Embracing Wisdom – Cultivate

The first step in embracing wisdom is to cultivate your inner garden. What does this mean? It’s connected to what we’ve talked about before; self observation and Self Remembering. The more you discover who you are in your relationships; how you react, engage and participate with the world, the more self-awareness you will attain. This requires alertness and getting down in the dirt to see what’s growing there within you. It’s not always pretty.

Have you ever started, tended, and harvested a real earth garden? If so, you know that it all starts with cultivating the soil, turning it over, loosening it up, making furrows and mounds, fertilizing the soil if need be, and preparing the ground for sowing and growing. In our lives this takes place early on by those who conceive and birth us, tend and care for us, raise and educate us. It’s the environment we grow up in. Eventually we have to tend it ourselves.

The difficulty here is that we become tethered to dogmas, beliefs, ideas and understandings that distort our perceptions. Thus, as we start tending our own inner gardens, we must become aware of what’s growing within us. To remember who we truly are requires an ongoing assessment of who we’ve been programmed to be. Self-awareness is the cultivation of an inquiring mind that’s willing to scrutinize the additives put into our already fertile soil which mute our creativity and distort our freedom. Wisdom is discovered In this daily reflective cultivation.

Had I not been required to enter into this practice of self observation as part of my professional training I doubt I would have engaged it. The  experience however, in group and individual work completely changed how I saw myself and the world. Cultivation takes place for us consciously and unconsciously in relationship. It’s a mirror we can use to see ourselves as we actually are. Unfortunately, rather than seeing our true reflection, we self justify, hide, repress, deny and miss observing what’s actually in our garden. We’re blinded and enslaved by our conditioning.

If you’re having trouble with what I’m saying here, simply take a moment and reflect on some of the interactions you’ve had with others over the past days. Become aware of your thoughts,  feelings, judgements, projections, self righteousness and fear; all your reactions to others. What do you see? What are you experiencing? Are you connecting with what‘s not really you? Are you experiencing a new alertness of mind, a more keen perception of who you are and who you’re not? Is your self-awareness expanding? This is where cultivating wisdom begins.

The question I want to leave with you as you cultivate your inner garden is: What makes you come alive? Cultivating wisdom within yourself recognizes that weeds exist but  focuses energy on the joyful abundance you want to create. This concentration of energy brings life to life for you which is the water and sunlight that’s so necessary for any garden. What are your positive attributes? What qualities do you share with yourself and others that enhance and inspire life? Focus on them, grow, live into them and lovingly embrace them. Cultivate the wonder-full-ness!

As long a you wear masks, ignore your conditioning and focus on the weeds, you’ll never become wise. Letting go of your distorted ‘filters‘ by cultivating self observation helps you wake up to who you truly are and allows you to create a revitalized inner environment. Here there’s no struggle, just realignment and refinement. Here you can embrace the beginning of wisdom…