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Cultivating Bliss: 4 Ways to Explore Your Inner Garden, by Debra Moffitt

(Article originally published in The Llewellyn Journal.)

I'll bet that you have a secret garden. You may not realize it, but there's a place within you that holds the seeds for healing your heart and cultivating peace and joy; I call this the secret garden. I first discovered secret gardens during my travels to Europe. They popped in during conversations in French when I was talking with a man about my deep desires and dreams to write. He said, "Keep that to explore in your 'jardin secret'." I remember walking away and scratching my head. "What's a secret garden, anyway?!" I thought. I didn't think much about it until I traveled to an Italian-speaking area of Switzerland, and, in another deep conversation the language was different but the same advice arose. "Keep that to explore in your 'giardino segreto'."

Do I have a secret garden? I wondered. With some research I discovered that secret gardens first sprang up during the Middle Ages, that war-torn, plague-infested time of great social strife and upheaval. They grew behind protected walls where only a few people had keys. Secret gardens were places where monks, seekers, healers, and secret gardeners planted healing herbs, fruit trees, vegetables, and delicate flowers. These secret gardens often held a natural source of water. As I reflected I discovered that secret gardens are perfect symbols for the sacred space within us.

How to Find Your Secret Garden
My secret garden first started to appear to me in dreams. At first it showed up as a desert where nothing much grew, but as I began to cultivate my relationship with my soul-Self (who I call the "inner gardener"), trees in the secret garden of my dreams began to bud. Flowers blossomed. The more I cultivated my relationship with Her, my soul-Self, the more vibrant and live I became and my creative life blossomed. The physical world around me also changed. As I cleaned out my inner junk; weeded the inner garden; and kicked out pests like anger, envy, and jealousy, there was less drama in my life and I began to find more balance and equilibrium.

You can begin to become aware of your own secret garden and transform it into a garden of bliss by cultivating the inner landscape. The inner gardener is the wiser, higher Self who knows what we need and provides it at exactly the right time. The more we align with her, the closer we come to a harvest of joy. Her ways are mystical and magical. That inner gardener speaks to us through intuition, dreams, synchronicity, and symbols. She protects and guides us well when we pay attention, honor her, and act on the wisdom she brings.

Getting to Know Your Inner Gardener
Sometimes we may not recognize the presence of our wise inner gardener. The mind likes to take control and the physical body likes to have its desires met. But the wise inner gardener speaks to us in the still, subtle voice of the spirit and hearing her requires tuning in and aligning with our highest aspirations in order to hear her. She may warn about people not to associate with by bringing a dream or she might speak in a voice that comes through the heart. I have even had her stop me on a mountain path in the Alps as I was about to step on a viper; I felt a strong hand jerk me back, but there was no physical presence around me. My next step was about to fall on the poisonous serpent. A dream the same morning warned me to pay attention, but I ignored it. On a deeper level the serpent, for me, represented the kundalini energy and the need to use it with care and in appropriate ways.

If you'd like to explore your secret garden more and discover your bliss, here are some ways to experiment with:

1. Plant Seeds of Love. Thoughts are like seeds. If we set the intention to plant seeds of love in the inner garden of the spirit, we can begin to consciously cultivate them in daily life through paying attention to the mental dialogue. Are your thoughts kind, constructive, and loving as they go out to yourself and others? You may also want to consciously plant and cultivate seeds of peace, kindness, creativity, courage, and more.
2. Cultivate Your Inner Landscape with Dreams and Symbols. The inner gardener, that wise, divine aspect of our Self, speaks to us through dreams. Often mental chatter and our usual way of reasoning and thinking makes it hard for deeper inspiration to come through. Dreams allow for messages to come through and can bring good guidance. If you use dreams, it's essential to attune to the highest and best. Surround yourself with protective, white light and say a prayer or a mantra of protection. Keep a note pad and pen beside your bed or a recorder and keep tract of the images and scenes that arise. Patiently begin to decode your personal dream symbols. Garden of Bliss explores some ways to do this.
3. Develop a Solid Relationship with Your Inner Gardener. The inner gardener is our intuition. She gives guidance and teaches us the right direction—when we listen and act on what she offers. We are not separate from her, but she may appear in dreams and visions as separate and apart because we may feel we're not good enough or worthy enough to be one with her. She is the spark of the Divine within us; that Divine Self is wisdom itself. Sometimes it's hard to believe this. But when events begin to occur where we receive information, warnings, and guidance from her that turn out to be true and right, we begin to trust her, our soul-Self, more. The more we align with her and act on her guidance, the more that relationship deepens.
4. Work to Stay Grounded. In cultivating the inner landscape and exploring spiritual life, it's easy to become ungrounded. Sometimes we don't want to be connected to this dirty, messy stuff of life, but being grounded is an essential part of doing spiritual work. Some ways to get out of one's head and get one's spirit back into the body include literally getting your hands dirty by potting plants, working in a garden outdoors, weeding a flowerbed, and walking barefooted on the ground. Hiking in a forest will help to bring you into alignment with natural beauty and harmony, and get you into your body.

Article originally published in The Llewellyn Journal. Copyright Llewellyn Worldwide, 2013. All rights reserved.

Over the past few months, I have stopped dreaming (or stopped remembering my dreams), but at the same time, my psychic abilities have really taken off. My perceptions seem to be much stronger and far more accurate. I have been doing a lot of reading on spiritual subjects like chakras, astral projection, etc. I'm wondering if there is a connection between my lack of dreams and my abundance of psychic experiences. What do you think? My birth date is 12-14-66. Thanks! - Wandering Mystic

Dreamchaser:

What is happening to you is quite exciting in my opinion: You are growing spiritually by leaps and bounds.

