SPENCER: Pulling out life’s weeds
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This morning I was doing some landscaping at Indigo Lounge. It is my businesses’ 10th anniversary and to celebrate we got our liquour license this week and built a beautiful new outdoor patio. I was trying make the grounds look nice, which included pulling weeds.
As I was pulling them out, I noticed if I pulled in a hurry or only grabbed part of the weed, it snapped at the base and I wasn’t able to get it all. If I slowed down, grabbing the whole weed at the base and pulled up slowly, the entire pesty plant came out, roots and all with ease.
It got me pondering how much weeds are relatable in our lives.
Why do we pull weeds? For many reasons, but in a nutshell because they aren’t good. The main issue with weeds in your garden is that they compete with the other plants you are attempting to grow. Weeds grow faster than most plants and they fight with other plants for water, nutrients, light, and space, and unfortunately, since they’re the stronger competitors, and they usually win.
Weeds develop strong, vigorous root systems that overpower those plants we wish to cultivate, especially when those cultivated plants are fragile or were recently transplanted. They also can attract pests and diseases.
When we compare a garden to the gardens of our lives, similar experiences happen when we allow unwanted things to grow.
If we are not mindfully aware of what is growing in our lives and not removing the unwanted with intentionality, then we are missing the eradication of what is negatively growing and taking over in our lives.
When we allow pesky life weeds to grow in our world, then those negative experiences can grow, and steal the nutrients of what is good in our lives. The unwanted can choke out that valuable things that we are attempting to nurture such as our dreams, visions and other things that help us feel good and expansive. By allowing “life’s weeds” to grow without taking them mindfully out at the root, fully and completely, they can diminish the goodness in our lives.
The weeds can take over the garden and even blur the boundaries of where the garden is and where the grass is. The same can happen in our lives.
Being mindful of what seeds we want to plant and what it is we want to grow and nurture sometimes requires us to access what it is we do not want to grow and nurture. From time to time, we need to set the intention to assess what needs to eliminate in our lives and what boundaries are blurred and need to be defined. Using mindfulness and awareness that weeds can multiply quickly if we don’t tend to them, we can understand that checking in with ourselves, taking inventory of what needs to be weeded and what we want to grow more of, assists us to bloom fully!
It is said that allowing weeds to take over can diminish our harvest yield in a garden by 40-60% percentage. In our lives, would this not be a proportionate comparison?
Life is all about planting seeds, pulling weeds, nurturing our intentions of the garden of life we desire.
So… are you tending to your life’s garden?
(Kelly Spencer is a mindfulness specialist, award winning author, life coach and motivational speaker. If there is a topic you would like to see discussed, feel free to email kelly@indigolounge.ca)
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