Love is essential for our growth
When I was young, my mother taught me that plants need love. My mum learnt this from her grandmother, my great-gran, when she was a little, too. According to my elders, love is the key element that animates our living world, including the plant kingdom. Other ingredients like soil, light, and water are obviously critical, too. But, as far as I knew, the simple act of speaking to plants, and showering them with “I love yous,” can revive even the limpest of limbs.
What does this have to do with mental health? Well, everything. The story my mum passed down to me is an allegory for our own personal growth and development. Just like plants, people need the right conditions and environment to flourish.
Love and kindness is fertiliser — it feeds our heart, mind and soul. It enriches our lives, communities and workplaces. It creates better human beings.
However, external circumstances and sometimes our own personal choices, have meant that many of us have experienced long, dark winter periods. Some are in the depths of it right now. Grief, financial hardship, relationship breakdowns, health challenges, stress and strain all have a significant impact on our mental health. During these times, it can feel like the ground has turned fallow, with few shoots of meaning, and little vibrancy.
But we are all gardeners of our own minds and are constantly cultivating our psychological terrain. It can be beneficial to question, with how much awareness are you tending to your mental landscape? Are you selecting the most beneficial varieties of beliefs, thoughts, and ideas to plant in your own mind? Often, we go about life on auto-pilot and rarely stop to consider our thoughts. Where do they even come from?
Most of the time they just loop through our head, on repeat. Sometimes trapping us without even realising we’ve become imprisoned by them, ourselves. What’s worse, is that often we can’t see that our beliefs aren’t even our own. They’ve been acquired through outside influences and passed onto us through family conditioning (like talking to plants — though I’m keeping that one), education systems, and socio-cultural paradigms. We’ve been enculturated into a psychological reality. Some thoughts are golden, others are noxious weeds.
In the book Together We Are One, Buddhist monk and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh writes: “We are gardeners of our depth consciousness and what we water in ourselves is what grows into this world . . . the practice (of mindfulness) is to attend to what causes us pain and suffering and use it as fertiliser to create the most beautiful garden possible.”
We’re living through a time of great uncertainty. Very little is making sense and people are grappling with big challenges, personally, professionally, and globally. It’s complex. In many ways, we cannot control our external reality. But we have a significant opportunity to create positive changes if we choose to. It starts with us as individuals by becoming master gardeners of our minds, and carefully examining the social and psychological contracts that we’ve signed, sometimes unconsciously.
The great invitation of this time is to cultivate a mindful sense of present awareness. We must consciously tend to our minds, and be open to weeding out old beliefs and seeding more favourable ways of thinking, being and behaving. Doing so is a mature practice. We can create a rich and abundant garden of life, through our own hearts and minds — one that respects ourselves and others, with love. The power to do so is in our hands.
Lifeline: 13 11 14
This article was first published in The West Australian in Renée Gardiner’s weekly column in Agenda, 4 December 2021.