One spring I volunteered at a botanical garden, spending many days uprooting what to my untrained eye looked like lovely flowers and plants, because they were “non-native.” This particular garden cultivates only indigenous plants, so any errant seeds that have the misfortune to blow in and bloom are routinely removed
I found myself apologizing to the blossoms I pulled, innocent flowers who happened to settle in the “wrong” location. And I began to contemplate how much of our sense of borders and boundaries trickles down to everything we express as a species. While I’m not a horticulturist, my sense of deep ecology evolved out of my own healing journey.
Living Beyond the Lawn
Growing up in suburban America, I observed fairly rampant homeowner disgust with the dandelion, scourge of suburbia’s well-manicured lawns.
Much later, I discovered that dandelion is one of the most healing herbs available to humanity, offering itself in abundance wherever we may dwell. It’s a supreme liver tonic, known to help detoxify the body’s “processing plant.” In Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), the liver equates to anger. If you want to release that pent-up rage in a healthy way, the remedy is probably available, free and easy, right in your own backyard.
Dandelion can act as de facto compost, gently surrounding and helping to decompose back into rich loam that which no longer serves. Yet we curse the weed and uproot it, spray poison to keep the green carpet unsullied. When we can stop “livin’ for the lawn,” focusing predominantly on the external, and make the subtle shift from ego mind to Universal Mind, we see with great clarity the incredible gifts all around us. Our teammates are everywhere, in the animal, plant and mineral kingdoms — if we have eyes to see.
Reimagining Inclusivity
As we move ever deeper into our collective rebirth process, we’ll be releasing people and places that no longer resonate with our lives now, and preparing to welcome in the new. Doing this with lovingkindness is our mandate. It’s a ripe moment to ask, who or what in my life seems like an outsider? Am I willing to look again, to enlarge the lens, to see beyond imaginary borders, to become inclusive rather than exclusive?
The Dandelion Principle says that where some see a weed, others see an herbal ally; a tonic not a toxic.
Where in your life is the medicine you need staring you in the face, masked as an undesirable…and all you need to do is shift your perception?
Below are seven practical steps to enlarge the lens this spring (fall, for our southern hemisphere allies): to slow down and look with the eyes of wonder, like a child. You’ll find many more on my mp3/CD, What You Need to Know Now: A Road Map for Personal Transformation:
- Keep a journal. Buy a beautiful blank book and a pen that feels comfortable in your hand. Then allow yourself to write whatever and whenever you want. No one else need ever read it unless you choose to share, so send the censor packing! Journaling is like ingesting dandelion leaves with your pen — a great way to purge emotions and discover what really matters to you. And writing by hand is very different from writing on a digital device.
- Dance your evolutionary process. Do you instinctively sway as you talk, or dance around the room when you get excited? Express your change process as flowing movement. Maybe it’s yoga, or tai chi, or free-form dance.
- Make art. Are you a natural with a paintbrush or clay? Splash your emotions onto canvas, pour them into a mold, sketch them into being. Remember, this is art from the heart: done for the sole/soul purpose of enlarging your own vision.
- Sing! Is your voice your most powerful expressive tool? If you love to sing but don’t know any songs, make up nonsense words to tunes you like, and sing them — in public. This is also a fabulous way to break free of the “What will people think?” trap.
- Be in Nature. Sit by moving water. Sit inmoving water. Sing while sitting in a stream!
- Prepare a meal that is as aesthetic as it is nutritious. As you combine ingredients, imagine that you are cooking up a grander vision for your life.
- Hush. Spend a day, alone or with others, in total silence.
© Copyright March 2021 by Amara Rose. All rights reserved.
About the Author:
Amara Rose, Managing Editor of Ascension Lifestyle, is widely published in health, business, lifestyle, and new thought magazines, both digital and print. Visit LiveYourLight.com, where you can also subscribe to her monthly e-newsletter, What Shines.
This month, approximately 75 countries worldwide will create an annual illusion: saving time. We move the hands of our clocks ahead, and think we’ve harnessed the sun. In the U.S., our participation begins at 2 am on Sunday, March 14th.
Holding the both/and
There are many effects or influences occurring that we can observe in the world now.
