Tending My Garden

Well, I'll be honest with y'all. I didn't start here because I'm wise. I started here because I was tired.

I'd tried a little of everything. Breathwork that made me dizzy. Journals I never kept. A cold plunge, once, which we will not be discussing. Some of it helped for an afternoon. None of it stuck, and I couldn't have told you why.

Then Natalie asked me something I had no answer for: "Do you know how you're built?"

I did not. I knew how I'd been told to be. That's not the same thing.

So we started with Groundwork. Forty-five minutes. Nobody fixing anything. Just a good, honest look at the ground before anybody planted a thing.

What came back surprised me. The way I draw my power and the way I express it don't line up the way I'd always assumed. Nothing broken. I'm just built that way. And I'd spent years fighting it and calling it a flaw.

Well, now. You can't tend what you haven't met.

Read Chapter 1: Groundwork in the Field Guide

Natalie showed me what Groundwork had been reading, and I've been drawing it in the margins ever since.

Picture two funnels meeting at the heart. The bottom one points down into the ground and spins like a turbine. That's my power: all the raw feeling, everything that hasn't been named yet. The top one opens to the sky. That's my expression. It takes what rises, sorts it, shapes it, and sends it out into the world.

Where they meet, right at the heart, there's a coupler. And here's what stopped me cold. That coupler is where attachment lives. Before I ever attach to anybody else, I attach to myself. However I hold myself, that's how I'll hold everybody else.

Then Natalie gave me a picture I could live in. You're a house. Upstairs is the penthouse. That's your logic: the top funnel, where you reason, organize and explain. Downstairs is the basement. That's your raw emotion: the bottom funnel, where you feel everything before it has a name. And the staircase runs right through your heart. That's the coupler.

How you live in that house is how you're attached.

Live only in the penthouse with the basement door locked, and that's avoidant. Everything's logical and tidy up there, and you toss out what you feel like it's useless information. Natalie says that's not smart at all. It's working from half the facts.

Live only in the basement, and that's anxious. You feel every single thing and have no way to carry any of it upstairs to make sense of it.

Run up and down the stairs all day and never settle on either floor, and that's fearful-avoidant.

Secure is living in the whole house. What you feel comes upstairs to be understood, and what you understand goes back down to be kept.

Me? I've been living in the basement. I feel everybody's everything, and I never carry any of it upstairs to ask what I need.

Natalie was careful about one thing. How my two halves are built? That's design. How I live in the house? That's mine to tend.

The goal isn't picking the right floor. It's living in the whole house.

Read Chapter 2: The Wellspring in the Field Guide

Natalie drew me a picture today, and I haven't stopped thinking about it.

Your nervous system is a projector. Your beliefs and your body are the slides it shines through. Where it's pointed is your orientation. And what lands on the screen is what you call reality.

Here's what got me. When my slides were crooked, I saw shadows on the screen. Big, blurry, frightening things. When we squared them up, the shadows were gone, and there were Sunny and Violet, playing in a meadow like they'd been there the whole time.

Now, sometimes the world really does change, and you've got to deal with that. But that day, nothing on the other side of the screen had changed. Only the projector had.

I sat with that one a long while.

Read Chapter 3: The Projector in the Field Guide

Violet asked me a question I didn't want to answer. "Why do you let some pictures in and not others?"

Turns out, before anything reaches me, it passes through gates. Safety. Identity. Worthiness. Loyalty. Survival. If one of those gates feels threatened, the picture gets stopped or bent before I ever really see it.

I found my loudest one fast. Worthiness. Every time somebody offered me help, that gate slammed shut and asked whether I'd earned it.

Natalie says a gate doesn't have to be a wall. It can work more like a station. Instead of slamming shut, it reads what's arriving and sends it where it belongs. Same gate, different way of running it.

I'm not there yet. What I've learned is that I can't do a thing with that gate while it's running me. I have to settle down first. Breathe. Get still. Then I can look at it.

Well, that explains why I never got anywhere thinking my way through things at two in the morning.

Read Chapter 4: The Gates in the Field Guide

I've got two selves, apparently. Everybody does.

There's the one I present. The one who's always fine, always has a kind word, always shows up. I built her out of what I got praised for and who I needed to be to stay loved. She carried me through some hard years, and I respect her for it.

And there's the one that's actually running. You find her in the evidence, not the description. Where my time goes. Where my money goes. How things end. What people keep coming to me for.

The gap between them isn't a failure. It's information. But it's expensive. Keeping that first self standing takes energy every single day.

Natalie gave me a test I can't stop using: is this what I produced, or what I intended?

Lord. That one stings.

Read Chapter 5: The Two Selves in the Field Guide

Wait a minute. This is the same thing I wrote about yesterday, from the other side. Yesterday was the gap. Today is what keeps it open.

Everybody carries a hero story. It's the role that made you feel safe or worth something, way back when. Mine's the Giver. I notice everybody's needs before my own, every time. I feel justified when I'm useful.

And the story doesn't just describe my life. It filters it. It decides what I notice, what I ignore, and who I end up surrounded by. Givers find takers. Then I point at the takers as proof that nobody gives back.

You don't just live inside your story. You build the world that confirms it.

You want to know what gave mine away? I walked into Flourish Fields asking for a crib and a bottle, and when they actually tried to take care of me, I didn't know what to do with myself.

Receiving. That's the edge of my story.

Read Chapter 6: The Hero Story in the Field Guide

Here's where it all came together for me.

What's on the screen doesn't just sit there. It feeds back into the machine. A frightening picture makes my nervous system brace. Bracing confirms the belief. The belief tilts the slide. The slide changes the next picture.

Round and round. Every pass shapes the next one.

That's why one good day doesn't fix anything, and one bad day doesn't ruin anything. It's the rhythm that counts. What I do over and over.

So I tend it the way you tend a garden. A little every morning. A little every night. With other people around, so I don't quit the first time it gets boring.

Read Chapter 7: The Loop in the Field Guide

I don't have it all figured out. Some days my slides are square and some days they're a mess. But I know what I'm looking at now, and that's changed everything.

Natalie said something I wrote on the first page of this diary, so I'd see it every morning:

Freedom is not seeing the world clearly. No one does. Freedom is knowing what you are seeing through.

Your turn, honey. Start wherever you like.

Read Chapter 8: Where to Begin in the Field Guide