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Growing Confidence in the Garden of Life

Spring is an inspirational time for those of us seeking to leap, try something new, or just liberate the doldrums of Winter. After a year of navigating a global Pandemic, you may be itching, like me, to get back to life and sprout new avenues of adventure, see friends, and make life changes.  Change and new beginnings entail taking risks and, consequently, often failing. How we hold those failures has everything to do with growing confidence and generating further trust when trying something new. Confidence is the belief that we can rely on something to go as expected. Confidence is firm trust in ourselves and in others. From a Contemplative Psychology perspective, self-confidence is cultivated by holding our mistakes and failures with loving-kindness. 

Contemplative Psychology encourages taking a mind of not-knowing to evoke an open perspective in whatever it is we’re engaged with. Cultivating a mentality of not knowing is the view that invites curiosity and courage. The great Zen Master Suzuki Roshi inspired a generation of meditators to take a ‘beginner’s mind.’ He said, “In the beginner’s mind, there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s, there are few.”

Since moving from Northern California to Colorado, one possibility I’ve been longing to explore is to start another garden. I lived with a permaculture food forest in California, with bees, chickens, fruit trees, and vegetables for many years. I was not the gardener, but living there allowed me to experience the reciprocity of the earth that naturally occurs between garden, kitchen, and gardener. The garden taught me a lot about natures’ challenges through the seasons.

I recently decided to try planting a small kitchen garden in Colorado. I’m discovering a completely new challenge with different weather, different growing seasons, and completely new rules for hosting a garden! To have an abundant garden in Colorado, one needs to start seeds indoors and wait until it’s warm enough to transplant them outdoors mid-May. 

As I said, I was not the gardener, but I was the beneficiary of the gardener’s work. I dabbled and learned, but I’m a total novice as a gardener. I resonate deeply with farming and gardening, probably because my roots are deep in the farmlands of Missouri when there were family farms still in operation. My mother grew up on the farm and was adept with horses. My father was ‘farmed out’ to his relative’s dairy farm in Missouri as a kid, while his mother worked and lived at the St. Joseph State Hospital. 

My father and my mother both hated farm work, they said, but they were familiar, and I was briefly exposed to these relatives as a child. I grew up in the concrete jungles of Los Angeles apartment complexes. I was a ‘lock-key kid adept at making TV dinners and ordering take-out when my mother worked late. Thus, becoming the gardener is a risk and a personal stretch for me, an aspiration I have leaped into this Spring.

Every day, I rush to the window where I’ve planted my ‘seed babies’ to observe the slow-growing sprouts. Some are coming up nicely, others not at all. It’s a hit-and-miss endeavor, and it strikes me as the perfect metaphor for leaping into anything new in our lives when we don’t know at all what we’re doing. 

The hit-and-miss quality of taking a chance, and doing something new, actually bring joy if we hold our mistakes and failures as opportunities to learn. 

Beginning anything new, for many people, feels risky! Depending on our personalities and style, we may be the type of person who doesn’t dare take any risks for fear of failure. That’s why cultivating a ‘beginner’s mind’ in every endeavor is liberating. We are all beginners when we think about it because there are always causes and conditions that cause us to make mistakes. We all experience failure in life and sometimes hurt others in the process of trying new things. Most of us encounter failure many times over in our lives.

Trying new endeavors, making changes, and even letting things go when there isn’t a replacement are all risk-taking behavior resulting in disappointment and loss. Learning to hold mistakes and failures with kindness and inevitably is the way to develop trust in ourselves -not trusting ourselves never to make a mistake, but trusting we can live with it when we do.  Learning how to make amends to others when we make a mistake that affects others, in large part, is learning to embrace and befriend our humanity.

Examples that come to mind are daring to meet someone we’ve met on a dating app, learning a new language or musical instrument—changing the approach to our diet, exercise, or leaving a  job that’s killing us—making a significant move to an unknown destination, entering a path of recovery, or ending an important relationship when it no longer supports us. These are probably familiar things being considered by some right now. When we take the time to ask ourselves, “where do we desire to make a change?” what is stopping us from doing so?

Making change and stepping into the unknown can be regarded as cultivating growth opportunities. In Contemplative psychology, cultivating a ground of openness, courage, and not knowing is necessary for opening our hearts to a fully engaged, compassionate life. Stepping beyond our comfort zone is essential because it breeds the confidence to fail and succeed. 

Once we take a leap and make a long-overdue change -- it may not work out, and that’s JUST INFORMATION. We do not have to hold ourselves hostage and never try anything new again. Learning how to hold our failures, challenges, and slips along the way in the space of loving-kindness is how we grow a heart of confidence. Taking loss, relapse, mistakes, and relational blunders as a path to learn, increase and expand our capacities and capabilities. The alternative is being stuck in small-mindedness and beliefs that we’re not capable of change.

Here is a contemplation on where in our life we could use some risk-taking.

Take the time to reflect on your life as you’re experiencing it right now. Use a piece of paper and journal your thoughts, or just sit and consider each of the following categories:

  • Your living environment, home, and or personal space where you spend the most time. What needs attention in this space? What needs to be changed or let go of to support you to feel comfortable in your home?
  • Your body, including diet, physical exercise, well-being, and or ongoing sickness, and with ailments you know so well. What needs more attention to be changed or let go of to support you to feel entirely at home in your body?
  • Your relationships, familial, personal, and professional. Where do you need attention, change, or who you need to let go of to feel comfortable in your relationships?
  • Your mind. What feeds you intellectually, spiritually, and creatively? What would you like to change to bring stimulation to your mind? What needs to be let go of for peace of mind?
  • Your Livelihood, including what fulfills you, supports you and contributes to your family and society. Where do you need attention in your livelihood? Where do you need to make a change? What do you need to let go of to feel fully supported by your livelihood?
  • Once you have identified where you need to do something different, make a list of possible alternatives, and include what is stopping you.
  • Then apply a ‘beginner’s mind’ and ask yourself, if not now, when? And consider holding the outcome, not in a success or failure paradigm, but as JUST INFORMATION.
  • Whatever you meet in your mind in this contemplation, hold a space of acceptance for any fear or trepidation around making a change. 

Karuna Training provides safe containers for people to consider their habits of mind around many factors, including trying something new. We are all conditioned by the past, and yet, cultivating a mind of not knowing in everything we do, invites a beginner’s mind approach. In meditation practice, we discover each moment is fresh, and it’s possible to cultivate our lives, like a garden. We are planting seed babies, taking small steps, and growing our confidence in the garden of life. 

Article written by Melissa Moore

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