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MMW - December 16, 2017 - Planting and Growing Spiritual Seeds Hello to each of you. We are here, now. We can begin. Today we are asked to speak about "spiritual seeds" that you actively or passively "plant" in your life and how these work. As we do not have a specific term regarding this process, we will continue to use the metaphor of the plant. There are, indeed, "seeds" that one plants as both Personality and Essence that are fertilized, germinated, sprouted, mature, bud, flower, ripen, etc. You have various "gardens" in your life, as well, that could correlate to Centering and Axes, such as your Emotional Garden, your Material Garden, your Intellectual Garden, etc. Today we speak of your Spiritual "Garden" and its "seeds" because these tend to be what you "harvest" most from a lifetime. You have a Material Garden that provides you with your levels of energy, power, resources, and goods, and your Relationship Garden that provides you with your abundance, growth, fulfillment, and evolution, and your Intellectual Garden that provides you with your infrastructure, awareness, experiences, choices and contexts. Your Spiritual Garden rises up from all of this. It is the wholeness that is greater than the sum of its parts. It could be said that your Spiritual Garden is what you ULTIMATELY wanted and needed or extracted/harvested from your life. It can often be fairly easy to know what one is cultivating in terms of the Material, Relationship, and Knowledge Gardens, but it can take time to see and understand what you gained from your life in terms of Spirituality. You can also see when your "gardens" are lacking or weakened or struggling in the Material, Relationship, and Knowledge areas, but it is not always clear how the Spiritual is fairing. This is because the Spiritual Garden CANNOT fail. It is the only "garden" of your life that is not dependent upon the limitations of your time and space incarnated. Because of this, many of you leave the "harvest" for after the life. Even the Oldest of Souls can leave this to the afterlife because she knows it will be done and it will be good and it will show the life in its most beautiful light, even if the life was constant struggle. Because of how this Spiritual Garden works, the older souls tend to put it off and the younger souls tend to cling to it as an escape from the responsibilities of the more temporal gardens. Many religions focus only on the Spiritual Gardens, not as a way to better understand and nurture and feed the other gardens, but as a way to escape the necessity for bettering the other gardens. Your Spiritual Garden may never fail, and always yield the best fruits, but it is entirely dependent upon the whole of the work and care given to all of the gardens. This is yet another reason the older soul tends to leave the "harvest" for after the life because she knows the work of focus and awareness on the life, itself, matters, even when it may not always be obvious. Today we speak in terms of how to understand and gain from this Spiritual Garden while in the life. We offer this up because many of our students are living AS Essence, rather than living only as Personality. When you live only as Personality, it is fair to be lenient in what one can gain from the life in terms of the Spiritual, but when you live as Essence, then you can gain tremendously when you understand and see the "harvest" from your Spiritual "Garden" on a regular basis. What one gains from the Spiritual can often be difficult to put into words or linear language. This is also why it can be so easy for younger souls to hijack the concept of the "Spiritual Garden" as a concept of reward rather than as a concept of mere Truth, Love, and Beauty. The fruits of your Spiritual Garden are always about Truth, Love, and Beauty. There are infinite variations within each of these terms that come from a life and contribute to the harvests of Truth, Love, and Beauty. Each of you tends to focus on both the planting and harvesting of a Spiritual Garden that emphasizes "fruits" of Truth, Love, or Beauty. There will be harvest from each of these, but there is an emphasis. Most of you will have planted your "seeds" without much awareness, but we think that many of our students regularly do the work of "harvest" already within the lifetime, even if you do not realize that is what you are doing. To understand what "seeds" you have focused on for this lifetime, it can be helpful to look at your overall focus or distraction in this life as being on one of these: SELF, THE WORLD, or OTHER/RELATIONSHIPS. If your focus has been on your SELF, as in how to better yourself, improve yourself, evolve yourself, even protect and better serve yourself, be yourself, etc. it is likely that your Spiritual Garden is focused on regularly harvests of TRUTH. The focus or distraction on the self is not meant in terms of selfishness and self-preservation, though it can certainly include those states. For most of our students, the focus on self-development will have been a great part of the life already, but for those who have had to focus deeply on overcoming internal obstacles, struggled to BE themselves, define themselves, free themselves, this focus on the SELF will be immediately clear. For those who are focused on the Self as seed for their Spiritual Garden, the harvest from everything is all about Truth. It is about evolving integrity, authenticity, confidence, and comprehension. For the person whose seeds are planted for the Self, the life will have great cycles of emphasis on checking in on your evolution, questioning the meaning of your actions and contributions and participation, defining and redefining purpose. Your Garden is all about what you gain in terms of Truth. This is the ultimate harvest from your life. Regardless of all of the nuances and variations, this life is lived for TRUTH. If your focus has been on THE WORLD, as in how to better the world, improve the world, evolve the world, how to protect and better serve the world, be in the world, represent the best world you can imagine, it is likely that your Spiritual Garden is focused on regular harvests of LOVE. There is nothing more important than anchoring and spreading more LOVE in this world, increasing the capacity of others for compassion, empathy, healthy living, healthy exchanges and contributions and ownership of responsibility for the delicate and awesome part every one and every thing plays in the ecosystem of existence and life. As you might imagine, even with an emphasis on The World, there would be a necessary element of focus on Self as part of this, but for those who plant Spiritual Seeds of LOVE, this will be immediately clear that this is the harvest you seek from this life. If your focus or distraction is with Relationships or "Others", as in how to better your relationships, the relationships between others, how to improve others, how to protect and better serve others, how to allow room for all of the variations of expression and actions of others, it is