Setting Intentions for the Life You Wish to Live

Visualizing your garden

Your Life Is a Garden series

Gardening invites you into a state of intention, focus, consistency, and care. Before you start throwing dirt on the ground or sprinkling seed around, first take time to dream - to envision your garden and all the elements of it - the fruits, veggies, flowers, trees. Even the little gnome statue that you love, or shaded bench perfect for drinking a cold lemonade on. Here you have full permission to dream big - don’t hold back from filling your garden with all that you desire, all that would make your garden (aka your life!) feel like paradise to you.

Now, if what you get out of this is the push to actually start gardening, and nothing else, then I love that! Research shows that gardening has many evidence-based benefits to your mental, physical, and social health.

But for the purpose of the metaphor, answer these questions to help you visualize the garden of your dreams and discover your life intentions:

• What is most important and precious to you?

• What are your core values, and what goals follow in these values?

• How can you align your actions and decisions with your values and your goals?

• What do you want to challenge yourself with?

• What kind of work, labor, or activity feels exciting to you?

• What energizes, satiates, or nurtures your body and soul?

  
  

Now, let’s walk through the exercise together. Picture this:

You approach a beautifully carved wooden gate, its doors luminescent, it’s handle shiny and smooth, inviting you to open it. As you push the gate open, a calming whoosh comes over your whole body, and you have the innate sense that everything is at peace. And you know, from a place deep in your being, that this is the garden of your life. You are exactly where you’re meant to be.

Once inside the gate, your senses are deliciously filled with the sounds of chirping birds and buzzing insects, the aromas of sweet rose nectar, dewy moisture on grass, the perfect balance of the warm sunlight resting on your skin, under a cool breeze that awakens your senses.

There’s a path that takes you through the garden. Start walking it - see the patches of land, the flower and vegetable beds, the shady corners, the fruit trees. Let yourself wander, take it all in.

Now, start to see each element as a different part of your life.

Perhaps your family is blooming from the rose bushes; your friendships and community rooted deep next to the beets and carrots; your activism or volunteer efforts swimming about in the lily pond; your education and work blooming from the apple orchard; your creative life splattered in colors across the wildflowers; your home and spiritual practices painting an archway in the hydrangea.

Fill up your garden with the answers that came to mind from the reflection questions above. Really allow your mind to wander. Nothing is too grandiose, too “much”, for this exercise. Your garden overfloweth with all that fills you up.

Bonus tools for setting intentions for the life you wish to live:

• List of values to choose from: https://www.actmindfully.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Values_Checklist_-_Russ_Harris.pdf

  
  

• How to set values-based goals: https://ucebt.com/how-to-use-act-values-and-goals/

  
  

• 11 minute garden visualization guided meditation: https://insighttimer.com/spiritofnorton/guided-meditations/peaceful-garden-11mins