On the Autumn Equinox, this year’s Venus Garden Flower Essence combination was born. The Angels named it ‘Loving What Is’ Here’s my description of this Essence’s vibrational gifts. As ever, the definition is a work in progress, but not this Essence. It is ready to serve you with its sweet and bold healing purpose.

LOVING WHAT IS
This Flower Essence combination is amazingly straightforward in its purpose, but, as usual, this doesn’t mean I am able to explain it simply.

I share the journey of learning about this Essence with:
A Short Definition
The Culture
Other Reasons Not to Let Your Mind Run Your Life
The Mind as Servant to the Heart
How this Garden Grew
Water
Clutter and this Essence’s support to De-Clutter

A SHORT DEFINITION
‘Loving What Is’ helps us live in our hearts.

This Essence offers a roadmap to move from the mind’s territory of judgment about ourselves and our lives to the heart’s territory of embracing our lives and ourselves with peaceful equanimity and joy.

If we know the way to our hearts already, it supports us to live there more of the time.

The heart is the place we can relish our lives despite the fact that they have not gone according to the mind’s plans or expectations. This is why this Essence is called ‘Loving What Is.’

THE CULTURE
Our culture puts the mind ahead of the heart. This is because our culture is a construct of minds.

As a creation of minds, our culture believes in the mind’s authority and encourages us to keep our minds in charge of running our lives.

The culture encourages us to listen to whatever mind ideas are screaming loudest on any given day and judge our experiences as good, bad, or ugly in relationship to these mind ideas. No countenance is given to how mind ideas leave us suffering, because the mind really only cares about staying in control.

To keep us in check, the culture constantly changes its collective mind standards. If we are always running after the new mind ideas of the culture, we have less time to consider that maybe the mind, either our own or the collective mind of the culture, should not be in charge of driving our lives.

The collective mind of the culture and our individual minds have no interest in our happiness. What they want more than anything else, is to stay in charge.

It is grace that mind standards can never be met for more than short tension filled periods of time. This is because life is not a servant of the mind. In those times when our lives do not conform to the collective mind or our individual mind’s ideas of what life should be, the door opens for us to abandon the hold the mind has on us.

This doorway is a blessing, not so much because it alters the abyss between mind ideas and reality, but because it encourages us to shift the place where our consciousness is seated from the ever dissatisfied mind to the peaceful heart.

This Essence is to support us to shift our consciousness to the heart, the only place we can experience peace no matter what is happening in our lives.

We must make the decision to change our habit of living in our minds, a place of judgment and restless discontent, in favor of sinking into the heart’s place of unconditional loving acceptance of what life is.

“Loving What Is” will help us make the shift and help us to stay in the heart even as every construct of the culture calls us back to the mind’s territory of judgment.

OTHER REASONS TO NO LONGER LET YOUR MIND RUN YOUR LIFE.
SOME IDEAS YOUR MIND WON”T AGREE WITH

What is the problem with the mind?

When the mind is given the reins to rule our lives, it rules from a data base of contradiction and confusion.

This is because the mind is no more than a rag tag bundle of ideas collected from a myriad number of sources including childhood data collected from our family of origin.

The ideas we have collected are based on other people’s unique perceptions of reality as well as our own perceptions. These ideas are always going to be in conflict with each other because no two people can see things the same way.

From the moment we are born, our minds collect conflicting perceptions. Our fathers’ ideas conflict with our mothers’ world view and that is just the beginning of the dissenting opinions we collect and call our minds. No mind has any integrity. The mind is a body of information rife with conflicting ideas.

My mind would like me to belabor this point with lots of mind ideas. My mind would love it if I did this, because the mind has no capacity to be in charge, but wants to be in charge anyways.

It will use any idea in its data base to keep itself in charge. This means the mind has no hesitation to throw out new conflicting ideas if it feels us waver in our allegiance to it. If we momentarily sink into the happiness of the heart and the mind feels its hold on us lessening, the mind will not hesitate to throw a grocery list of worrying, fearful, guilt laden, contradictory and unhappy thoughts into our consciousness in order to stay in charge.

To let our minds drive our lives is self sabotage of the highest order.

No matter what rises up from our tangle of mind ideas as the right opinion of the day, it is always in conflict with other ideas we carry and therefore literally sets up a dynamic of constant inner conflict. The mind, when given the role of running our lives, literally divides us from ourselves.

So what is the solution?

As Einstein said, “the consciousness that created a problem can’t solve the problem.”

The solution to this dynamic lies outside of the minds that created the problem. The solution lies in the heart.

It is in the terrain of the heart that we can love what is, sink into a consciousness that is not in conflict with any other consciousness, and therefore find the peace and harmony we seek. All hearts are kind and loving because the heart is an integrated part of all creation. Few, if any, minds are kind and loving because the mind, by its very nature, is a hodgepodge of conflicting information warring with itself for dominion.

We will never find peace in our efforts to live according to our mind’s myriad ideas of the good life. We will only find peace when we live in our hearts and discover its immense capacity to accept what is.

