In May 2021 I came down with flu. Unable to do much for days, I started listening to "The Secret Garden" by Frances Hodgson Burnett, read by LibreCast, on Spotify. I had bought a BBC drama version of it years ago for my children and listened to half of it. For some reason, I wanted to know the end now, but couldn’t remember where the CD was, as we are no longer in the CD age. I loved the Spotify version too though. I loved the story and how well it was read. And somehow, by the end of the story, I felt a deep inner knowing that I will heal in my garden too. Not from flu, but from all the grief and pain buried inside my body, as I felt deeply depressed and lost. And who knows, maybe even physically, from my ulcerative colitis.
I bought my domain name and started my journey inwards, as I was strangely certain that I would find my answers within me. When I bought my domain, I wasn't really sure why I had chosen its name, but it felt right. I felt a deep inclination to blog too, and the topic seemed to be on my healing journey and my garden. But somehow I couldn't figure it out, so instead I focused on spending more time in my back garden, while also starting my journey inwards.
One of the many discoveries that followed was that we have like a garden inside of us, our soul's garden. Maybe it's a beautiful garden, just as we envision it. Maybe not. This was a major insight for me because the beautiful flowers in our inner garden are called hope, inspiration, fulfillment, joy, satisfaction, happiness, laughter, love and self-love, self-esteem, trust, resilience etc etc. The weeds, we dislike, are called doubt, fear, anger, bitterness, overwhelm, frustration, hopelessness, feeling stuck, desperation, jealousy, etc etc.
My garden was overgrown with weeds and full of thorns.
However, I realised while being out and working in my own back garden, that just like our real gardens outside our houses or in our communities, we have the power to create the inner garden we love, the garden of our dreams! This insight was huge for me because I didn’t feel powerful, nor did I feel that I had many choices. Yet, we simply need to understand the conditions that favour weeds in our inner garden, what helps them to thrive and expand. Maybe weeds are even flowers in some cases. But I also understood, that we can change that inner garden, just like we can change our gardens outside our houses - by pulling out the weeds and sowing the flowers we want to see instead.
Which is not necessarily an easy job. Digging out weeds is hard, especially when you are feeling low and weak. Stopping them from re-growing is a major challenge, a better first step might be reducing their re-growth. But in order to do so, we need to understand how they thrive and why this location seems to be so good for them. Next, we need a vision of how we want our inner garden to look like, if we don’t have one already, else the weeds will just regrow. For some people, having a vision for their life is easy. For others, it is not.
For me, it wasn't. There are so many options, so many design elements to chose from, and even more flowers and colour schemes! There was an additional challenge for me. Through the garden book Digging Deep (this is an Amazon affliate link) my major focus for my backgarden was: how do I want it to make me FEEL when I am inside my garden? I am going to share the details of that in a future post! Of course, when thinking of my inner garden, that question seemed even more important! And again, I didn’t really know. I knew it was impossible to be happy all the time, and I had never really thought about how I wanted to feel and that I could even think about it. But even without that question, there is so much to learn and to take into consideration, it can simply feel overwhelming.
And while it felt overwhelming, I realised that I could change something, everything in fact! Not over night, but over time. And so for the first time in years I went into my inner garden, not with my eyes closed or disgust or fear, but curiosity. I took in its condition and started visiting it regularly. I noticed what was growing, I started to understand why it was growing there and why exactly in that location. I witnessed what helped it growing and thrive, I understood why it was full of weeds and thorns, I also understood how I kept them alive.
Then I started to look beyond all I saw and started to wonder what I would like to see instead. How I would like to feel instead in my inner garden, inside me. And finally, I truly understood that I had the power to change my garden into what I wanted! Into what I wanted. I also realised it was my garden and thus my responsibility. Of course, I could get help – and that is a good thing! –, but that I needed to figure out how I wanted my inner garden to look like, how I wanted it to make me feel and how much future work I wanted to it to cause. If I wanted to live in my dream garden, I would have to understand what my dream garden should look like.
So I set out on a journey to dig deep inside, learn, discover tools and methods that support me, understand myself, would help me to heal, to envision, and finally set to work. It has started an interesting and rewarding journey for me, and it is my hope that my journey can inspire and encourage you to take a look at your secret soul garden inside of you. To visit it with curiosity and compassion, so you can discover which weeds are growing in yours and why, how you can change things, what you would like to see growing in yours, creating your soul's garden to flourish and thrive, filling you with joy.
When I walked into my soul garden initially, I understood that all my life I had wondered what I am good at and what I should do with my life. I was good at school, but I had no obvious talents or interests, and most things seemed exciting to me, really. Depending on the people or teachers, I am easily interested in any subject… So, I had no idea where to go. I tried figuring it out, but I couldn't. Over the years, I had tried more and more to shut out the question of what I wanted from my life and what I was good at.
