A Flower Never Starts As A Flower – A Metaphor For Growth

Hello!

For the next three weeks I want to provide you with some encouragement on your path towards creating whatever it is that you’re looking to create in your life.

Because the reality is, when we’re going somewhere we’ve never been, when we’re trying to create something we’ve never had, and when we’re looking to change our lives in ways we’ve never changed them before - the journey can be pretty discouraging and can feel hopeless a lot of the time.

It’s really common for us to have an expectation of how our growth journey is going to look, what things ‘should’ be happening as signs of our progress, and to feel like when that idealized version of the journey isn’t manifesting that this means that we aren’t ever going to get where we want to go, that we can’t have what we want or that reality has gone ‘wrong’ in some way.

It’s incredibly common to feel like what we have in this moment ISN’T a part of the progress towards what we want - when what we have looks so DIFFERENT from what we want.

When we want a deeply connected relationship and find ourselves very single.

When we are wanting a fulfilling career but are currently working a job we hate or when we don’t even have a job.

When we are trying to heal our bodies in some way or to create a level of health we’ve never experienced and rather than seeing obvious progress forward it feels like we’re taking one step forward and two steps back over and over again.

It can really feel like we have no idea what we’re doing, or if what we’re doing is working. It can feel like we’ve tried all there is to try and there’s no way forward. It can feel like all of our efforts are being wasted because every time we try to move forward or take steps, we find that what we try fails, doesn’t turn out how we thought it would or simply doesn’t give us the results we were expecting.

Over the next weeks I want to hopefully provide you with a little context around why the journey into the unknown is so difficult, and I want to give you a metaphor that I hope will be an anchor you can use to keep you grounded in the truth of what any growth/healing/transformation journey is going to look like.

Because as much as it may feel like it, most of the time our journey isn’t *totally* unique to us, and the path of growth actually IS a little more predictable than we may think at first.

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The Flower Metaphor

No beautiful bloom ever started its life as a flower.

No rose started its life with those silky, fiery red petals spiraling around one another.

No Frangipani began its existence emitting its beautiful tropical vanilla scent from the pearly white pillows delicately extending out from its core.

No cherry blossom was ever ‘popped’ into existence ready to uplift the spirits of all those who pass by, promising the new season of growth and harvest.

Rather, every flower that you’ve ever seen started as a humble seed.

It started as a seed that looked absolutely nothing like the flower it would one day grow to become.

That seed was then planted deep in the earth. Then via the nourishing darkness of the underground experience, that seed would eventually produce a root. One little shoot that would venture down DEEPER into the earth rather than coming up to the surface. That root started to multiply its arms, reaching out for more streams of sustenance and more stability for its future incarnations.

Eventually this seed started to grow a shoot with upward trajectory. It grew slowly, sending a part of itself up towards the surface of the earth - eventually breaking through to finally see the light of day.

This shoot was incredibly vulnerable. It had little fortitude and little protection - it could have been a possible victim to all kinds of destruction - storms, infestations of bugs or mold, a mindless foot or a hungry beast. So long as it wasn’t being destroyed, it was working to keep strengthening itself - thickening its circumference. Developing weapons of defense like needles or toxic chemicals. This phase was rather precarious and challenging for the plant, as it moved from its childhood form that was protected from the elements to a more adult expression.

From here the shoot started to grow bark, leaves and other accessories according to its genetic blueprint. It continued to set its foundations for a healthy life cycle - leaves to collect more sunshine for more energy. Bark for more protection from the elements. The shoot matured into a full blown stem/trunk, developing new capacity to support more complex life.

After the plant had reached this level of fortitude, it then started to produce a bud. A tight little ball of potential nestled in and amongst its other leaves. 

That bud stayed a bud for a while. It was doing all of its growth and expansion on the inside and none of this would have been visible to the outside onlooker. All we would have seen in this time was a tight sphere. Packed with life that was as yet unknown to us. But within that packed sphere was SO much movement, so much growth, so much building and transformation. 

Eventually, after many weeks, months or possibly years, that bud started to open. Slowly but surely, we began to see all the culmination of all the phases that had passed before that enabled this beautiful expression to finally materialize.

The blossoms blossomed. The beautiful spirals wafting their aroma out to the world emerged. The colors popped. We got to witness the poetry of the miracle of life embodied in one of nature's most fascinating creations.

We have the awareness that this journey was a long one, with many phases and stages that looked absolutely nothing like this blossom.

The journey from seed to bloom is the PERFECT metaphor for our life, our growth and what healing looks like.

You Are The Flower - Or At Least The Potential Flower

Looking at the journey from seed to bloom, we can observe that *most* of the time spent in the creation of that beautiful flower was spent in a way that wasn’t directly or obviously creating the flower. Most of the phases that the plant had to pass through didn’t have anything to do with producing petals, emitting a scent or displaying its stamen for fertilization.