Thoughts, influences, and experiences shape our perceptions. If we are unawares of how we are aligning, or entraining to anything, then we may unknowingly behave as the creators of those influences wish us to behave. Marketing and advertising have achieved untold levels of leverage over human consciousness via digital means. We know that via documentaries such as “The Social Dilemma.” What we need to become even more aware of is how we are influenced or imprinted on other levels of our mind, even in our own bodies. Entrainment, resonance, and imprinting is the way mammals operate and learn from each other. Unfortunately, these beautiful traits are now being used against humanity.
Witnessing the chaotic patterns and disintegration of patterns in our world now is difficult. So many seem so hypnotized, or plain lost. Millions have no other concern other than simply surviving. Did we really want it to be this way? Our understanding of how human consciousness works and interacts is the key to extricating ourselves. Creation is born out of chaos and resonance by informed choice, arrived at by meditation/spiritual hygiene, critical thought, and practical action, is necessary to reverse the direction we are now finding our world going towards. The disintegration of the old order must continue, even as there seems to be no new framework to rely upon to replace it. The old consciousness is simply unable to offer any solution to the problems it has created.
Lastly, fastidiously monitor your interactions and usage of electricity and technology. Currently the Dual-Headed Gods are Science (orthodox) and Technology (digital), but they are false gods. How they came to dominate our world is a story for another time. Our task for now is to take responsibility for allowing it to happen thus far by compassionately understanding how we have been sleepwalking with it for so long…and then taking the necessary steps to change ourselves, and by extension, create the potential world we would all like to create and inhabit. Where everyone is healthy, where everyone thrives, where loving kindness, cooperation and creativity are paramount.
We are in the midst of a struggle for our future, the future of countless species, and indeed future of this Planet. Much is at stake. Even so, there are very good reasons that we are at this juncture, and it is first and foremost an opportunity to remember what is essential about us, and all of Life.
I have been noticing and observing that the predominant preoccupation with the Age of Science and Medicine is to classify micro-components of the natural world as hostile to human biology, when in fact our biology exists in a symbiotic relationship with trillions of bacteria and other organisms. There is mounting evidence that when we introduce toxins of any type into the natural order, these microorganisms will attempt to rid themselves of the toxicity, and in turn, this may appear in biology as illness, or dis-ease. When this happens, it should alert us that something has changed in the equilibrium, the balance of Nature within and without. Instead, we treat the manifestation of illness as an invader, mercilessly and coldly attacking us and killing some of us. The only question that remains is to identify and remove the sources of toxicity, whether it be in our air, water, food, or within our minds and emotions.
We can no longer afford this sort of indulgence, not when we face multiple challenges in simultaneity. Even though the lockdowns during 2020 seemingly provided a brief respite, the collapse of the ecosystem is still accelerating. The Pandemic of 2020 has captivated most of human focus, drawing away attention to the looming crisis of the collapse of capitalism as we’ve known it, and the poverty that is being created because of it. There is a stated desire by the world’s most influential persons to establish a single digital transaction system to replace the currencies and through a digital “smart” infrastructure, manage most aspects of every human being’s life in the near future. Is this what we really want, or need?
Challenge your own assumptions. Protect yourself and your loved ones from over-exposure to artificial EMF’s. Buy a water filter for your home. Learn deep breathing techniques, and perhaps grow a small veg garden. Dance more, make love…to everything. Meditate, reflect, spend time in Nature. Self-care is essential…always!
Do you remember the sixties? They say if you do, you weren’t there. Sex drugs and rock ‘n’ roll… “Turn on, tune in and drop out”, mantra of LSD Guru, Timothy Leary. The psychedelic world of Bohemian counterculture flourished in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury and New York’s Greenwich Village. Each coast had its defining generational event, the 1967 Summer of Love in Golden Gate Park, and Woodstock in ‘69. It was a time of rebellion and idealism. “Hair” opened on Broadway in April of 1968, awakening the collective consciousness to the “Dawning of the Age of Aquarius” when “Peace will guide the planets and love will steer the stars.”
“The rebirth is the organic flowering of the revolution. Just because we cannot fix the world as it is, does not mean we cannot make the world a better place. Our vision of the perfect future is precisely what creates the necessary frequency shift that will trigger the genetic forking of our species. It will happen because it must happen, but we must still create that happening. This is the paradox.”
Barbara Hand Clow writes, “Cosmic light reaches Earth in 2020. Miraculously, at the exact moment of the Winter Solstice, December 21, 2020, Jupiter conjoins Saturn in zero degrees Aquarius trine the Pleiades, the dawning of the Aquarian Age.”