It was only when I hit rock-bottom, that I had to face answering the question I hadn't found an answer to in over 20 years. And it went deeper this time. I had not found the answer to what would spark my interest professionally long enough, or which circumstances I needed to thrive in, or if it was simply a question of lack of self-esteem…. All my attempts had failed. I was worn out. Life had thrown its fate at me during those years too, and I was ill. So if this wasn’t the life I had signed up for, the question arose, what I had signed up for and with it, the question "do I have a purpose or not?", resurfaced.
Could there be anything out there that inspired me and wouldn't drain my life energy? It is not that I didn't try to find what I am good at and inspired by! Or if that was asked too much, simply find something to get by with and live my life after work. I tried all of that, and they had simply all failed. I was 43 years old, depressed, chronically ill, weak, full of anxiety and had panic attacks several times a week.
When I handed in my notice for my last job, I just wanted to get out and heal physically and no longer be the impatient mother and wife I had turned into. I wanted my energy back. I wanted my health back. My ulcerative colitis had been raging for years and I couldn’t get back into remission despite my medication. I needed to get everything out of my life that drained my energy. My husband and I took the decision together to step back into massive financial uncertainty and try to build our dream life together instead. I was determined to save myself and build my soul aligned life. I had no idea what it looked like, but I had a deep inner knowing it existed. Something I had always known, but had learned to consider wishful thinking or childish thinking. But frankly, the way I had learned to think had got me to where I was... and it was time to trust myself instead of everyone else. Maybe they knew how to be happy, but their way of thinking didn’t make me happy. Something had to change, and listening to others had not served me well. Plus, if I was honest, the majority of people around me weren’t exactly happy people. The majority seemed to be where I was, stuck in a life that was the far opposite of thriving. I can't speak for others, but my life was crippling. I lived in a constant fear of death since our son’s stillbirth. The fear of me dying and leaving the kids without my love or them dying, forcing me to experience even more pain than I already had. Of course this made sense with my history, and of course it makes equally sense not to live like that, because it wasted valuable time of neither of us being dead. But I was trapped in it.
If I go back to the picture of the inner garden, I was trapped in anxiety, surrounded by large, overgrown, thorny bushes with seemingly no way out and very little daylight. If you had known me all my life, you would know how much I dislike darkness, always have. I didn’t want to stay there. I didn’t want to get my family to get sucked into it either, but I had had to admit to myself that I was sucking them into my misery. One year for example, my fear at the time was ticks, following an incident a few years prior, where my two eldest picked up 33 ticks between them after playing for a couple of hours in the forest. So a few years later, I suddenly developed panic around them catching ticks and found a million excuses why we should not play in the garden but inside. For the entire summer, I didn’t step off the patio, and we stayed indoors A LOT. Once I got over ticks, another fear came and the misery continued, it just had a different name. This had to stop, and more and more I realised that I was trapping us, that I was stopping us from living life – not even fully, but at all really. And that I was not only stopping myself, but my kids too. They deserved so much better!
So over time, I figured out that my personal way out, was to live my life in the moment, and the way I wanted. I had to admit to myself that I couldn’t prevent death, that it would come, and that it would come when it wanted to come. That no one had ever been overlooked by death. Ever. And I had no say in the timing it would choose. And that regardless of what I do, I would have no say. So instead of fearing death, I decided to start fearing dying with regrets. And even though I was still unclear about my life vision in its details, or how to make the details happen, that I knew, my life vision became: "to die with as few regrets as possible". And this is still my life vision, and I suspect will remain my life vision until I pass one day.
In order to do so, in order to die with as few regrets as possible, I would have to find a way out of my labyrinth of thorns or make them wilt somehow. I needed to understand what made them thrive, so I could stop their growth and power. Many, many tools helped me on my journey, and I will share them all with you in the hope to inspire you to find yours. A little spoiler, so it can act as a short-cut for you: Three things had the biggest impact on shrinking the thorny bushes that kept me trapped: figuring out my life vision, understanding my purpose and trusting.
What does your soul garden look like? If it is looking like mine did, what could help you to stop the weeds in your inner garden from thriving? Is anything keeping you trapped? I am hoping that my story can inspire you to look at your garden, and eventually feel your power to grow as a gardener, ultimately leading you to your authentic, fulfilled and purposeful life! I will share my thoughts and tools with you. Maybe they can help you too. Maybe not! Trust yourself to find your tools, methods and path. Your weeds and their growing conditions are likely to be very different from mine. My tools don’t have to work for everyone. I don’t believe in one-size-fits-all-solutions. However, I do believe there is a path for each one of us, and I hope that my path can inspire you to figure out yours, with the methods and tools that work for you.
Trust yourself. You have an inner knowing and guidance inside of you.