One of the things I love about my backyard is how my garden is constantly teaching me how to be in flow - in a more healthy relationship with myself. My backyard garden is a LOT like me. Like my garden, I do not respond well to being pressured, punished, bribed or overly scheduled. I love spending time in my garden because my garden gets me. My husband says I have a green thumb - I think its just that I am in tune with the rhythms of my garden.
Review Commitment 1
8 Commitments of a Healthy Relationship with Yourself
Commitment 2
Before you say YES to anything, think through the full lifecycle maintenance needs of what it will take from you to nurture that commitment and follow -through.
Before you say "yes" understand how it will fit with other things you have already said yes to, and what you are fully committing to. What prior commitment will have to be sacrificed for you to follow-through on this new yes? Every yes represents a thousand nos. Become more conscious of what you are really saying no to before you say yes and your life will transform.
In a garden, it is very easy to say yes to an attractive plant (like the topiary in this picture) and then find out how very high maintenance it is. So you might be tempted to say yes, but then the plant dies or becomes overgrown from lack of pruning.
Much like a deadline or project we never finished because we didn't realize just how much time and energy it would take to do.
When you say yes to high maintenance things, people, or projects, what often happens is we start sacrificing self-care like sleep or eating healthy. That sets us up to become even less able to perform well and follow through on any of our commitments.
All of life, even the pleasures of sleep and eating start to feel like they are intruders on our ability to get things done, when truthfully, they are the most critical gas we need for our car.
It's funny, when we feel like we need our car to take us more places, would your first reaction be to give it less gas? If a plant is wilting, would you give it less water?
So why is it when you have more to do you tend to skip meals and lose sleep?
When you see it differently, the work of self-care does not feel like an obligation or a "chore". When you don't try to force or "should" yourself into sleeping or eating in a healthy way and see it as the actual SOURCE and fuel of your ability to get things done, it becomes much more than just another item on your To Do List. It becomes the number one most important relationship in your life.
When you approach self-care as an adventure in cultivating yourself to bloom, the work of taking care of yourself becomes an opportunity to constantly research and learn about yourself, a place to experiment, and discover new ways of seeing, being and doing.
When you fully commit and make at least minimum self-care your top priority, and you focus on the potential pleasure of it instead of on what you are giving up to do it, it transforms from feeling like work to feeling like a natural mood lifter.
You CAN become as addicted to eating healthy delicious food as to processsed foods.
You CAN become as fiercely protective of your own sleep as you are of making sure you have time to check your email.
You CAN have a much healthier relationship with yourself.
You CAN put a limit on high maintenance projects, people and things in your life.
In my garden, I replaced most of the high maintenance plants with low maintenance ones. I even took out my front lawn and made this landscape instead. It's even more beautiful than the lawn...and it's a lot less work, less chemicals, less water, everything about it is easier. Every single plant in it is perennial, even in the window boxes.
So that leaves me plenty of time to take care of the 2 topiaries I love. They are high maintenance...but I don't mind the work, because I only have 2 of them. I love my garden and the topiaries so much that I've designed my life to have plenty of time to do the work of pruning. Each plant has different pruning needs and that makes them interesting to me. The art of pruning and weeding to facilitate the health of my garden is such a life lesson in the value of frequent decluttering.
One of my topiaries is in the photo of my backyard above.
Here is my front "landscape" you can see the other topiary on the right and in the close up below.
Hope you found this helpful!
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