Grow your mental health is my experience of how gardening and cultivating plants improves your mental health.
Gardening reminds you of the importance of nurturing living things with love, which of course heals many a troubled mind.
I’m not an expert gardener, far from it!
The only experience I’ve had to date is growing my spider plants and if you follow me, you will know how excited I get about them and their babies. 😉
Grow your mental health
We all have mental health and it’s how we maintain it on a daily basis that defines what state it’s in. For me, my new found work out for my mental health is, cultivation or gardening.
About two years ago, I read somewhere on the Internet that spider plants are good for removing negative energy out of your room. On my quest for self-healing and working with energy, I had to buy one and test this theory out.
Well, Big Bertha (yes, I’ve named her) as had babies and what’s more exciting is, I took some of them, planted them and gave them away. One of those babies is now having babies. The joy this brings to me and Elaine who I gave one to is immense. On a different note, I gave one to Kerry and they haven’t had babies. If anyone knows why they don’t have babies, can you let me know please?
Growing plants improves your mental health
I have found that having a spider plant does removes negativity energy from my room. It’s also improving my mental health.
Planting these babies and looking after the original plant has brought me lots of joy and happiness. More importantly though, nurturing them rewards me with love. I really do feel the growth inside of me.
When my spider plant looks a little limp, I know that it needs attention. Like I said earlier, I’m not an expert at gardening, but I’m learning so much.
I’m really enjoying the experience, and I also now understand why Prince Charles talks to his plants. I talk to mine and I’m proud of that fact!
Mindfulness and Gardening
Gardening and growing plants also helps me with practicing my mindfulness. When I’m tending to my plants, re-potting them, ensuring they have the right amount of light and water, I’m in the present moment and I’m being mindful.
Being in the present moment is key to maintaining your mental health
I’ve said it plenty of times in my previous meditation and mindfulness posts that it’s essential to live in the present moment.
The key to mindfulness and being in the present moment is to be aware of your senses. When using your senses of touch, smell, taste, sound and sight, you are not inside your head missing out on the good things around you. When you worry constantly, it creates a snowball effect or more worry and can lead to the onset of dis-ease.
Apart from being in the present moment, nurturing is another key element of practicing mindfulness. Nurturing your awareness of being in the present moment and not on the drama roundabout is paramount. Growing or nurturing a plant really helps you to use your five senses.
Gratitude and Mindfulness
Practicing gratitude is another important element of practicing mindfulness, and I’ll show you how easy it is to do this.
When I noticed some red seedlings shooting out of the soil, feelings of gratitude immediately flooded in. For the past couple of days, we’ve had rain, some heavy spells that followed glorious sunshine.
Now, some people get a little down with the sun disappears and the light fades bringing cooler air, and rain. Not for me though!
I write every day in my gratitude journal what I’m grateful for and I wrote how I’m grateful for the much needed rain to water the plants. I personally don’t like too much heat, so again, I’m grateful for Mother Earth and what she provides. Right now, I’m grateful for receiving the rain showers and the sunshine in between.
I’m also grateful for seeing the bees on the Lavender that we planted in the last 10 days. Knowing that I’m doing good for the bee population fills me with joy and happiness, and so does the growth of the seedlings. The energy and how this makes me feel is positive, and happy. It’s very important that when writing your gratitude journal, you write how it makes you feel. This will help immensely to maintain positive mental health.
Crystals and Gardening
You may notice in my photographs that I have crystals in my plant pots?
Crystals I believe do help the plants with their growth and health, just like they help us.
I use green quartz and clear quartz, but any crystal will provide healing for the plants. Green crystals promote healing, growth and love whereas clear quartz provide all of this with lots more power. I sell crystals if you would like to buy some, just drop me a message. One day, I will have a crystal garden.
Finally, I will leave you with one last thought..
I don’t have a garden as I live in a second floor flat, but I’m lucky enough to have a balcony to put these planters on. Even if you can’t have a planter on your window sill, you can still have plants indoors. No matter how big or small your garden is, just one plant can provide you with happiness, lift your vibration and improve your mental health.
When you lift your vibration, you attract good things i.e. like attracts like.
They say that in life, you reap what you sow and it’s certainly very apt for me.
13/08/22 UPDATE – I manifested a large garden and revisiting this post has brought back so many lovely memories. I’m starting a new chapter and I’m working on creating a moon garden.
I’ve also learned how therapeutic weeding is!
