Life & Therapy

The other day, I walked past a garden alongside a building.  There was a beautiful, single yellow iris blooming against the wall, but barely visible because there was a giant bush in front of it.  This seemed tragic to me.  Here, this gorgeous flower is baring itself to the world, but hardly anyone will see it.  It probably gets very little sun or water, so it won’t spread and grow as well as it could if it were in the right place.  I felt tempted to dig it up and take it home with me, so that I could plant it in a spot where it might thrive.  At the same time, I am aware that this plant may not have enough of an established root system to survive such a sudden move.  If I were to kidnap a plant, I would need to make sure of this sort of thing first.

There are times in life when we are like this yellow iris.  Maybe we were born into a family that didn’t recognize or value our strengths, so we learned to squeeze ourselves into roles that gives us very little room to grow and thrive.  Perhaps we are in a relationship that isn’t giving us the space to fully be ourselves, and so we don’t express much of our truth. We might be stuck in a job that does not reward our talents, and slowly we numb ourselves just to get through the days.    

If we look inside ourselves and learn just what it is that we need in order to thrive, we will start to recognize the areas in our lives that feel constricting.  When we do this, it may be tempting to uproot ourselves immediately- quit the job or dump the partner. If we do this in a knee-jerk way, without building our own internal resources, we may end up floundering rather than thriving.  Rather than just uprooting ourselves when we are uncomfortable, we can strengthen our relationship with ourselves first.  By feeding our internal needs first, we strengthen our root system, so that we can survive a transplant. This way, we will become strong, with more of ourselves to hold on to when it is time to make the move to an environment where we can thrive.