Lessons From The Land

I recently completed a seven day detox – the first one I’ve ever done properly. Previously I’ve had a lot of resistance, as I do love food so much. Anyway, it was intense but fruitful (literally!). Of course, we aren’t just detoxing the body when we undergo such a thing, but all layers of ourselves and, I found, especially the mind. I found it an incredible boost in helping me release some stale old beliefs that still reside within me as self-sabotaging toxins.

I alluded in a previous post to an issue I’ve been grappling with for some time; how to earn my living professionally and value my worth. During this detox, where I was taking in herbs and veggies from the land every day, I really felt the land speak through me. It revealed to me that, my love of food is, at least in part, a mind trick that comes from lack rather than a body need, and this is a clue to answering the question I have around my living. It whispered gently, over and over again, ‘you are enough…’. It showed me that lack is not nature’s way.

Nature’s way is abundance, giving, giving, giving. And, within this, an innate understanding of the law of reciprocity. In fact, giving is receiving. Nature gives and receives in an endless cycle of flow, on all scales. This is the true nature of currency.

I’ve always felt strange about the system we have on this planet of working so hard and spending so much of our precious time to earn money to live. So it ends up that our daily living is focused on ‘making a living’, as though our actual life doesn’t count at all. It’s never sat easily with me, as though a part of me has always known there’s a different way that’s much more easeful and aligned with our true spirit. There’s an all-pervading energy of modern life that whispers subliminally, ‘you don’t have enough, you are not enough, you need more, others are better than you and have more than you…’.

A deeper understanding is growing within me that I’ve always been enough, and I don’t need anything, actually. All I have is here, with me now. I align myself with nature’s way and I dedicate my energy and life to serving and stewarding nature and, in so doing, I receive ten-times and more back. The abundance blows my mind. The land where I live is so incredibly generous. Not a month goes by without some kind of glut of produce coming off the land, even through the winter with olives, nuts, chestnuts and citrus fruits. And the people here are generous to match, so aligned are they with nature’s way. Bags of surplus produce arrive in our hands from others and we happily give our surplus away too. This feels like a natural way for us to be with each other.

And I’m growing slowly into a new way of being with my service as a sharer of yoga too. I am dedicated to the evolutionary path, of which yoga has been the central container for me, and it is my joy and privilege to share this path with others. My value can never be measured by anyone or anything outside of me and the source of my abundance comes from within, my internal reflection of nature’s external abundance as I am, of course, a part of nature. I cannot name anyone external to me as the source of my abundance.

It’s a leap of faith, this gradually unfolding knowing within me, and I’m not sure where it will take me. It feels like new, abundant, joyful and easeful territory awaits, beyond the intense strictures of societal conditioning. And I am gradually finding my way there, with nature as my daily guide…