The shift to the heart opens us to love what is. Being in the heart is not a process or a struggle. It is the experience of love. This is because the heart is the eternal and divine part of ourselves that knows its oneness with everything. A life lived in the heart is the experience of what we were seeking all along, an experience of infinite love and peace.

The dynamic of this Essence supports us to no longer allow our minds’ to drive the show, to leap into the heart, and to stay there long enough for the rewards of this choice to become self evident and we find the motivation to stay there of our own accord. If we have settled into our hearts to some degree, this Essence supports us to abide there as we navigate a world working overtime to call us out from our centered place of joy.

THE MIND AS SERVANT TO THE HEART
When the mind is given the task of implementing the choices of the heart, it becomes an excellent tool for manifesting these choices. This is the only role appropriate for the mind.

HOW THIS GARDEN GREW
In January, when I was planning this season’s gardens, the Angels told me that this year’s Venus Garden would be, among other things, about water. I spent time with the Angels figuring out which plants best represented the dynamic of water and was given a beautiful design that included juicy watery cucumbers, melons, parsley, nasturtiums, sweet peas, and a White Lotus. Seven glazed blue pots encircled the Lotus, each one representing one of the seven seas.

The garden was easy to plant and very elegant in its early weeks. When the Nasturtiums started their display, the garden became a veritable mass of Flowers. The Angels asked me to leave various “volunteer” annuals including a mass of gorgeous deep blue Chinese Forget Me Nots and a big swatch of White Nigella, How well these contrasted with the dizzying oranges, yellows, reds, creams, and mahoganys of the Nasturtiums.

Oh my mind was so pleased with myself. What a splashy garden! How clever was I!

Then the flowering ground to a halt. The Sweet Peas that had ringed the garden in abundant and fragrant blossom turned brown and died in the summer heat. The Angels asked me to leave every crisp brown vine in place. How my mind disliked this untidiness! Then the Nasturtiums did what they do when put in good soil. Their leaves got enormous and they stopped blooming. Soon there was not a Nasturtium Flower in sight. The garden looked as unimpressive as any I had ever planted. When I was in my heart, I felt the peace of knowing all was well and the garden was serving something is some way. But I allowed the appearance of the garden to sometimes pull me off balance and back into my critical mind.

Then one day, very late in the summer, as I passed the garden with all its weeds, overgrown Nasturtiums and unflowering plants I burst into laughter. Quite abruptly, I fell in love with the garden just the way it was. As I rubbed against this garden in passing, its vibration had helped me fall completely out of my mind and into my heart. I was so happy to have made such radical peace with the garden. I was completely in love with this big brown weedy mess. In that moment, I experienced the gift of this Essence to move us from mind to heart. I knew there would be a lovely Essence born from this garden and that it would be about loving what is.

WATER
Why a connection to Water?
The Overlighting Deva of Water speaks, “ Water represents the territory of navigating life from the heart more fully than any other element. This is because the flow of water has the least resistance to what is. It may experience the constraint of other elements defining it as a pool or river, but it never experiences separation or boundaries, being completely malleable in its own structure. Within this construct of formlessness, it never rests in its movement towards the manifestation of oneness, pouring itself into union in seas and sky. It is the perfect balance of loving what is while simultaneously moving towards a manifest oneness.”

CLUTTER AND THIS ESSENCE’S SUPPORT TO DE-CLUTTER
During the time when I was mulling over this Essence’s purposes, a Green Hope friend called to ask for a remedy that would help him with his clutter. He knew a new life was pouring into him and he wanted a clean canvas for what was being born. For some reason, I was sure that “Loving What Is” would help him to let go of clutter.

To answer his question, I had to look first to my own clutter. I noticed that it involves attachment to stuff that has no real connection to my actual life. It either hangs on from my past or reflects some notions I hold onto about what will be in my life. Someday I will use that gewgaw. Someday I will write the great American novel. Someday I will knit a coat of a thousand skeins of saved bulky yarn, even though I have never liked bulky yarn. After this friend’s call, I realized my clutter is the outward manifestation of my mind ideas about things that should have been, mind ideas about things that should be, and mind expectations of the perfect life. Supported by ‘Loving What Is’, I encouraged myself to assess my clutter while grounded in my heart. I accepted that some things I expected to have or do in my life are not meant to happen and with that acceptance I found myself able to move clutter on its way. It was not the painful process of agonizing over each scrap of paper that de-cluttering has sometimes been for me. I was at peace while letting go effortlessly of some external stuff that was connected to things that weren’t happening in my life.

For example, grounded in my heart, I experienced the truth that it would never be in my best interests to write about my earlier life. It would be too difficult to go over what happened without reigniting the bitterness of the mind. I felt at peace when I realized this. Afterwards, in that peaceful place in my heart, I could let go of certain papers, a manifest form of this project. My mind had been attached to this project. My mind had kept a pile of stuff related to this project. Yet I felt the truth that letting go of this project served my deepest self. This was a different direction than I expected in my life to take, but I could accept and love this twist. The unburdening was both literal and figurative.