What Needs to be Pruned

I will admit upfront that I am not a gardener. I have lived in condominiums and apartments my whole adult life, although I do remember doing a bit of planting when I was a child. I also had some planter boxes on the deck of an apartment I used to live in. I have a flower garden out front of my current home that was created by someone else. But all my gardening is very minor gardening. What I understand is that, for crops to grow abundantly and for flowers to flourish, we need to prune back plants, deadhead flowers, thin planted seedlings, and pull weeds. When fall comes I now know to prune back most of the plants in my current garden so that they will be healthy and abundant in the summer. In other words, prune, prune prune. 

I don't think that pruning is an activity that is limited to just gardens. I have moved a number of times, and each time, I gave away items that I no longer needed or hadn't been using for quite some time. I have been slowly doing even more here in my current home even though it was, relatively, not that long since I moved in. I finally looked at the stem ware glasses that I have moved 3 times and asked myself why I was holding on to them. They have gone to the charity resale shop. I continue to donate books to the library. 

Then what are the inner things that I can prune out of my life? What old, stale emotions and energies that I have been clinging to can I let go of? This takes diving, so to speak, into our deepest selves. One of the meditations in Opening the Heart: Meditations on How to Be speaks to this. (here) 

The expanded text in Part 2 of the book says in part: "The knowledge that you need to exist in the world in the new/old way is there in your deepest self." Part of this knowledge, I think, is what is no longer serving us and can, thus, be pruned out of our lives. I'd say that what no longer serves me is anger that interferes with action; fear; lack of compassion; disappointment in myself; disappointment that others don't do what I want or live up to my expectations; old hurts; and probably many more old, stuck emotions and energies. 

Delving deep may need to be done over and over to achieve as much clearing out as we want to achieve, to be able to put the pruned material on the "bonfire" where it belongs. I think that delving deep to prune can be different for everyone and different at times for everyone. It might be meditation, reiki or other energy work. It might first be changing our diets and exercising more so that we are healthier, which then allows us to concentrate on emotional and psychic health. It might be a combination of many things as once. 

One way I pruned was to move from Massachusetts to Vermont as my energy became stuck over time in Massachusetts. I found a doctor after moving who referred me to a Naturopath. The three of us are working on boosting my thyroid function, which gives me more energy to work, to rid myself of more things that I don't need in my life. See how this happens? 

And, I think that by pruning in our own lives we can have a ripple effect in the world. By becoming the person we'd like to see operate in the world, we can change the world one person at a time. Who knows what the synergistic effect of this will be? An amazing one I hope.