Gardening! (How it feels to really heal)

👋 Hey, I’m Rachel! I’m a content creator, yoga teacher, and coach, and a late-diagnosed neurodivergent woman - ADHD a few years back, and I strongly suspect Autism too, so I choose to self diagnose for the time being, as AuDHD. I’m also a proud mum of three (all ND as well!).

Over the past five years, I’ve been on a deep spiritual awakening - one that’s reshaped how I live, parent, and show up in the world. I’m sober, I’m open-hearted, and I don’t hold back from sharing the messy, the magical, and everything in between.

On this podcast, I bring it all together: life, neurodivergence, and spirituality — with honesty, curiosity, and a sense of humour. Expect unfiltered and unscripted chats and inspiring guests, too. Check out my offerings and connect with me below!

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Transcript

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Conscious but grounded is a podcast exploring the intersection of neurodivergence and spirituality, high vibe living, while staying rooted in the very real challenges of life as a neurodivergent mom. Here I ask the big questions like, how do we connect to the universe while keeping our feet firmly on the ground? How do we honor our sensitivity, creativity, and unique wiring in a world that isn't always built for us? Expect honest, unscripted conversations, personal reflections, and inspiring guest episodes with spiritual teachers, healers and neurodivergent voices. This is a space for truth, humor, spirituality, and practical wisdom, so you can feel more connected, grounded, and at peace in your own skin. Let's dive in. Welcome back to Conscious But Grounded. This is a podcast about spirituality in the real world through the lens of me, Rachel. I'm a neurodivergent mom of three, and the reason I say there we're neurodivergent first is because I'm just currently in the last couple of years just really processing that and in the last couple of months really processing another level of that. With the exploration that I may be autistic as well as A DHD prominently, A DHD, but with a touch of that, the autism. I say that. Jokingly, but I know that it's, it's not a joking matter and also it's just my reality. And so the last few episodes have very much been about that. Um, and today I'm walking the dog. That's why I sound a bit breathy. Uh, I wanted to talk about gardening and I wanted to talk about how it feels. To really heal, and I wanted to talk about sacred timing, divine timing, and I wanted to talk about how you can't rush things. And so all of those things together, you have to trust the universe and it's divine timing. So I'll give you some context for the metaphor, I guess, of gardening. So for years, going back to when we lived in Manchester in a little terrace, and I bought my first few pots of pinks, which is Dithers, which is, uh, they're called pink pinks, colloquially, I guess if that's the right word. Um, and I bought, I think I bought myself a book called The Virgin Gardener. I was in my twenties. And I was forcing train. This isn't, look, there's nothing wrong with this. The attempt that you make at sobriety, the attempt that you make at gardening, the attempts that you make at X, Y, Z, it's not like they're failed attempts. It was your first dip, right? So I was making my first dip in gardening in my twenties, and I put the pot, I read about what's the easiest thing to do to start with. And in this book, the Virgin Gardener, it said, get some dehi. They're very hardy. You can snip them with some scissors when their flowers are going over and they'll just come again. Really pretty, uh, and easy. I seem to remember. They smell nice, although they probably don't have a smile at all and I'm just making it up in my head. But anyway, they were good, all rounder. And so that's what I did. And they sat on my windowsill and I managed it. It was manageable. Um, and let's kind of fast forward to now. I live in a house that used to be a farm. We've got about an, I know our garden's really big, it's about half an acre, um, with a polytunnel and stuff like that, and an immediate back garden. We've had to landscape our land quite severely with diggers and so on because it was a farm and it filled with rubble, uh, and it was derelict and so on. Um, and my husband is the farmer, and that's what I say all the time. That's my go-to. My husband's the farmer. I wish I was a farmer. I wish I'm the one that, you know, cooks the vegetables that he brings in. Um. It is not our first attempt of vegetables either. We used going back to the same days in Manchester probably when Stan was, sorry, when Arthur was born 15 years ago, we had an allotment and I used to dig it over, heavily pregnant. I remember this old guy saying, just be careful doing that. You pregnant. Are you heavily pregnant? And I loved. The feeling of like digging things up, getting my hands in the soil. However, I could not cope when I'd take half a day to, or a full day to like dig over this piece of land, get some seeds, put the seeds in, and then to come back, I don't know, a few weeks, a few a month or whatever like later, later on, and see that all of your seeds and all of your baby plants and stuff had been eaten by birds or slugs or whatever. I could not cope with it. I was just like, are you fucking kidding me? And so this isn't metaphor in itself for like the type of personality that I am and probably an insight into my struggles. Like, you know, Adam was very much, it's