likely that your Spiritual Garden is focused on regular harvests of BEAUTY. If you are distracted with having relationships, gaining relationships, healing relationships, repairing them, keeping them, finding them, being in them, navigating them, understanding them, it is likely that you are nurturing all you can in regard to a harvest of BEAUTY. Again, each of you will have variations of harvest from seeds planted from Truth, Love, and Beauty, but each of you will likely find that there is an immediate sense of alignment with that which is your primary garden and primary harvest. For Harvests of Truth, there will be patterns related to questioning the self, meaning, purpose, confidence, growth, etc. For Harvests of Love there will be patterns related to mortality, health, existence, and the world at large. For Harvests of Beauty, there will be patterns related to conflicts, constant efforts for peace, resolution, understanding, common ground, getting along, forgiveness, etc. When you can look at your life in terms of these ULTIMATE HARVESTS, you can gain profound awe for your life in terms of how you have been nurturing such persistent value on levels you may have dismissed or missed. There may be some shorter cycles of emphasis on different gardens over your lifetime, but you will likely see the greater arc of what you have planted and continue to harvest on that larger scale. For example, there will be cycles where your emphasis shifts from The World to Self. There are many reasons this may happen, but it is likely that the shift will return from The Self back to The World. QUICK ASSESSMENT: We ask of each of you to share what you knew or felt immediately as the Primary Harvest of your Spiritual Garden in this life in terms of TRUTH, LOVE, or BEAUTY. Janet: TRUTH UMA: TRUTH Wendymae: TRUTH Bobby: Beauty ViP: Relationships (but I feel my true "center of gravity" may be Self) Luciana: I am in doubt between truth and beauty. Luciana: I can't decide DianeHB: Truth MichaeE: Beauty ViP: Aka beauty/truth Maureen: LOVE... but the others stood out as well. Maureen: So in order... LOVE, TRUTH, BEAUTY If you are in doubt, you may ask yourself: which one takes the most work? Which one is the most frustrating and distracting? Which one often hurts most? ViP: Lol, that's a good one - relationships for sure then Luciana: so I think its beauty Wendymae: I feel like LOVE is the most work, but in all honesty, my main interest in World/Love and Relationships/Beauty is how they related to my growth The reason these questions are relevant is because this is a GARDEN. It is not a delivery service or menu. There is work. Exhausting work. Exhausting demand. Constant reassessment and assessment. It is something you strive to improve and bring to a better state. There are other areas of your life that benefit from this, but that is not the same thing as it being your primary garden. However much the other areas benefit, it is the one that is most distracting, frustrating most work, rather constantly in focus even when you would rather look the other way. Wendymae: TRUTH! For example, many of you will gain tremendously in terms of SELF even though your actual garden is THE WORLD. You cannot help but gain in terms of Self when helping The World. Many of you will focus on The Self AS A AWAY to improve The World. Many of you will focus on Relationships as a way to improve The World and The Self. As you can see, these are not closed systems. But knowing where your emphasis lies in terms of harvest, you can look at your end of the year in a new way. Maureen: For me, this is a little like choosing which child you "like" the best. Bobby: My child is ADHD You can look at what you harvested in terms of Truth, Love, and Beauty. Look at what you grew, what you did, how you did it, how much you did. The Harvest may sometimes look weak, but there is ALWAYS a harvest in terms of a Spiritual Garden. Always. The World is getting better, regardless of the temporary challenges. You are getting better, regardless of your setbacks and frustrations. Your relationships are improving, even if you do not see the proof of this at the moment. This is not a delusional position to take. It is only delusional if you try to impose this view within a limited time frame. There are times when your relationships will suck. The World will collapse. You will be depressed and grieving. These are true events and states that WILL CHANGE, but this has no bearing on the Spiritual elements that are not tied to limitations of time and space. If you wish to practice Manifesting Essence, and continue nurturing living as Essence, you will want to look at your end of the year in terms of this Spiritual Harvest, of the Truth, Love, or Beauty that you did all you could do to grow in your year as you. You are nurturing and growing levels of your life in ways that are often missed or dismissed. This is one way to bring greater sense of yourself as a soul when you look at your life in greater terms. SELF-ASSESSMENT: When you look at your 2017 in light of your nurturing and growing Seeds of Truth, Love, and Beauty, regardless of the painful or pleasurable details of the year, do you see this greater part of you participating in a "Garden" that is so important? Do you feel a shift in awe and appreciation for the part of you that trusts the greater arc of your life and its harvests? Uma: Definitely Bobby: I do. The pattern is glaringly obvious as I've learned more and more. Janet: Oh yes. Certainly ViP: Sometimes - other times it feels like I've taken a wrong turn somewhere, but overall it feels like I'm growing in some kind of pattern DianeHB: Yes Wendymae: Yes there's some areas of my life that really jump out Luciana: I guess. Some relationships got a bit confusing. MichaelE: Absolutely. On all counts. Keep in mind that some harvests are weaker than others, and you cannot "fix" last year. You can only participate more in the care of the next. HOMEWORK: We suggest that each of you consider what you assessed about yourself today and approach your new year with as profound a trust and knowingness as possible in what you are planting for the year ahead. In other words, if your focus is on Self, then go for it. Let it be about your Self and its evolution and meaning and purpose. LET it. Do not force it or command it. Just LET yourself know that this is your garden and it matters that you care for it. Let yourself aim for another harvest of Truth. See if it is different when you have a sense of willing participation. This is the same suggestion for those who determined that their emphasis is on The World, or Relationships. LET yourself plant those seeds, nurture them, and own this garden. Add this new dimension of awareness and participation and willingness and see how your year goes. We will look forward to your reports. We must conclude here for today due to time constraints for Troy, but we will respond through Troy over the week ahead to any further questions posed in a discussion thread in your little community. Good day to each of you. Goodbye, for now.