Day 303 of 365 - Digging up Roots

If you have ever had a garden, you have probably had the experience of some plants getting out of control.  It might be some persistent weed that you just can't seem to get rid of, or, it might even be something you intentionally planted, like a herb or flower.  If the conditions are right, these plants will just keep spreading from year to year,even overtaking the space. Sometimes, the only solution is to smother them from above, so that they don't have the nutrients to survive, or, to dig out all the roots.

Patterns that keep recurring in our lives as people can be like that too.  Recurrent life challenges, whether they be physical, emotional or spiritual keep reappearing until we become aware of and address the root causes.

There is an expression that we can't change what we are not aware of.  Along the lines of the idea written about life lessons a couple of days ago, we usually get lots of chances to become aware of various struggles and dramas in our lives.

Because our bodies are our vehicles in life, the symptoms of our patterns also lie within our body.  Bodily responses can give us clues when something is out of sorts and needs attention.  For example, we might have a 'gut feeling' about a situation to warn us when something is not right.  That can actually occur before a much clearer and bigger stress response.

We can learn to tune in to details, being our own personal detective in a way, to become aware before something gets out of control.  The primary way we do that tuning in is through all our senses.  Being able to attend in more detail to the various sensations generally requires us firstly, to slow down, and secondly to focus without distraction.  That is one of the great benefits of breathing and meditation practices.  It helps us to do both of those things.

But, there are lots of other ways to simply practice this kind of tuning in too.  You could take a couple of minutes upon waking in the morning to scan your body and your feelings to get a baseline before you even get out of bed.  Or, maybe while soaking in the bathtub you can do the same.  For another, maybe floating in a pool staring at the clouds in the sky is their quiet reflection time.  For someone else it might be lying in a hammock looking up into a tree.  Then, we can also become aware of what comes up for us in a recurrent way when we do slow down and focus.  With awareness comes the possibility to investigate further and then to address.

I suppose too, that one of the reasons I've been sharing about quite a variety of approaches in this blog is, that different things resonate with different people.  Some people become more aware of themselves while being still and others while they are moving. Some people might be able to tune in to their internal environment better through attentive body work, like a massage. Regardless, we can learn a lot about ourselves and about our health and vitality.  Then we can decide whether there is anything that we want to shift.

My hope is, that we can become more the masters of our destiny as we move into and through our senior years, and not just victims of conditions of aging.  By being attentive gardeners of our lives, maybe we'll have more health and wellness and less disease.