just part of gardening. Like you've just gotta shrug it off and like get on with some. And I was just like devastated, like, Nope, that's it, I'm done. I cannot do that. I cannot do that. Like I can't work for, you know, blood, sweat, and tears for a day, and then it's just destroyed and you just get on with it. And so again, I walked away from it several times. Several times, dipping my toe in the pond of gardening, and several times coming away. Go in 10 use for me. Also, I have this out of sight, out of mind, which is object permanence, which is very neurodivergent, which is like if the garden or whatever is not immediately in front of you. So I coat like I will forget about it. So I coped really well in Manchester when we had a little terrace and a little garden in the back and then a few pots on the front. The allotment was outta sight out of mind. Um. And where we are now, our polytunnel is out of sight, out of mine. Okay. So Adam will say, why haven't you been up to the Polytunnel? There's like stuff rotten up there. So we have a history of Adam. I'll get really into it one day and dig over a bed of something and post a picture on Instagram, like, yeah, I'm gardener. Um, and then I, Adam will kind of plant it over vegetables and then we'll let a lot of them rot because we are just so overwhelmed with children and animals and a big career and neurodivergence and life. Every year I kind of go, right, we are not going to do this yet. It's like, right, how can we do this? I was like, right, we need to put the vegetables right in front of my face so I don't forget about them. I just finally feel right. I'm 46 soon and Adam's 49 soon. This is incredible to me that they're at this age, but I'm actually loving it so much. I listened to Joe Wiley and Zoe Ball's podcast yesterday, a few episodes. I absolutely loved it because it really helps me feel like this is an age to be celebrated. This is really an age where things are landing. This is an age where things are actually finally becoming. Uh, embodied. Embodied, I think is the right word. So, yeah. So yesterday, Adam's away camping at the minute with his kids. With his kids. Oh my God. That's with, with two of the kids, two of his kids. But I've got, uh, our girl here and the boys have gone, but my girl was at her nana's. It's really windy. I hope you can hear me. I'll have to edit the windy sound out. And so I had the most delicious, the most insanely enjoyable 24 hours on my own. And I kept looking in the back garden. Every time we sat in the back garden with this, there's a table in there, like a very distressed kind of table in the garden. The garden, the back garden's. Beautiful. Adam's brother helped him. He's a landscape, uh, gardener, you know, architect, whatever proper professional garden we planted up the back garden. So nice. It's so beautiful. But because Adam is in charge of our outdoor space, it's incredibly messy. So it's beautiful, but it's messy. Do you know what I mean? Like it's beautiful, messy, messy, beautiful. Um, and that bugs me. But because I walk around the garden feeling so overwhelmed and exhausted by the house, I have to just walk past so many. I walked past things. That's a classic KDHD thing as well. I remember the first time I ever tried medication. I walked around our garden and actually picked stuff up. I was like, shit. This is the, it is the motivation to pick stuff up. Anyway, so I've had this time on my own. I, I, I've laid in till almost 10 o'clock, two days on the trot, which is leading me to believe. I just, I'm someone that needs more sleep. I just might need more sleep because I, I'm not feeling fatigued at all having slept until that time. So yesterday I walked around the garden and I started to just think, yeah, it's a mess. It's a mess. Like I love Adam for doing all this crowding, but it's a mess. It needs tidying up so many weeds all over the drive. It's almost a carpet of weeds at this point. Well, I don't know, like a lot of weeds, uh, the polygonal was a complete mess. But filled with veg. Uh, obviously the veg breads are completely overgrown. We're just gonna have to let that one go this, this season. Um, and a lot. Yeah, just junk everywhere. Just junk. And once I started to pick it up, I couldn't stop. I was like, why is this here? Like this big piece of taral in with a load of rotten bits of stuff on it. I was like, right, that's going, that's going, that's going. I ended up ordering two. Big gallon, you know, five liters or whatever tubs of weed killer having conversed with track D, B, C. Is there any way of getting rid of this amount of weeds? You know, sustainably, I came to the conclusion, look, it's not too bad if I just use it on the weeds, on the drive, and that's it like once a year. So I did that. I've always weed killer, who am I? And I'm forwarded Skip. Now Adam's gonna go crazy at me because he always says we can just take the stuff and go to the tip. I am over it. I just feel in a time of my life where I will just wanna cleanse everything, all of our job and chuck it in a ski. I have not got time, and this is a really important conversation with Neurodivergence, with overwhelm, with midlife. I think it was Joe Wiley on the podcast where she was like, I've ordered a skip, and it felt amazing. I'm like, I don't have time to do 15 runs to the tip to stack the car up and all that stuff. I can't, I've got to have a shortcut. This is the shortcut. Yes. You pay 300 quid for it. Um, but they've given us a deadline because she's