Early spring & fresh starts

I was sat on a stone in a small wooded area and I was feeling very exposed because there was hardly any foliage which meant I was visible from the road. I came out for a walk because since yesterday I had been feeling a low, negative energy with a sense of doom that nothing will work out. I thought a walk in nature would help me shift that energy.

The stone that I like to sit and reflect on

I came across a small, lone bush of gorse and thought about its energy and what it was telling me. The first word that sprang to mind was ‘hope’. You can always count on gorse to be flowering at almost any time of year, but especially when hardly anything else is growing or flowering. It was telling me to keep going and follow its example and I was grateful for this lesson.

A lone gorse bush, the only plant flowering among mostly dead bracken that hasn’t come to life yet.

I then noticed how everything looked neat and tidy around me, there was very little ground cover (besides fallen leaves), and it felt like this was nature’s fresh start. The ground was ready for new growth. It made me wonder: ‘How can I prepare myself for a fresh start?’ It suddenly made sense why people have ‘spring cleans’ at this time of year. But this is the easy stuff for me, the external. I will naturally go to cleaning and organising my environment to help me feel better internally. The internal takes more effort though. For me, I think it’s about letting go of old thought patterns and energies to make room for the new. That brings me full circle to why I came out for this walk in the first place, this negative energy I was trying to shift. The old thought patterns that no longer serve me stem from a place of fear, being afraid and suspicious of the world and not trusting my place in it. There’s always a lack of motivation and a feeling of apathy that comes with it. The reason this walk helped to elevate my energy was because it creatively inspired me. When I got back home from my walk, I watched a youtube video by Emma Roble and she talked about infusing rosehips in cider vinegar which is something I’ve never done before. This got me excited to get my herbal book out (The herbal medicine-maker’s handbook by James Green) and I read all about how to make an infusion with vinegar. I had forgotten how much I love this book. His writing style is very engaging and humorous and I’m often giggling to myself while reading it. Needless to say, all of this combined reminded me of my interests and the things I love to do which shifted the energy for me.

MENTAL NOTE TO SELF: Whenever you have negative energy to shift, do something that creatively inspires you and reminds you of the things you love. Other practices that help are: journaling my thoughts to help identify old beliefs that no longer server me, and invoking a sense of gratitude by writing down at least three things I am grateful for today.