Given the Right Conditions
A reflection on healing, growth and what plants taught me about my own capacity to change.
I've been thinking a lot lately about growth and healing - for us as humans - and how much it mirrors what we see happening in plants.
Have you ever had a plant that was doing so well for a while, and then, for one reason or another, it just wasn't anymore? Maybe it got moved to a new spot and the light, the moisture, the temperature - none of it quite worked for it the way it used to. And slowly, it began to wilt. The lushness it once had just was no longer there.
When things stop working
So you do what you can. You take a clipping and place it in water, hoping for roots, hoping to carry something of this plant forward in a new form. And sometimes, you find that the pruning itself was all that the plant needed. New growth begins to emerge. You give it fresh soil, renewed care and it comes back. It simply needed to shed what was no longer serving it - old leaves, heavy vines, exhausted soil and the weight of what it had been carrying - to make space for new growth.
Sometimes, though, the mother plant doesn't have enough left to survive. And watching something you've tended to reach its end can be really painful. But then you realize that the spirit of it carries on in the clippings. Sometimes we too need a completely fresh start. And when that happens, our past doesn't disappear but it becomes the roots beneath us, the foundation from which something new can grow. We only need to be willing to nurture the change.
Our past doesn't disappear - rather, it becomes the roots beneath us, the foundation from which something new can grow.
New beginning
The clipping typically finds its own new roots - it takes on a life of its own. A new plant. And sometimes, that clipping becomes even more lush than the mother plant ever was. Through the process, you've also learned something about how to care for the plant better. You know what it needs, what it can handle and you're able to tend to it in a more attuned, more knowledgeable way.
Reflecting on my own life
When I think about my own healing, I see so much of this very same playing out. In the beginning, I didn't even realize I had wounds. I just thought I was the plant that was in the wrong soil, had the wrong temperature, wrong pot, wrong owner. I kept seeing reasons outward that made things hard, not realizing I needed to turn inward to understand what was going on.
It’s when old wounds I hadn't even known I was carrying started surfacing that I understood something was asking to be seen. There's a kind of a disorientation in that. Feeling things you can't quite name, from experiences you didn't know were still weighing on you.
But that surfacing, as uncomfortable as it was, turned out to be the beginning of something. New experiences made room for new perspectives. A different way of moving through the world started to become possible.
What the pain made possible
What started to unfold from all of this:
The wounds started healing. And from that pain came a kind of growth I could not have imagined from where I was before - ways of seeing myself and the world that would never have been available to me without the struggles. The wounds are still part of me, but they no longer hold me down. They've become part of what moves me forward. I am a stronger and more resilient version of myself because of them - not in spite of them.
The wounds are still part of me, but they no longer hold me down. They've become part of what moves me forward.
And those new experiences - the clippings as I see them - have led me somewhere I never could have reached had I stayed rooted in the same place, in the same perspectives, in the same story about who I thought I was.
Now, the old and the new live alongside each other. Each experience, each moment of reflection, becomes another layer of growth. Another opportunity to become a little more fully myself.
The thing about growth and healing
What I've come to understand - through looking at my plants and through reflecting on my own journey - is that growth doesn't happen on demand. We can’t force it and make it happen just because we want to. It happens when the conditions are right. When there is enough light, enough care, enough willingness to let go of what's no longer needed.
The question I find worth sitting with for myself isn't "why is it so hard to change?" but rather - what conditions am I living in and are they the ones that move me forward?
That question, I've found, becomes a lot easier to answer when you learn to listen - not just with your mind, but with your whole self. With your body, your breath, your movement. The way you hold yourself in a moment of difficulty. The way your shoulders soften when you feel seen.
I wrote more about that kind of attending and listening here - How Moving With Awareness Brought Me to Living From the Inside Out