great.'cause normally they're like, yeah, keep it till whenever. Now they've said, right. It's a two week turnaround. Right. Great. And so I feel like I'm getting so much shit done so. I also went to pick my daughter up. On the way back, we stopped and had lunch and we went to a little garden center and I lost myself in the garden center and bought a load of plants, like not low. It was like four I think. And. I was like, right, I'm gonna keep to the basic palette of like, why it's purple and pink. That's kind of what we do. We have got a few others actually in the garden. That's not true. But I feel like that's a safety net of like Right. It'll look good. And I know the type of thing that I like. Um, I don't want bedding, plants, I want, these are gonna last and return, um. I haven't put them in yet, but I just came back and I was in the garden for hours. I harvested, I thought out al harvested all the parsley, all of the basil. I mean, that is a job in itself. I washed it all. I've still got quite a bit of posse left and I whizzed it in a wizard with olive oil. Put it on Instagram as well because I was like, I've gotta share this, and then froze it so I can just add those frozen blocks to stews and soups and lasagnas and S and you know, and that is gonna be a huge vitamin kind of boost for those needles. I've harvested so many of our plums off our plum tree. Our plum is drip. Our plum tree is dripping. It literally, there's a carpet of plums on the floor, which the dogs love. I'm, I finally with my mom's help. Last week she was like, Rachel, let's harvest. Let's get these, let's take the stones out and freeze them. And she sat there de stoning them because I was like, ah, cannot be asked to do stone fund. The point being, I'm finally getting my act together in these small ways. And the wider point being, I finally feel like I'm about to get into gardening. Like I subscribe to Gardener's World, you know, they do's offers like two issues for 99 p. I'll try and remember to cancel it after two months just to help me because I'm like, I have no clue what I'm doing. And also, here's the thing. P called avoidance. I don't like doing any of this. When Adam's there, I don't want him to tell me what to do because he is going to tell me that I've done it wrong, because I'm gonna do it wrong because I'm a beginner and now I feel ashamed. I feel really criticized. I don't like it. So that's a massive light bulb. Now that how I'm like, how come I'm doing all of this when Adam's not here? Like one thing is I want to surprise him when he comes back and he'll be kind of 50% horrified, 50% pleased, I think. Um. The other thing is, I've just realized is that he's not here. So he can't say, no, no, you're not. You can't, you can't buy that weekender. You can't do, you can't order a escape. No way. We've gotta save money. We've got to do this. Or you know, you can't do it like that. You can't just cut them down like that, or. Everything I'd done will have been slightly wrong. Now he is not a bad meaning person at all. I had a bit of heated discussion with the other day saying, you are Mr. To know it all. Like you literally are Mr. To know it all. Um, but this is the thing. It is taken all these different conditions, age. I'm really reconnecting to my sobriety. I've thought, I'm not gonna talk about this too much because it's such a personal journey for me and I think it, it hurts me oversharing it actually, because it's been so hard. So I am working with a sober coach now and I will report back after six weeks of working with her, which is the package I bought, and then we can talk about that. But suffice to say, I've had some wobbles recently with the leg and everything. Um, and I just don't like it in my system. I don't like the mental health effects. Okay, that's that. But gardening, it's like I feel like I'm finally going to get to grips with gardening. I cannot wait. I've gotta to take the girls to the gym Today. We're members of the gym and Sarah is bees that will find, we take her. I really don't want to, I'm like, I've got an engineer anyway, so I'll only be able to do something. But I am desperate to get in the garden, so I'm gonna stick to what I'm gonna some. Some photographs on Instagram. I'm gonna upload these episodes that I keep recording and not uploading. My point being about gardening, being a metaphor, is you can't rush getting into gardening in the same way that you can't rush your sobriety, you can't rush your healing, you can't rush your spiritual journey. You can't rush the right time to have a baby. Everything, everything. You can't choose some stuff. You can't. Make your child be more mature. You can't make your husband, I don't know, drink less or you know, I dunno, whatever it is. You know, the things that you, when we try and control things and force things, the universe has its own perfect timing. The universe has its own divine plan and I feel like God thing is like a perfect example of that. Like when I get frustrated with one of my kids, my mother-in-law. Always says rage. Like, give him time. Give him time. He's only whatever, you know, he will, he'll be absolutely fine. Give him time. And it's the same with the sobriety journey. Like I had a chat and I said I wasn't gonna talk about it, but I had my first session yesterday. She's actually a well-known sober influencer kind of coach person. And the reason I chose her is because we have so much in common. Like it's scary. And that was very validating itself. And do you know what she said