THE GARDEN'S PEACE

 

 

    For the past week, the house behind my house has had guest visitors who have been congregating in the back patio and engaging in lively conversation from 10.30 pm to 2.30 am. Their status as visitors provided them with the ignorance to avoid the neighborhood regulations to respect the quiet of the neighborhood after 10.00 pm. In addition, these guests would also smoke marijuana during the afternoons and at night. Because my house was directly in line with the backyard patio, I would receive the noise and the smoke through my open windows.
    To get to my windows in the back of my house, the noise and the smoke had to travel through my backyard garden. When I look at the avocado trees, the rose bushes, the mint, the jalapeños, the kale, the kabocha squash, the zucchini squash, the lettuce and the tomatoes never changed. They did not become angry at the noise or the smoke. They did not try to build walls to keep out the noise and the smoke. They grew. They simply continued to surrender to the loving universe, in order to manifest the greatest good.
    The greater good of my garden makes me discover why I am not in peace when I think of the visitors in the house behind me. Dr. David Hawkins exposes the different ways I am reacting to my visitors, including suppression, expression and escape.
    First, suppression is the manner in which I push feelings down or pretend the feelings do not exist. Consciously, I do no want to be bothered by my feelings. And so I deny them. Through my years of living, I also realize I do not know another way to handle these feelings. As a result, I suffer through the feelings and I try my best to live. However, the feelings build and build until the feelings become pressures that seek release, because I have not acknowledged them and released them before. The suppressed feelings, in the pressure, are felt as irritability, mod swings, tensions in the muscles, headaches, cramps, insomnia, and other somatic conditions.
    I thought what I was feeling about the noisy and smoky visitors. First, I was suppressing the feelings, and so I tried to deny that I was feeling them. In denying them, I was then projecting my neighbors as bad neighbors. In this projection, I was trying to create an enemy and put blame upon them because they were not able to act as good people.
    Dr. Hawkins states that suppression is the cause of my anxiety about the noisy and smoke visitors, and expression is the cure to my anxiety. In expressing my feelings to other neighbors or my family, I believe I am freeing myself from my feelings. However, the opposite is true. In expressing my feelings about my noisy and some neighbors, I am growing my feelings and giving it greater energy. Instead, I should be channeling my feelings into creativity (which I am trying to do with this essay).
    Fortunately, I am not trying to avoid the feeling by drinking, drugs or being a workaholic. Instead, my garden encourages me to discover surrender. To surrender to a feeling is to let go of it, which deprives it of energy. Without energy, the feeling decompresses and dissolves and I become happier and healthier.
    In the presence of peace of the garden, I am able to try and surrender myself to the river of the universe, which flows without judgment as it passes through the gardens of the world.

*Hawkins, David. (2012). Letting go; The Pathway to surrender. Carlsbad, California. Hays House, pages 11-14.

 
   
       
   
    

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