Healing: Your Inner Garden
I’ve been doing some gardening lately, and I couldn’t help but notice the parallels to a healing journey.
Before your healing journey, your inner world is a lot like an overgrown garden — full of weeds, vines, snarls of aggressive plants fighting for survival.
The beginning of the healing journey is learning that you have a garden at all, and that you might dare to have a nice one. In other words, you realize that life could be different, less harsh, gentler, but at this stage you don’t know how.
That’s when it starts, the systematic observation of what is actually present in your garden/life. You pick up that first vine and notice that its roots are thick and fibrous like a tree’s; it’s been there for ages, maybe forever. You can’t imagine what your garden would look like without it. Not only is it enormous, but it has wrapped itself around the other plants and hindered their growth. Maybe for you this vine represents your “thick skin,” an insensitivity that, while helpful for dealing with your parents in early life, has limited your ability to enjoy intimate relationships in your adult life.
Seeing these things can be difficult. It can be overwhelming to look at what’s really there. Maybe you see just how limited you are in your ability to be emotionally intimate. You realize it could have been different if you’d had different parents and were allowed to show up in a different way. Maybe you experience shame about not knowing this sooner, or a feeling of regret about missed opportunities and damage done.
You feel sad about the garden you never got to have.
As unpleasant as this feels, you’re already miles ahead of where you used to be when the weeds were growing unchecked. These weeds are now being checked! And that’s when the fun begins.
You can trace that vine and notice how it grew into its present form. You can study vines, where they come from, and how to remove them. You can learn exactly what kind of vine you have. You can notice the progeny of this vine and pull them out before they grow too large. You can notice the interaction of the vines with other plants. In other words, you can learn about why you are the way you are - why do you feel like you need to have a thick skin all the time? What happens when kids are treated the way you were? What happened to YOU?
This is where the metaphor breaks down a little. Garden vines can be violently removed with blunt tools, but your coping strategies do not respond to that kind of aggression. Your inner vines need to be known, understood, and gently unwound. Compassionate study, not aggression and violence, cuts your inner vines from their energy sources, slowly weakening them.
As you continue your healing/garden journey, you might notice that there are tiny flowers you hadn’t seen before, poking their sunny blossoms out from the limited space they have. These represent your gifts, you true self, your inner nature that wasn’t allowed to express in your early life. For example, maybe you have a knack for poetry, but because “thick skinned” people don’t do that, you never got a chance to explore it. But now you can recognize these blossoms for what they are: some part of you that you like, some potential of yours, something new to cultivate and explore.
The processes of healing and growth happen in parallel, side by side. The vines weaken from neglect, the blossoms benefit from the nurture and care. And slowly, with time and consistency, things shift.
You find that life isn’t as hard as it was, that your history doesn’t get to determine your future, and that your intention and attention are what really direct your life. You discover that you have much more agency than you thought, and that it feels good to know the truth about yourself. What could be better than that?
Want to clear weeds together? Reach out and let’s get started.