at the circle call? Yeah, it took me about 10 years as well. So I, you know, you, you see these people and you think, oh, they've just cracked it straight away, or, oh, they just got into gardening and that was that like, oh, they've always been this mature, oh, they've always been this good with money. You know, most financial coaches and things like that have got into it because they were terribly in debt and sort themselves out. Like there is a perfect sequence. And even though it feels like the last few weeks with my indecision about my business again and my knee accident and my sobriety slips and all the things that have happened that I go, I'm not even gonna bring'cause to here. Um, are all part of the divine plan. They're all happening for me, not to me. When you have that outlook. It's not spiritual bypassing. You could easily confuse it for that and just be like, yeah, I'm just fucking letting everything happen. I'm not, it's not that. It's just like if you can just step back, focus on what's in front of you, do the next right thing. Stop future tripping. Stop future stressing. Stop sitting on a laptop, researching everything to death, to death, to death. Just chill out about the future. Live in the now. Get your hands in the earth. Get your feet in the water. Take the dogs out, cook something. Make a meal from scratch. Have a good conversation with someone. Have a nap. Like just be here in the present moment and let the universe kind of do its thing and ride the wave, like ride the waves of what's happening. And I never want to seem like preach or advice with these things because that's ridiculous. I'm not someone who. I just, I never feel comfortable in that role, which is probably why I don't actually do that much coaching. Even though I quite like coaching. I just feel very much like my. Strengths are when I just share what's happening with me and other people relate. Um, and it's been a wild ride. And I think the gardening is the perfect metaphor. It's like I've tried to get into gardening so many times, and I think there's a reason why women get into gardening around this age. Like my mother-in-law, again, amazing gardener. My mom's into gardening as well. And you don't just get into gardening when you're in your twenties. Well, if you do, that's different. It's probably your life purpose. It's probably like that's what you do for your job, you know? But it's like most people, like on the podcast yesterday, that, you know, one of the themes of the podcast is like gardening.'cause they both love gardening and it's just like winging it, like making mistakes. The only way we can learn in sobriety and life in anything is making thousands of mistakes. Like you, I don't think it's possible to just go, I'm deciding to cook, drinking, and now that's that. I think it's extremely rare. Extremely rare. And then when you dig a bit deeper into a person's story, who says that, then you find out actually they've been trying to do it on the quiet for five years or six years or whatever. And same with gardening. Like you'd be like, oh. In my twenties, I kept plants and they kept dying. In my thirties, I actually got an allotment thing and I went a few times. It was great. And then it died off, you know, it's this repeating cycle. And there's a reason why the, the spiritual symbol, there is a spiritual symbol called, uh, of the spiral. Right. And I use it a lot. And, and when I was doing my yoga teacher training, I relate, I related to it a lot because my teacher said. We learn in spirals and that's so true. And so I'm trying to, when I'm in the garden center, looking at these names, trying to remember them and realizing there are a handful of plant names. I always remember like dta, dta, sc like certain, like certain like, like cricos, like I can spot certain plants and go, I know what that is. In the same way that when you are learning yoga, you are like. I know about five poses and what they're called, and I even know the Sanskrit for three poses. You know? Then all of a sudden, you know, five, you know, 10, you know, 20. So this is what I keep coming back to is like you learn in spirals. Like you just learn through doing. Like people say to me, how did you learn to cook? And my best friend says to me once, how do you come up with recipes all the time? Like, do you take a recipe and adapt it? And I'm like, no, I just cook. Like, I just look in the fridge and I just cook. Like with whatever I've got. I don't go to the shops. I don't plan anything. I just cook. And that's because I started cooking when I was about. 13. I used to cook for my nan and then for my pa, for my family and stuff. I just did it. It's just part of my dharma. It's part of my life purpose. It's part of my bones. And that's another part of this. Like if you are not into something right now, stop trying to force it. Like don't keep trying to force going to the gym. If you absolutely hate it, find something else that you like doing. Go hiking. Do something different. Okay, I'm gonna leave it there. Um, and it's been really lovely processing this and it helps me an awful lot actually. And I am. I'm going to go home, not today, perhaps this week, and just upload these and, and actually be more brave about sharing them because I love sharing my voice and it's in my projector profile to share my truth. That's just who I am, and it's not always easy because I feel it's a, it's a sticky place to be some time actually. So, but I will keep doing it loudly, proudly, and until next time. Bye.