​A GARDEN ANALOGY

Dear Reader,

Your entire life represents a beautiful garden, and each of your relationships represents a patch of fresh, healthy, and rich green within it.

Can you visualize the beauty of it? Good!

When we experience the loss of someone we dearly love, whether to death, divorce, estrangement… it feels as though that special patch of the garden has just died.

This is true for any life experience which we anticipated sharing with a loved one, and then our plans evaporated.

When we sit very still and simply contemplate the lost hopes, expectations, and dreams for what we will never be able to share with that loved one, well, it is simply unspeakable.

That patch of green, which represents our lost loved one, is withering in our heart…

You might be reading this and nodding your head “yes,” because you know that you don’t even want to walk into that part of the garden since it is too painful.

Then what begins to happen is you avoid that part of the garden altogether… (Think of not driving down the street where your deceased grandfather lived, because it’s just too raw to see the house he lived in that you loved… so you drive a different route to avoid the pain.)

Then the weeds begin to grow and the flowers, which were once so very colorful and vibrant, die. Everything in that patch of garden is suffering from infestations of weeds.

In time, what happens to that one dying patch is that it begins to infiltrate the other rich and healthy patches around it.

I will serve as your guide or, if you will, as your Master Gardener with the Grief Recovery Method. Together we will walk into that garden with my toolkit. Together we are going to rejuvenate that withered patch of garden.

The feeling that you have had of “there is no way that I can do this on my own,” I fully comprehend! I know it can be scary and exhausting since even walking into that part of your once beautiful garden can make you feel even physically ill.

Together, we will walk into that brown patch of garden and clean it out… shovel the rocks that no longer belong there. You will keep all the beauty (fond memories) and throw away the weeds that no longer allow your garden to thrive. I will do the heavy lifting with you!

Needless to say, just because you cleaned out the garden once doesn’t mean you don’t continue to weed it… There will be more weeds that sprout. You will have gained an empowering emotional toolkit to carry with you, so the garden patch is never again as overgrown as it once was after your loss!

I’m going to leave all the emotional gardening tools with you, so you can then use them with any other patch of brown which may appear in your garden…

If you desire to call upon the Master Gardener, Lesleigh, again, I will be here for you. I will be available to support you, if you so choose, with my listening ears and my huge heart.

Once this part of your garden is cleared out, your life is going to thrive once again.

I can’t wait to transform your garden with you!

Lesleigh