Finding Ourselves in an Unknown Garden

I have been experiencing intense dreams of the past for several months. These dreams haven’t been scary or challenging. Instead, there has been a softness to them – it’s like I’m revisiting pivotal moments in my life from a new vantage point.

The dream experiences have more often than not, included key entrepreneurial and personal experiences that have shaped my life. One of the common threads in all the dreams has been the presence of people who became mentors, guides, teachers, colleagues and friends. Perhaps these dreams have been spurred by the recent deaths of two brilliant women in my life, and yet, I can name other times when similar dreams have invaded my subconscious. They seem to come at times of transition – times when I find myself in an unknown garden.

I wake with a mix of nostalgia, fanciful preoccupation, and bittersweetness of the fact that I cannot ‘re-do’ those moments with what I know now. Too often, we return to the moments where we were challenged, grew, or stepped into discomfort on our path to becoming who we are today.

In times of transition, these dreams are like markers helping us see where we have come from, who we have become, and where we are heading. Where we are heading is really about who we are becoming.

In this unknown garden that we find ourselves in, what needs pruning, what needs composting, and what needs nourishing. These transitional thresholds in our lives can come at any time – our 20’s, 50’s or 70’s. For me, these times have come approximately every 12 years. Each threshold has brought me closer to coming home to myself.

And yet, I can also say, during these times of transition, I hold a great paradox of emotions ranging from great hope and excitement for the possibilities to come to stifling fear about my capabilities to tend to this new garden. What nutrients are available? How wild or manicured shall I make the space? Where do I want to put my roots? Perhaps the most potent question might be: What weeds need pulling? In this garden, what more might we discover about ourselves?

There is a tenderness that we can bring to the knowing of the unknowing. My transitions are both personal and work related.

For me, I find that I am living more into the possibilities I’ve been nurturing for many years: to create ripples that reach more people; to feel more and more at peace with who I am; to support others in their walk to come home to themselves. Might that change the vibration in workplaces, families, communities?

Especially after a few tumultuous years, there aren’t enough elders, mentors, therapists and coaches in the world to meet the collective need. In this new garden, I’d like to create more ways in which the challenges that arise from our working lives to move more wholeheartedly into our adult human selves, and thereby, somewhat and sometimes ease the pain of the vagaries of everyday life. As John Kabat-Zinn says, it’s “full-catastrophe living” – to mindfully live with the ups and downs of life.

I want to do good work, done well, for the right reasons.

We can tend to ourselves, our workplaces, our communities, and the planet in non-violent ways. Since my early entrepreneurial days with The Body Shop, I have often said that we spend too much time at work to not make it a place of joy and a place where people can live into their fullest self. In this past year, I have found more and more clients sensing a time of transition – finding themselves in unknown gardens. It’s a good time for leaders to be asking: What does the world need from us now? What do we value here, in this moment in time?

No matter what an organization is creating as a product or service, the one thing it needs is leadership and a culture where people can stand in their truth along with the ability to navigate their inner space and the relational space between one another. Or as Brené Brown says, “Don’t shrink. Don’t puff up, Stand your sacred ground.” This is the space where we don’t burn down relationships, but instead, light them up in ways that allow them to flourish.

What a magnificent generative garden that will be.

I have found solace in honouring the past, digging up some roots, remembering what has nourished me, and pruning what has depleted. And now, I’m ready to sow seeds for the future.

My hope is that you too are intentionally and lovingly tending to whatever garden you find yourself in.

xo