Garden Your Way to Health- Mind, Body, and Spirit
The Three Facets of Health
Being healthy is not just having a healthy body. Being healthy includes having a healthy mind, healthy body, and a healthy spirit. It takes all three to be a truly healthy person. Gardening fosters all three. This is my personal experience.
A Healthy Mind
Communing with nature, in this case gardening, can clear my mind better than anything else. We all have had periods in our lives where troubles can become overwhelming. It seems that all that we do just isn’t enough- lying awake at night, unable to concentrate on anything other than our difficulties, or sometimes sinking into a severe depression.
Depression has been a lifetime “curse” for me. I often suffer from what is called clinical depression meaning that I inherited it and have a chemical imbalance. The imbalance can bring on an episode of depression in an instant without any apparent reason.
It is times like these that I grab my garden tools and head outside. Weather permitting of course. If the weather is bad and I can’t get out, I’m in trouble. I’m thankful that I live in a climate where this doesn’t happen too often.
When I’m in the garden or yard working with my landscape, my mind has a chance to relax so to speak. No real focus. Just doing mundane things like trimming, pulling some weeds here and there, maybe this plant would look better over there, etc.
How does this help? Focusing on my difficulties has moved from the “forefront” (conscious) to the “back” (subconscious) of my mind. Of course the problems haven’t gone away, they just aren’t dominating my every thought. Conscious thought requires energy. That is a contributing factor to a depressed person’s fatigue. Subconscious thought doesn’t require nearly as much energy.
However, the subconscious is at work processing and looking for solutions without my conscious awareness. On numerous occasions I have had solutions or ideas pop into my mind while working in the garden and not even thinking about any difficulties. WOW! I call it my “Mountain Top Experience” when this happens.
I don’t mean for this post to turn into a book. So, I will break it off for now and talk about a Healthy Body in my next post.
‘Til next time,
Poppy
