“When a flower doesn’t bloom, you fix the environment in which it grows, not the flower.” ― Alexander Den Heijer
A SIMPLE REMINDER
What If I shared a simple reminder with you?
A reminder, that you (yes you, and me) have never needed to be fixed.
Sit with this for a minute. Consider what you do when you get a signal from your body. A headache, a rash, some swelling, and even stress. These are signals from the body.
As a health professional, people would present with all types of things. Yes, I could guide their bodies back into harmony, relieve some tension, and point them in the direction of solutions that will support them back into harmony. However, ultimately, your body does all the work.
We only need guides and professionals, when we are fearful or unsure/unaware of how we ended up here or how to return our body back to its harmony or "homeostasis".
We all know that what we focus on expands. So, what would happen if instead, we sought to be nourished, rather than seeking to be fixed?
Instead, Be Nourished
Have you ever spent time in places and with people where you leave feeling more full than when you arrived?
What if, the keys have always been in your hands? Where a moment arises, when we can choose to be the driver, no longer the passive passenger.
The key point is to choose your environment and proximity wisely. They will dictate your well-being more than any other factors. From here, every other choice we make is either leading us towards harmony or away from it.
THE TENACIOUS CITY FLOWER
Have you ever seen a little fragile flower pushing its way through the cracks in the pavement of a busy concrete city? Who cannot help but marvel at its tenacity in trying to adapt and find a way to bloom Is our environment stronger than our willpower? Or is our willpower stronger than the environment? Are our choices dictated by the environments that we grew up in and/or even live in now?
Imagine you had all of the willpower in the entire world, but the environment you dwell in was never designed to help you thrive in abundance, to reach your full potential. What would happen?
Perhaps this story of the flower will shed some light on this point. Many of us are trying (willpower) to cultivate and activate our own health and well-being so that we flourish and bloom from within, in our own unique way.
Humans, like flowers, are designed in the same way; to flourish and bloom. However, not all do.
Mystic and philosopher Mokokoma Mokhonoana shares that “we are capable of believing ourselves out of or into disease.”1
So, what do you believe? But why? If we are all designed and have the potential to express our ultimate human potential, then why don’t we?
Think about this for a second; if a flower you planted doesn’t flourish, bloom or grow, what would you do?
THE FARMER
Imagine you were the gardener, tending to a group of flowers. 19 in 20 were struggling to survive and only 1 was really thriving. How would you help the majority? Would you try and fix the flower? Or would you look at things a little bit differently?
Rather than honing in on one flower, you could take a step back. You then see the flower in the context of its environment. Not knowing the answer, you look laterally to other gardeners and other flowers who seem to have found the ease and flow of growth.
A seemingly complex problem all of a sudden becomes simple. Almost as if the answers were hidden in plain sight all along, sitting just beyond the tunnel vision perspective of focusing on fixing the flower.
But the fact remains: the flower has always been designed to bloom.
What if rather than focusing on the problem (the flower's inability to grow), we shifted our mindset and expanded our consciousness to consider the flower within the context of its environment?
This way we would have to trust in the flower's innate evolutionary design. In the 21 century, we have forgotten something seemingly obvious; something the best gardeners know all too well. We are designed to bloom innately.
SUMMARY
Our job as the farmers of our own inner well-being. Is to water the grass we stand on, and tend to the soil and the roots, with an inside-out approach. Focusing on saturation and nourishment from within, rather than seeking nourishment purely from external sources. Ensuring the proximity of flowers we grow with, sustain and support each other. Be filled in the same way, they energetically pour.
REFERENCES
This is directly referenced from the best-selling Amazon SelfCare Book "Lifestyle Medicine For the People" by Rory Callaghan. If you would like to read more content like this. Grab the free online chapters of the book or a hard copy.
We have done our best to reference everyone’s expert opinions, peer-reviewed science, and original thoughts, all references available here and referenced in the text.
We also understand that most thoughts are not our own and there is a collective unconsciousness, unconsciousness, and universal mind stream of energy that is always at work. How are references are sorted and filtered is here
