Nurture your Nature Program
Stage 1: Becoming Aware
with Daily Sadhana
{50 days}
"As any good gardener knows, the first step at getting your garden in order is to visit it regularly. The way a wise grandmother would show you the ritual of tending to the garden. Our first step is to tend to our garden and to keep returning. To return every day with patience, just to become comfortable with the state it's in. If you keep returning, if you begin to nurture this garden of yours, the birds will soon learn your name. You'll become accustomed to the dirt between your toes and begin to delight at the way the wildflowers are somehow finding a way to bloom. You'll grow a kindredness with this space that you'll be inspired to clean it up."
Stage 2 | Weeding & Seeding
{10 weeks}
"This is the Weed and Seed portion of our healing journey. In this stage we look at every plant growing in our garden to ensure it is contributing to the wellbeing of the whole garden. If it's not, we weed it out and plant a seed that could replace the space with something more fruitful.
This would look like replacing a limiting belief with an expansive one. From "I don't fit in, I'm not worthy of love" to "I don't settle for people who don't light me up". Reframing and retraining our brain to frequent healthier neural pathways. Affirming to ourselves every day of how we're choosing to see our circumstance.
As with any aspiring gardener, once the impulse to restore their garden has created the momentum for them to begin, they usually do some research first. They scour books on the subject, take local permaculture programs, and often create an ideal picture of how they want their garden to look, feel and yield. They use trusted sources to inspire and guide their project of restoration.
This is where I bring in the Yamas & Niyamas, to dissect all my values in the light of ancient wisdom and have a frame of reference to consult whenever I’m unsure how to decipher a weed from a good seed. The Yamas and Niyamas are the first two limbs of the eight limbed path of yoga described in The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. That’s a fancy way of saying that they are a set of ten values from ancient yogic texts. The Yamas are five social restraints; non-violence, truthfulness, non-stealing, non- excess, and non-attachment. The Niyamas are five observances; purity, contentment, self-discipline, self-study, and surrender. In deeply exploring these values, we can see clearly what is a weed and what is a good seed.
The grandmother knows to start small, so we only dig up a few plants at a time, taking our time so that we don't get overwhelmed with the expanse of our garden. Studying it section by section, taking it one step at a time. One by one, we move through the wisdoms of the yamas and niyamas, uncovering the questionable plants we find in the landscape of our gardens. "
Stage 3 | Energetic Landscaping & Recallibrating with the Chakras and the Subtle Body
{8 weeks}
"When the chakras become "blocked" or the wheels are not spinning at its desired rhythm, we experience stagnation. This energetic imbalance can result in physical, mental, emotional and spiritual dysfunction. When the energies are in balance, we experience a flow state in which we are the communion between the earth and the universe. We reach a state of equanimity between our connection to our roots and our connection to consciousness. There's a balance between our soul self and our spirit self. In living with a balanced duality as such, the currents of energy meet in the middle chakra, anahata, the heart. In this way, when our energetic system is balanced, we live from a state of embodied love. In this state, we are of higher service to ourselves, our communities and our collective consciousness
So you take grandmothers hand and you allow her to teach you the subtle body of the earth, the subtle body of your wilderness within. She teaches you the importance of spending time with every plant, with every belief or aspect of yourself. She teaches you the importance of learning the plants history, is it native to this land or is it exotic. Next you learn the medicines and poisons of the plants, learning the duality of nature, the light and dark of every being. She instructs you to reach out and feel the textures and the feelings of the plant. And finally you learn about how to care for the plant, as every plant needs a different level of care to grow in abundance and become fruitful.
The plant analogy alludes to the different parts of you and how they're housed in the garden of your energetic system, notably in your chakras. When we study the chakras, we use the same wisdom the grandmother has taught us about how to tend to our gardens. We spend time with each chakra separately. Learning about how our history and trauma during specific years and ages affects the way the chakra develops. This is is similar to the notion that our biography becomes our biology; our memories are housed within our energy system and our somatic (bodily) experience. We look a little closer to study ways in which this chakra can be medicinal for us and how when its stagnant or blocked, the imbalanced results that emerge from such a state can be detrimental to our health and wellness. We move our bodies intentionally and move breath through our system to feel the subtle textures of how the energy in the chakra affects us physically. And finally we learn healing practices to realign the specific excessive or deficient tendencies that we developed as we grew. All of these steps will be covered in detail in this course."