Your Life Is a Garden (And You've Been Growing Weeds)

Imagine your life as a garden.

Not as a metaphor. As an actual description of how things work.

Every day, you're planting seeds — through what you pay attention to, what you emotionally invest in, what you keep returning to in your mind. Some of these seeds you planted deliberately. But most of them? They got planted without your conscious participation.

That resentment you've been carrying toward someone who wronged you three years ago? That's a seed you've been watering every time you replay the conversation in your head.

That anxiety about the future? You've been fertilizing it with every worst-case scenario you've imagined.

That belief that you're not quite good enough? You planted that one a long time ago, probably before you had words for it, and you've been tending it faithfully ever since.

Here's what gardeners know: weeds don't need your intention. They just need neglected soil. They'll grow anywhere you're not paying attention.

But the plants you actually want — the ones that produce nourishment, beauty, meaning — those require conscious cultivation. You have to choose them. Plant them. Water them. Protect them from what would crowd them out.

This is the first pillar of working with devotion consciously: Touching the Garden.

It means becoming aware of what you've been growing — consciously and unconsciously. It means taking honest inventory of the soil of your life: What's flourishing? What's choking out everything else? What did you plant deliberately, and what just showed up?

And then it means making a choice: What do you actually want to cultivate?

This isn't about ripping out everything and starting over. Most people don't have the energy for that kind of dramatic overhaul — and dramatic overhauls rarely stick anyway.

It's about small, consistent choices. Noticing when you're watering the resentment, and choosing to redirect that energy. Catching yourself in the middle of the worst-case scenario spiral, and gently turning your attention elsewhere. Recognizing the old "not good enough" story when it starts playing, and declining to tend it for the thousandth time.

The garden doesn't transform overnight. But every choice to tend what you actually want to grow — and to stop feeding what you don't — shifts the direction.

Tonight I'm hosting Planting Seeds of Devotion — a live session to help you take inventory of your garden and consciously choose what you want to cultivate this year.

And for those who know their garden needs deeper work — the soil itself needs attention, not just the plants — Root to Rise opens today. Four weeks of working with the nervous system and energy body to create stable ground for everything else to grow.

— Shanti

Root to Rise — four weeks of foundational work and intuition building. If your garden keeps producing the same weeds no matter what you plant, the issue is the soil. [Learn more]