Personal Growth Lessons from The Garden: 3 Steps to Nurture Your Dreams Today
What four tiny basil seeds and weeding taught me about life
Every afternoon after lunch I take a break. I take a rest from the laptop and my work to enter another realm. That realm is just outside my door, but it becomes so magical if I let my thoughts go and let my mind rest while my soul takes over. This realm is my back garden. I am getting to know it in every detail each afternoon I venture out there. I love this new practice of slowing down and noticing.
Every day I hand water all of my plants. I find it much more relaxing and mindful to slowly fill up a watering can and go to each plant. I love to notice how each plant has grown each day and every day something surprises me! Today I noticed a plant that I had trimmed back and fertilized had started to bloom. It had beautiful deep purple blooms. My purple iris have started to bloom as well!
The most surprising thing I saw today was a third basil seedling coming up! I was so in awe of this little seedling! I had put 4 small terra cotta pots on a table out in the garden and planted one tiny basil seed in each. Every day I watered and fertilized them if it didn’t rain. One seedling came up. I kept watering the other three, then a second came up and I kept watering the other two. Now a third seedling has appeared!
In all honesty I thought for a while that the others weren’t going to come up. However something in me told me that I had to keep watering. I had to keep the idea alive that these basil plants would come up. If I quit watering and fertilizing them, I had given up on them.
This is what it is like for our hopes and dreams. If we write one article and it doesn’t do well and we quit writing, we are not watering and fertilizing our dreams on a daily basis. Once we plant the seed of an idea it must be nurtured on a daily basis. It must be given daily focus, daily time and daily work. This grows our dream into something bigger and better each day. Soon that dream will flourish and flower, just like the plants that you give daily attention to in the garden.
Another form of nurturing and attention I have given daily to my garden during each afternoon is weeding. I take a hand trowel and I use it to pull up weeds in the lawn one by one and I also get down on my hands and knees to pull out tiny little weeds in the flower beds and vegetable garden. This weeding is a mindfulness practice. This allows me to notice and care for this garden with every tiny detail. It gets my mind to slow down and focus on each weed that I pull.
Each weed is much like a negative thought that can take root in the lawn of your mind. We must do daily “weeding” of our minds, taking care to pull out, notice and discard the negative thoughts. It is okay to notice them, to examine them but also to notice that they are not true. They are stopping our dreams from flourishing, just as dandelions in the lawn. If negative thoughts are left to fester in our minds, they take the nourishment out of the soil that our dreams are sown in. Those negative thoughts must be weeded out by writing them down, examining them and letting them go. They are not serving us.
Here’s three steps to nurture your dreams today:
- Plant Your Dream Seeds: Write down your goals and your dreams, ALL of them! Make a big sign or something that you look at each day. Start to believe in those dreams, believe that they can come true with focus. Keep your dreams in front of you each and every day. Place them where you can see them.
- Water & Fertilize Your Dream Seeds Each Day: Create a daily practice. Whatever your dream involves, do activities that nurture it and make it grow. Write daily, paint daily, sing daily, code daily, knit, crochet or take photos. Whatever activity your dream entails, do it daily. This will give roots, power and strength to your dream seeds to emerge first as seedlings, giving you your first glimpse at a bit of success, then on to a flourishing, flowering plant of dreams later. on.
- Weed Out Your Negative Thoughts Daily: We often wake up with doubts and negative thoughts. We must take care to weed them out and let them go by writing them down, knowing they are not true, turning them around into something that is true for us and letting them go. If you have some recurring negative thoughts it might be time to write them down and burn the paper in a fire pit or another safe place (or at least rip them up and throw them in the recycle bin.
I wish you a fantastic journey to sowing, nurturing and weeding the seeds, seedlings and flourishing plants of your dreams in your dream garden called life. We are all meant to dream, to grow and to flourish. We all have something amazing to offer. We all have gifts to give! We all have a light to shine! Focus on that today and you will flourish!
What dreams are your nurturing today? I would love to know about them!
With lots of love and light,
Trista
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Here are three more of my articles about personal growth: Thank you so much for reading!
