Francis Randall- 02-07-24
Like most children, I began life open and sensitive to the world around me and it felt like I was living in an exciting world of possibilities. However, not all adults I encountered appreciated this sensitivity and openness. Going to school was a terrible shock for me and gradually I learned to protect myself by closing down and developing strategies to avoid humiliation, especially being dyslexic. Spelling was difficult for me. So I was seen as lazy and possibly a bit thick. I started to doubt myself and built strong negative beliefs about school, education, the adult world, and myself. My father became sick with Parkinson's disease and my mother who was 20 years younger than him, drank more and more to cope. My magical early childhood was gone and I began an intense search for understanding and meaning.
Having been brought up in the countryside, I had a deep love for Nature and it remained the one constant in my life as I tried to respond to the world I found myself in. I was very fortunate to meet a lovely old Scottish lady, introduced to me by a friend. She needed help with her garden, so I set about her garden while she began to set about me. She talked about spiritual matters much of which went straight over my head, but I loved her presence and gradually she led me into meditation and became my teacher. Thanks to her I have been meditating ever since. The beginning was difficult, but I persisted.
At the same time, I was getting interested in healing. I was frustrated with negative emotions and mindset and the apparent difficulty in healing them. As magic synchronicity, I was given a book called Focusing, which was about a method developed by a group of Psychologists in Canada. They analyzed what worked in Psychology sessions and came up with a process that involved the client paying attention to the felt sense in their bodies and then naming the emotion or felt sense.
This process often led to the release of the suppressed emotion and insights into the issue being focused upon. In doing this, I had discovered letting go. I found it good, and something one could do while meditating or any time while being in a space where one could relax and pay attention. I became increasingly interested in Healing and Spirituality, I wanted freedom from suffering and to be more loving and creative in my life; I found in this process an immense tool towards this.
It became obvious, that I needed to take responsibility for my state of being, to stop being a victim of my circumstances. As I did this, I began to open to my body, to the people around me, and to life. My chronic shyness began to dissolve and I was gradually becoming able to speak out in groups of people. As my fear and anxiety began to dissolve, I was able to relax more into meditating. When our protective barriers start to come down, we feel more at ease to engage deeply with the world around us, which includes our bodies, the bodies of others, and life itself. Of course, it is not always plain sailing, and in my case, there have been many ups and downs, blind alleys, and deep resistance to deal with.
What I have concluded is that to work consciously with Nature in an effective way requires us to acknowledge who we truly are. It is the spiritual path of awakening that opens us to connection and alignment with the oneness of Life. This is very important when we are seeking to co-create with Nature. As our self-awareness increases we can appreciate that we have a truly wonderful physical body, an energetic, or etheric body, an emotional mental body, or astral body, and our spiritual body or soul. There is often a lot of disturbance and a lack of harmony between these bodies.
The Healing Garden Project is working with Nature to heal ourselves, restoring us to a state of balance and harmony and live more creative and fulfilling lives. The Garden of Eden is all around us. The magic of life flows through and gives us the power to create. The healing garden project is our adventure, offering, and demonstration, of how we learn to co-create with Nature and in doing so how we heal ourselves and our relationships with each other and Nature.
I will be moving to Spain on the 9th of July and will start to live a new chapter in my life. I am intending to record this in writing and video and share this with whoever is inspired by our experiences. We hope we can inspire and enable people to enrich their own lives and develop a creative relationship with Nature.
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