Well-Being
Well-being is your garden.
Your loved one’s well-being is their garden and the garden of well-being is the earth. Thinking about well-being as a garden is one way of allowing us to understand that well-being is not a goal but a process – an on-going dynamic engagement with oursleves and the world around us.
If you have ever tended a plant on your window sill, or dug your hands into the earth, you understand that the most important aspect of a garden is not the number of plants, nor the color of the petals on a flower. What matters is the health of the garden as a whole. Each plant has its role to play. When your garden is growing and healthy, bees naturally fly in, frogs and bugs appear as well as mammals, microbes and birds. These then become part of the tending. Your garden is a community. The health of the garden lies in tending the whole.
Because this tending to the whole can be taught, Nature’s Narrative Project has broken down the practice of well-being into six different energetic approaches, taken from the point of view of the six elements (cosmic energy) and the six chakra (internal energy).
Your well-being results from cultivation. Tending your garden is a life purpose that includes everyone and everything you encounter. Think of the people whom you come into contact with as beings who enter your garden. What will they find?
Are you trustworthy? Are you courageous? Are you curious and imaginative? Are you able to direct your attention in productive ways that yield abundant fruits for you, your colleagues, your family and loved ones, as well as for the world around you? What is your relationship with your earth energy – your ground and the ground of the world you inhabit. The ways in which you tend to the well-being of the earth indicate the ways in which you care for yourself. Many of us approach the care of ourselves and of the earth in a shadowy, half-light of awareness; not quite ignoring ourselves and the planet, not fully present either.
The more we can integrate this ‘inside’ ourselves with the ‘outside’ of our lived experience, the more growth happens. We feel engaged, validated and empowered. Earth responds in kind. Our awareness of an engagement in well-being is an awareness that is shared by the planet herself. Our planet seek to thrive – this is her ‘natural’ state of being. Our planet naturally seeks wellness. Every living being – your children and you children’s children, yourself and your friends and family – we all seek to thrive. That is our nature. Animals, plants and insects, microbes, the one plant on your window sill – for all of us, well-being is ‘natural’.
Well-being is our birthright and the birthright of all beings, including our planet. It is our mission at Nature’s Narrative to support you in honouring that birthright; to tending and realising the abundance that an awareness of well-being brings into our practice what it means to be fully human.