Mental Garden Cultivation: Preparing for Growth

 The 3 questions you could ask yourself to cultivate your mental garden this spring:

For Weed and rock removal- What is getting in the way or growing over what I want to grow? 

To Loosen and till the soil- What am I holding onto that is making growth hard because I don't want to change or it seems scary?

For adding nutrients- Where am I needing some encouragement or inspiration? 

 If you're feeling like it, answer all three questions, but my challenge is to just answer one. And with that answer, do something to cultivate your own mental garden this week. 

Transcript

Brittany: 0:00

Hey mama. Welcome to the Inside Out Mamas podcast. I'm Brittany Turley, mom of six, and I know what it's like to feel stuck and overwhelmed trying to be the perfect mom, but everything changed for me when I learned that small changes on the inside can bring big results on the outside. Each week I will share simple, yet powerful inside shifts or outside tips that can transform your approach to mothering, helping you thrive from the inside out. Ready to ditch the mom guilt and enjoy this season of life. You are in the right place. It's spring, the time of year when things are coming to life again. I love this time of year. I love all the seasons for different reasons, but I think I get a little more excited in Spring just because of all the new growth. Also because I like to garden and as a gardener, it's an exciting time as you prepare your beds and your pots and your ground for planting and just start dreaming and looking forward to all the things that you will grow. This year. When I was. Going through college each summer. When I came home, I worked at a garden center and it just really made my love for plants and growing things take off. And it was just so fun to be constantly around growth, working there. So when I had a house of my own, I was excited to put a garden in. I love gardening, all plants, but I think growing food is especially rewarding'cause you get. Growth, and you also get yummy things to eat, but whether you like flowers or food to get to the growth point, there are things that have to be done to prepare. The gardening word for that is cultivate. So the definition of cultivate is to prepare. It is also to foster the growth of, so when we're talking about gardening, when we cultivate for gardening, we are preparing the ground. We are working the soil so that things are ready for planting seeds. This usually involves. Three things, removing weeds and rocks, loosening the dirt or tilling the ground, and then adding nutrients like compost. So this week as I was thinking about cultivating my garden beds in preparation for planting soon. I started thinking about how we can apply this to our minds. What if this spring we also cultivated our minds. What if we removed the weeds and loosened to the dirt and added nutrients? What would that do for our growth? So today, I'm gonna just dive into that a little bit with the gardening analogy. If we're cultivating our mental. Ground. The first thing we would do was remove the weeds or rocks. This would be like letting go of unhelpful thoughts. Maybe you're holding onto resentments or those resentments are getting in the way. Maybe Removing distractions and removing doubts. So a question we could ask ourself to remove the weeds from our mental garden would be what is getting in the way or growing over What I want to grow? Before I had kids, I really enjoyed exercising. I enjoyed it to stay in shape. I enjoyed it to be physically strong, to do fun activities. I liked to do like mountain biking and hiking. I enjoyed it for the mental relief that it was. I can't tell you how many good runs I got out of bad boyfriends, and I just loved having that be a part of my every day. The mental stimulation and the physical stimulation of exercising every day I felt like was something really good for me. But when I started having kids, it became a lot harder to exercise. I still wanted to exercise, but I will let my mothering and my household responsibilities get in the way of doing that. I thought me wanting to exercise was being selfish because I wanted to exercise to lose baby weight, and because I enjoyed it and because it helped me. And so I had this thought that it was a selfish thing and that maybe it wasn't the best thing for my family because it was just really serving me. Like I'm just thinking of myself. I'm not thinking about my kids or what needs to happen here at our home. I'm prioritizing myself over the important things, and I had these thoughts about me as a mom exercising that were really getting in the way of me being able to exercise. But thankfully it didn't take me long to realize that that thought was a weed and it had to go. So for me, I had to get rid of the weed, thought that exercising was selfish and. Not serving my family. The next thing we do when we're cultivating our garden is to loosen the dirt. We do that so the roots can grow easily, so water can get into the soil down further and isn't just staying on the surface. And we can liken this to opening up our minds and our hearts and being willing to change even if it's uncomfortable. You can actually plant seeds in hard ground. You just poke a hole in and then put the seed in there, but it's just a lot harder for them to grow. In fact, as I've been growing carrots, I've been adding sand to my soil because here the soil is a lot harder because I was noticing that my carrots weren't getting very long because the ground was just too hard for them to grow deep and long. So loosening up the dirt for my carrots was actually really important for them So a question to ask yourself to loosen the dirt in your mental garden would be What am I holding onto that is making growth hard because I don't want to change, or it seems scary. This could look like being willing to let go of judgments of yourself or others or your kids. This could look like allowing yourself to try new things, even if it might not work out. This could. Be letting go of the idea that something can only be done one way. My hardened soil was holding onto the way I used to work out and not wanting that to change. I used to be able to work out on my own. It was my own time, and I'd go for a run or I'd do workout videos or I'd do just workout at home. but when I opened up my mind to change, I discovered ways I could work out and still be the mom I wanted to be. I became okay with the fact that it would take longer to get myself ready and my kids ready for me to workout. Then I would actually get to do the workout. That one actually took a while for me to be okay with, but. It was a reality. I also realized that I could go for a run with them and a jogger, so I wasn't limited to evenings when my husband was available to be with the kids so I could go for a run that was different than how I did it before, but I got actually a better workout because now I was pushing some weight. I also discovered that I can include my kids in my workout by doing a workout video at home that they could follow along with. And that not only was that good for me, it was good for them'cause I was modeling, taking good care of my body and it was good for them to get their wiggles out for as long as they followed along. The final thing to do when cultivating a garden is adding nutrients like compost to make the soil richer, to feed it. For a mental garden. This could look like feeding your mind encouragement. A question you could ask yourself is, where am I needing some encouragement or inspiration? You could think about areas that maybe are hard or painful to think about and how you could add encouragement or inspiration there. Maybe you ask a friend for help on. Getting encouragement or ask them for encouragement or find some inspiring media to help you, a book, a podcast, a quote. Things really changed for me when I realized that I was worth investing time into caring for myself and also that me. Being healthy, physically and mentally was more valuable to my family than having me available to them all the time and not taking care of myself. So I added the nutrient of encouraging and being proud of myself for taking time to take care of me, which also benefited my family. As we are mentally cultivating, we are preparing our mind and our heart to grow. We might be growing something new this year, like a new habit, a new idea, or a new belief. By cultivating our minds, we allow growth to happen. Now because I believe small changes on the inside bring big results on the outside. Each week on my podcast, I'm going to give you a small change challenge, something small that you could do throughout the week if you choose, that could end up bringing big results to your life. So the small change challenge for this week is to answer one of the three mental cultivating questions. The mental cultivating questions are what is getting in the way or growing over what I want to grow? What am I holding onto that is making growth hard'cause I don't want to change, or it seems scary. Where am I needing some encouragement or inspiration? If you're feeling like it, answer all three questions, but my challenge is to just answer one. And with that answer, do something to cultivate your own mental garden this week. I will put these questions in the show notes if you're like me and need a visual to refer back to. You can look there to see these three questions. Remember, small changes on the inside. Bring big results on the outside. Thank you for joining me for another episode of Inside Out Mamas. My hope is that our time together inspires more feelings of peace, confidence, and joy in your mama journey. Be sure to subscribe so you never miss a show. And if you're ready to take these insights even deeper, head over to brittany turley coaching.com to check out my digital workshop. Designed to help you reduce daily mom overwhelm without adding to your to-do list. Thanks for listening. And remember, small changes on the inside, bring big results on the outside.