Weeding Out Negativity
I must confess that though I have a beautiful garden, I don’t really enjoy the maintenance and upkeep. With that said, I did discover that with the help of visualization, my weeding chore that was a waste of time became a productive and spiritually rewarding practice. This exercise is for the restless wannabe gardeners like me, and the true gardeners at heart that enjoy the slow, methodical process. Whatever your gardening style, this exercise will further enhance the weeding experience and transform your mundane gardening into a spiritual maintenance program.
In this meditation, the weeds will symbolically represent the negative aspects in our life that we want to remove. So, get out your gardening gloves and a shovel, and lets get to work!
1. Hopefully you can select a warm, sunny day to surround yourself in a positive energetic glow from the sun. Sitting quietly in your garden, bring to mind negative habits and unwanted traits you may want to remove in your life. Perhaps it’s something you may think is silly, like bitting your nails, or something more serious like a substance dependency issue. Whatever variety of issue may be present in your life, allow yourself to begin formulating a list of mental images.
2. Let’s look at weeding from the spiritual point of view that weeds represent the negative activities in our life.
3. Upon a quick scan of the soil in your garden, you may notice that there are different types and sizes of weeds. Some may have pointy leaves, and some may appear more delicate. Some produce flowers, some produce thorns. Now, look at these weeds as the negativity in our lives. Some of the roots plunge straight to the depths of our being, while other habits scatter through out our life only appearing sparsely on the surface.
4. Go ahead and pull up a few weeds. Take note of the differences as you pull each weed. Some weeds you will pull up with ease, and some you may find surprisingly difficult to pull. You may even leave them alone, noting with good intention that you will “get around to it later when you have a proper tool.” Some weeds you may quickly yank out, and “accidently” leave behind some, or all of the root structure in the ground. Unfortunately this hasty lack of attention will result in the weed regenerating and appearing even bigger at a later time.
5. As you continue to weed your garden, give each weed a name, or a habit. “Smoking.” “Overspending.” “Yelling.” “Anger.” If you want to focus on one specific habit, repeatedly chant the same habit over, and over, with every weed you pull. Remove as many weeds as you comfortably can while maintaining this meditative state, as you image that you are extracting the aspects of yourself that you dislike.
6. If you stop to take a break, do not get discouraged if you look over the surface of your garden and it appears as though the weeds are multiplying and you feel defeated. It is often that once you address this weeding process and finally begin pulling the weeds, you begin to realize just how unkept your garden is, and our lives.
7. Do not get discouraged. This realization is designed to bring awareness to the positive effects of a good maintenance program, one that can be adopted and performed on a regular basis to prevent the return of weeds, your negative habits.
Until we take a good look at the problems that we planted and nurtured in our garden, whether we want to admit it or not, they have now grown and will begin to multiply. Unfortunately, we are often ignorant of their ability to rapidly take over. If you have recently become active in your garden of spirituality and feel overwhelmed, adopt a maintenance program and take the necessary time to “weed-out” your life before it becomes overgrown.
