 5 years that has changed.
I never take it for granted, I didn’t expect that it would happen the first time so who knows it might happen again, but I know that for now I feel good.
I have been tested with different situations that I know a few years ago would have had me reacting in a very different way and I am so grateful for all of the lessons I have learnt and also to be in a position to be able to share some of it with others in the hope of helping them.
We each have our own journey and there are many different pieces in the picture of good health and wellbeing, the path way is definitely not straight and it certainly isn’t always smooth, I believe it is more of a spiral and we often revisit things that we felt we had healed, but always with a different understanding of what we need to do, allowing us to go deeper each time.
Now is the perfect time to plant your bulbs for beautiful spring colour and signs of hope.
Maybe the year ahead will be a year that you choose to go deeper, trust the process, trust yourself and allow yourself to open up to the possibility of deep healing and transformation, sow the seeds, plant your bulbs, nurture them and let them grow.