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Musings

Honoring Growth

In my journey of caring for plants, I’m always receiving lessons from them that reflect aspects of myself straight back to me. Sometimes these lessons reveal beautiful truths and other times they highlight truths that are not as easy to accept about myself. What I’m about to share here is related to the latter.

I have a collection of plants in my home that started off as really small nursery plants gifted to me by one of my friends almost 2 years ago now. Caring for them has required me to be in tune with their individual needs, paying attention to their watering schedule, their soil and sunlight needs etc. To be honest, when I started caring for them, I saw myself start to be more intentional with my own personal needs, especially when it came to making sure I was drinking enough water too! Over time, I saw these plants start to flourish and eventually transferred them from their nursery pots to larger pots in January of last year.

These beautiful plants continued to grow and expand, but at some point last year, I started ignoring their signals of needing to be repotted again. I would see new leaves start to sprout and then quickly wilt and die off or just completely fall from the plant. I put it on my mental to-do list to repot them but it just never quite became a priority. Every time I looked at them, I was reminded that they needed space to grow but I couldn’t pull myself to provide that space for them. Excuses were invented to delay repotting, like “I have to find the perfect decorative pots for them” or “I don’t really have the time to repot all these plants. I could be doing ‘x,y or z’ .”

Let me preface this next section by saying – I’m a conscious dreamer. I pay attention to my dreams and the messages that arrive to me in that space. So I took it seriously when themes of ‘not having enough space to grow and thrive’ started showing up in my dreams in very vivid and dramatic ways! Then it clicked. My delay in repotting my plants was just reflecting to me how I was treating my own growth. To put it simply, I was not honoring growth itself.

You see, I have been on a path of constant growth and evolution (most of us are!) while still trying to live in my old pots. Roots trying to dig even deeper, but they literally have nowhere to go. New leaves trying to sprout from the energy they’re pulling from the sun and the water they’re receiving, but don’t have enough nutrients to pull from the soil. Trying to expand but feeling so constricted at the same time. It took me a while to make this connection, but once I did, I knew that the process of repotting my plants could easily be turned into a transformative ritual, giving me the space that my soul has been craving for expansion as well!

Two days ago, I dedicated my afternoon to repotting my plants. I didn’t even have to go shopping for pots and soil (apparently I had them all along – another lesson). I apologized to the plants for not honoring their growth and began the process of uprooting them and transferring them as gently as I could to their new homes. It wasn’t the easiest of processes and I cringed when more leaves dropped off during the process of moving them or when parts of their roots would get left behind in the old pots. In the end though, I knew that more new growth and a stronger root system would come in time. They finally had their space.

In a way, I feel like I’m still going through the uprooting process again myself (cycles!) which is not always comfortable, but I do find strength in knowing that I as I give myself more space to thrive, I can find beauty in what is here and what is to come as I choose to honor my own growth.