If you've ever been on a diet, you know that you will lose pounds quickly and then slow down and perhaps plateau for a while. It seems to be that way with our spiritual growth too. Sometimes we hit a plateau where nothing seems to happen, and then suddenly we start to evolve again. Youíve emerged from a plateau, and are evolving spiritually at a good pace again.

You have not stopped dreaming, per se - you have changed what you are doing while you are sleeping. Lately you are going off and being instructed spiritually. You're rehashing what you learned that day and being given information about what to expect next.

Your soul is growing and learning at a fast pace right now, so you are being helped to deal with all these changes while you are asleep. When we evolve that quickly, we often have to deal with physical changes as well. Sometimes, for example, we will not be able to sleep or stay awake, eat or stop eating. It will often go strangely quiet in our heads.

What has happened is your main guide has stepped back, and you are in the process of getting to know your new teaching guides ñ those that come with this new level of spiritual growth. Your body itself has to get used to the new vibrations at this level. Sometimes you will almost feel like you want to rip your skin off because it is so different. You will adjust. Give yourself time.

As a result of being on this new level, you are realizing that you are becoming more aware. Your thirst for knowledge is healthy. You should continue to research and learn about every subject you feel drawn to learn about.

This period of spiritual growth is all about education. You are educating your mind by studying all these subjects. You are educating your soul by learning how to trust this new level of ìknowing.î You are also being educated in how difficult it can be to be keenly ìaware.î

The key word on this spiritual level (or ANY spiritual level, for that matter) is TRUST. Your soul will not guide you in the wrong direction. Just follow what you "know." This not only goes for what you know about yourself, but also what you "know" about others and the outside world.

So to answer your question, yes - there is a connection between you not remembering your dreams anymore, and your psychic abilities taking off.

I wish you continued evolution.

*****

Astrea:

You're on to something when you say you're dreaming but not able to REMEMBER your dreams right now. Sag folks go through periods like this as other parts of the psyche are awakened.

While not remembering your dreams might be connected to the blossoming of your psychic abilities, it seems more likely to me that you've come to an age where you can tap into your own personal resources, which have always been there.

As we grow older and mature and get our lives in better shape, our psychic side begins to emerge much more forcefully. Practical, mundane issues become less important as we become happier, more settled, and more successful.

Then we begin to explore all the things we didn't have enough time to experience and enjoy while we were struggling through boyfriends, weddings, babies, college and wrong jobs and career choices.

Also, for a Sagittarius life begins to take on new meaning at the age of 40. Really, I see that all the time with folks like us; it's almost as if by magic we begin to come into our own on a psychic level. That whole world seems to open up for us as we get to be that age.

I have VIVID memories of those kinds of things beginning to happen differently at forty than they ever had before. That's when our minds begin to perceive the psychic side of life in different and more useful ways.

Certainly during that transition time, it's possible for us to stop remembering our sleeping dreams. Our minds and bodies are overloaded with new inner stimuli, and we can't hold everything in our conscious awareness at the same time. Memories of your dreams will return as soon as you get a better hold on what you're going to do with the abilities you've been given.

If you feel lonely because you can't remember your dreams, try this ritual. Take paper and a pen with green ink, and write down the subjects of the last three dreams that you can remember. It doesn't matter if they're in or out of order - just pick the three you remember as being the most recent.

Light a white candle on the left and a pink candle on the right and say: "Dreamweavers, Angels and Heavenly Spirits, cause the mist to lift from my mind so that my dreams return to me with clarity and beauty."

Pray in your own way for your dreams to return, blow out the candles and fold the paper. Place the paper under a piece of silverware at the right side of the foot of your bed, and your dreams should return to you within a few nights.

Astrea:

Many times in life we hear, "You will always have what you NEED, but not necessarily what you WANT." Your spirit must have needed to experience the feeling of leaving your human body, and the suggestion in the next chapter of Sylvia Brown's book was all it took to get you there.

Even though you hadn't read it yet, your SOUL recognized the title of that chapter as something it had been seeking, and your soul, knowing that you had that reference to read after your experience, got with it and out you went!

While I don't usually recommend her books, Sylvia Brown has a wide reaching and powerful effect on lots of people. A Gemini like you would be able to relate easily to her writing and put it to good use. Synchronicity - you gotta love it!

I like your description of "getting caught." That's exactly what it feels like, isn't it? One minute you're free and hovering above the room, and the next minute, ZAP! back down into your corporeal form you go!

As a little kid, I loved that "feeling of return." With practice, most of the time we can control that event, but sometimes, when our physical ears hear a distracting noise or something else occurs to knock us back into reality, back we go. With practice you will be able to control your return better.

I find it interesting that you were visiting your mother-in-law and not someone in your own genetic family. Evidently, you and your husband got married for reasons that are even deeper than love. His family's interest in "psychic stuff" will nurture your children in such matters and help them to grow into their own abilities.

You'll never have to be concerned that when your daughter visits them, she'll be discouraged from exploring her own psychic life and power. My parents encouraged me to develop my psychic senses in a time when it wasn't nice to even discuss such things in public. Heck, it's STILL not considered a great topic at the dinner table in some families!

Your kids will get to talk about it ALL and ask questions and read and study. This is going to give them such an edge in life! Talk with your husband about how you want to present this to your kiddos, so that you are united in your approach and ready to tell them their experiences are all natural and okay.

A word or two of warning: Geminis often have difficulty staying grounded in REAL LIFE. Don't get so strung out on your ASTRAL life that you neglect what you're doing here on Earth.

You are at the beginning of a long journey to learn where your power really lies. Try to be patient with this process and take your time.