In my new book, What Is Healing? Awaken Your Intuitive Power for Health and Happiness (you can find a signed copy or ebook version through http://shop.totalfitness.net), I wrote about how there are really only four problems, ever:
- Blocks
- Congestion
- Resistance
- Interference
When I do a medical intuitive reading on a client’s health, I look to see which of the core four problems are operating in that person’s body.
Nothing reveals my own resistance to me any more clearly than how I deal with change in my garden.
This past week, I pulled out the foxgloves in my back garden by my studio.
At night, they had been glowing tall with the light beside my staircase shining up at them.
During the day, they took my breath away with their purple and white bell-shaped blossoms, arching over the rest of my back garden, the roses and the violas and the lettuce and the celery and the spinach and the garlic.
But who paid attention to any of that? You hardly noticed anything else, they were so stunning.
The foxgloves were your basic knock-out head-turners.
Meanwhile, around this time, I had been rummaging around at various hardware stores, garden centers, Home Depot and Pike’s, trying to find this year’s version of the apple blossom double begonias that had graced the fountain outside my studio these past few years.
I had grown so attached to the apple blossom double begonias that I went to a new plant store virtually every week for six weeks.
Hoping to find them, I placed numerous requests, talked to the owners, managers and buyers of all the stores. Still no luck.
Finally, there I was, pouting visibly at the Pike’s on Lindberg over Memorial Day weekend when I realized that if I waited too long to find my most precious begonias, it might become too hot to plant and my window for spring digging would be missed.
So I adapted.
I bought two other varieties of begonias – not so pretty as apple blossom double begonias – but I plunked down my money and came home and put them in the dirt.
In business, when we make a mistake, it is wise to correct and continue.
Everybody makes mistakes sooner or later.
We hire the wrong person, try a technique that doesn’t really work, forget to pay a bill on time or some other equally memorable learning experience.
We can take all this in stride and keep moving forward, or we can waste a lot of time wishing we had been all-wise and all-knowing and never taken the scenic detour that caused us to become more of an expert about hiring, actually effective techniques or bill paying or what not.
I was really dreading pulling up my foxgloves. They are biennials, and you almost have to treat them like annuals since you can’t quite them expect to last virtually forever like perennials. I needed to admit the fact that the thrill was gone for this year and create the space for something new for the summer blooming season.
The foxgloves weren’t any kind of mistake – in fact, they had become one of my most successful garden experiments ever.
As I pulled them up, instead of tossing the plants into my compost pile, I threw them out on the ivy in an area where my black-eyed susans had naturalized.
Several years ago, I planted a few black-eyed susans. They came to like my garden so much so that they spread their seeds everywhere and in a few years now I have more black-eyed susans than I can even count.
The trick to naturalizing plants is to provide an environment so friendly that they feel like growing there without much effort.
I am hoping that my foxgloves feel the same way and will pop up next year, out of the ivy, I am envisioning. But we shall see.