Rather, the plant spent most of its time building roots, building a strong core, building leaves and other parts of the plant system needed for collecting nourishment from the earth and sunlight from above to be converted into energy. It spent most of its time growing that flower inside of a protective shell, keeping it from the rest of the world.

This is EXACTLY what a growth journey looks like for humans.

As hard as this may be to accept, when we are on a path towards somewhere we’ve never been before, we have to realize that what we expect the path to look like is likely not going to be reflected back to us in real reality. We have to realize that expecting our steps to look like the eventual outcome is going to hold us back from taking the TRUE steps we need to take - because the path is usually not going to LOOK like the end goal until we are much, much closer to that end goal. We are going to expect that there's a direct route where each step is obviously contributing to the end goal, without realizing that there will be many steps we have to take that build peripheral strength or that help us process related aspects of the journey that ultimately allow for our outcomes but don’t again look to be directly related.

We’re going to expect a straight line, when we’re actually going to get a massive squiggle.

We’re going to expect a step or a few steps that OBVIOUSLY take us to the final outcome, and we’re going to get a bunch of seemingly random steps that look nothing like the end goal.

We’re going to expect a logical progression and we’re instead going to get multiple side journeys and tasks that seem irrelevant or even like a distraction - until they don’t.

In other words, we’re going to have to learn to trust the process for what the process ACTUALLY is, and we have to learn to let go of our ideas about what the process ‘should’ be. 

In other less flowery language (pun intended) what we have to realize is that growth and change is almost always going to take us in directions we had no idea we had to go. It’s going to require us to build strength in areas we didn’t even know existed or that we didn’t realize were weak within us. It’s going to ask us to build foundations for much longer than we think we want to. It’s going to ask us to do things that seem unrelated to the ultimate goal. It’s going to ask us to have faith in our steps and to learn from all of our steps instead of assuming that anything that doesn’t take us directly to our goal was wrong or a waste of time.

The actual journey of growth is one of internal development more than anything else. The ultimate outcomes that we reach are amazing and great, but getting to those outcomes is generally speaking all about an inner journey we went on. 

The ultimate goal is usually a result of shifting so much within ourselves, changing our foundations, building our stability, learning to see life in a specific way and learning how to work with and through failure. 

We get to the end by, oftentimes, letting go of trying to BE AT THE END, and really digging into where we ARE in this moment. So that we can let ourselves be given all we NEED from this moment that will serve us in our eventual expansion and expression.

A Practical Human Example

Alright, enough metaphor, let’s look at a practical example to hopefully make this land a little easier.

I’m currently employed as a life coach/blogger/video maker.

This life career path that I’m walking - it’s something that deeply fulfills me and makes me feel like I’m ‘living my purpose.’ More than that, I feel that what I’m doing is supportive of others and that’s exactly the GOAL I had when I first started trying to figure out ‘what I wanted to do’ with my life.

Now, as a young adult, back in the early ‘ots’, the technology to do what I’m doing now didn’t exist. There was no such thing as an online life coach/content creator. 

There were counselors and psychologists. There were authors of books. Blogging was just starting. There were pastors and spiritual guides that worked with people. There were traveling evangelists. People who put on conferences. There were many options for guiding people through tough transitions or helping them understand themselves a little better - but what I’m doing now in its full form 100% did not exist.

I started my journey towards the career I have now via studying holistic nutrition in my spare time as I worked in health food stores and kitchens. These steps look NOTHING like the life I’m living now - I don’t work in the field of food or nutrition  - but all that studying, knowledge and practical experience working one on one with people  not only gave me information I needed to help me work on my own health (which would eventually enable me to do what I’m doing now) and it gave me a path to start walking. 

I got deeply into yoga and studying the energetic layers of this life's existence. I got my YTT certification in 2010, and never taught a professional yoga class.

I then transitioned to an online career - first starting by blogging for an up-and-coming company, which slowly morphed into community management and content creation for the business as a whole. Which then led to me knowing how to run an online business, which led to me writing my first e-book, starting to make videos, beginning to work one on one with clients, starting a membership community - and the rest unfolded from there.

All the while, I knew I wanted to be helping and supporting people - and that is what I was doing, all the while. And through it all, I kept collecting skills, I continued to refine what it was that I was good at, where I was most effective, where I wasn’t and shifted my work accordingly. There were SO many steps between graduating from high school with no money for a degree and no real sense of what I was going to do with my life practically - just knowing I loved alternative health and healing - and ending up where I am now.

And MOST of the path from where I started to where I am now didn’t LOOK like where I am now.

Cooking in kitchens didn’t look like this. Working at a health food store didn’t look like this. Having a personal blog that got no traffic didn’t look like this. Coaching people on nutrition didn’t look like this. Even the beginning of my online career and the beginning of this business I now run didn’t look like it does now.

Because again, what I am doing now wasn’t even an option for most of my journey here. It didn’t exist!

So how did I navigate all of this? How did I get here? How did I figure this out?

Let’s take a break here and come back next week for the practical, nuts and bolts tips for this whole growth journey process, shall we?

<3

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