The cycle of growth

I’m not learning anything new at the moment.

But I am gaining great benefit from re-visiting mindfulness tools that have helped me in the past. (I don’t share anything in my programmes that I don’t also use in my personal practice).

I’ve found this has always been an important way to practice: to apply the approaches I know to new, unknown experiences.

A linear view of learning can make us feel stupid, or a failure, if we have to go back to something we’ve already covered.

But the more I tread the path of a mindful life, the more I understand that there is no such things as ‘the basics’, in the sense of beginning-level practices that we leave behind as we become more advanced.

I learn that in fact there is no forward or backwards, just a deepening further into the wisdom that lives at the centre. This centre is found within ourselves, and within the earth that we’re a part of.

Plants aren’t going backwards when they sprout tiny new shoots every year, over and over again. It’s part of their natural cycle of growth.

My own cycle of growth feels like it’s taking me back to an expansive view of life that I inhabited as a child, one that got covered over by cultural norms that don’t always make room for instinctive wisdom.

Revisiting ‘old’ tools that I’ve used before in my mindfulness practice is powerful. It seems to have the effect of pulling these forgotten threads back together, revealing a bigger picture that’s been hidden away.

Perhaps if we keep going deeper into our cycle of growth, we might find a truth down there in the depths, that we can bring out into the light.