I think many of us spend years trying to change our lives externally without realizing we are living from an untended inner landscape. We try to fix relationships, careers, finances, circumstances, and even our identities while ignoring the condition of the internal soil everything is growing from. For a long time, I didn’t fully understand this myself. Like many trauma victims, I became very good at surviving. I knew how to show up. I knew how to carry the weight of the world on my back—not comfortably. I was functioning while quietly disconnecting from myself underneath it all. I thought peace would arrive when the external conditions of my life changed, the right people showed up, the stress ended, the uncertainty passed, and when I finally felt safe enough to exhale. What I Slowly Started to Understand No matter where I went or what I did, I was still struggling in my inner world. Fear, lack, and separation kept following me. My old wounds were just waiting to be triggered at any moment. I would slide back into old patterns that just didn’t serve me. Ways of reacting, protecting, shame spiraling, abandoning myself, and giving too much to gain self-worth followed me. And this was all while reading endless self-help books and being in and out of therapy. I took a lot of steps to move myself forward in my life, but the energy of fear, lack, and separation still managed to keep spreading through everything good I tried to do for myself. Eventually, I realized that so much of what we experience externally is connected to what we are unconsciously cultivating internally through where our energy is being directed. That was the beginning. I started paying more attention to my stories that were playing on an endless loop in my brain. That’s when I started putting my focus on living from a loving place. How could living in the energy of love help me process all of life’s twists and turns. In my writing on FromALovingPlace.com is where the garden metaphor started taking on a life of its own. You can even see seedlings of it in my first book, Letters from a Better Me. At the end of 2019, I created a presentation for a speaking event where the garden really began taking shape. My first book was released in 2020 in the very beginning of the pandemic, which made me need to focus even more of my energy on staying out of the energy of fear, lack, and separation. That’s when I decided to start a blog series called, “Daily Aligning with Love, Abundance, and Peace.” The series lasted a year. In that year the inner garden work grew. It became a way of understanding healing, relationships, taking accountability & responsibility, communication, leadership, and conscious living itself. Gardens Don’t Become Healthy Accidentally Gardens require awareness, attention, nourishment, protection, patience, consistency, and a whole lot of honesty. A garden can’t flourish by pretending weeds are flowers. Weeds with pretty little flowers steal the resources the healthy plant life needs to thrive. Strangling vines can smother tall trees. That truth became impossible for me to ignore. I began recognizing how many of us are living from gardens overrun by fear, lack, separation, resentment, exhaustion, comparison, self-abandonment, emotional survival, and inherited beliefs we never consciously planted. Some of us learned to survive by people pleasing, controlling, being vengeful, overachieving, staying quiet, being loud, and/or disconnecting from our emotions entirely just to name a few. We develop protective patterns for very real reasons. But eventually there comes a moment where survival patterns begin preventing the very peace, connection, love, and abundance we long for. That is where inner gardening begins. It’s not a place for perfection, performance, or pretending we are always positive. It’s real and it gets dirty. Inner gardening comes from awareness, openness, and acceptance of what weeds are showing up. We have to be willing to sit honestly in the garden of our lives and ask: * What have I been watering? * What keeps growing here? * What needs tending? * What needs uprooting? * What have I mistaken for protection that is actually keeping me disconnected from myself and others? Inner Garden Work is Deeply Personal I saw how fear spreads when weeds are left untended. I saw it in the energy I put into relationships, families, communities, causes, organizations, politics, religions, entertainment, and into the environment. The energy of fear, lack, and separation is all consuming when it goes unchecked. I saw how quickly fear can distort perception, fuel division, and disconnect people from compassion, clarity, and an individual’s perspective of truth. I also began seeing something else. I saw how love, peace, abundance, emotional responsibility, gratitude, boundaries, self-awareness, and conscious connection can spread too. I see how what I cultivate internally impacts the environments I create externally. The way I speak, love, lead, communicate, respond to conflict, parent, move through uncertainty, care for myself, support others, and live grows from somewhere. That’s when I began seeing clearly that integration and healing from our pasts is not about becoming someone else. It’s about becoming more conscious of what is growing within us. Inner Gardening Became My Soul’s Work This understanding eventually became the foundation for my work, my writing, my podcast, and ultimately my book, Tending Your Inner Garden: How to Weed Out Fear, Lack, and Separation and Cultivate Love, Abundance, and Peace. Not because I believe life can become perfect, because I believe we can become more intentional about what we cultivate. I believe we can spot the weeds and get them out faster. I believe we can see the beauty in someone else’s garden without having to plant what they grow in ours. As long as we connect from the energy of love, abundance, and peace, we don’t have to be threatened by each other’s differences. We can learn to stop feeding fear. We can stop normalizing emotional depletion. We can stop building lives rooted entirely in survival and hustle. We can begin creating lives rooted more deeply in love, abundance, peace, and authentic connection. Inner Gardening is Lifelong Work Our seasons can change our landscapes. We have seasons where others can see all our beautiful growth, and ones where our growth happens below the surface. Our gardens may look barren to the outside world. We still can get hit with nature’s elements like hurricanes, tornadoes, and snowstorms. I no longer believe healing means arriving at some permanently perfected state. I believe it means remaining willing to tend, notice, nurture, and take responsibility for the energy, beliefs, patterns, and emotional conditions we are contributing to our own lives and relationships. That’s why I keep doing the work. It’s why I offer a free bonus journal with the purchase of Tending Your Inner Garden, why I listen to the audiobook, and why I’m doing the everyday journaling in Substack notes. I want to keep cultivating what I want more of in my life. I want to live in conscious awareness of what I’m growing and spreading from my own garden. I want to make sure the seeds I’m offering to others come from the energy of love, abundance, and peace and not fear, lack, and separation as much as humanly possible. I love Inner Garden Work because it gives me the space to be human and different, along with the space to love and connect from an authentic place—from a loving place. Inner Garden Work Looks Different for Each Person I’m not here to tell you what seeds to plant. I offer seeds, it’s your journey to figure out what you want to plant and what you want to just observe. You may try to plant a seed someone offers you it doesn’t thrive in your garden. You may need to work in the soil first and get it healthy. You may discover the plant just isn’t for you after trying to make it work. You may want a cactus instead of a gardenia. I offer ways to tap into what is keeping us prisoners of our perspectives and tools to starting nurturing our perspectives that keep our beautiful plant life thriving. There is no judgement. I simply ask you to be honest with yourself about where you are putting your energy. If this resonates with you, I’d love for you to subscribe and join me here each week as we explore what it means to consciously cultivate lives rooted in love, abundance, and peace from a loving place. If you are interested in getting a copy of Tending Your Inner Garden in paperback or audiobook, the links are available on my profile. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fromalovingplace.substack.com
