Lessons from the Sunflowers

Every year I plant seeds in the spring for summer flowering. I gain so much joy from watching them grow and when I plant, I plant with intention and imagine each seed being a positive intention for the future. I have a mantra running through my mind….

“Spring we sow, Summer we grow, Autumn we harvest & Winter we rest, review & renew.”

This year was no different and in March I began to sow sunflower and sweet pea seeds. The Sunflower seeds gained momentum quite quickly, they were strong and sturdy from the offset. They looked so healthy and I viewed them as a clear representation that my future intentions were a guaranteed success. Then one day I set out to go to work, the morning was overcast and cool and my mind was on nothing more than the working day head of me. There is very little natural daylight where I work and it was only in the early afternoon that I realised that it had turned into a very hot day. The sun was scorching and deep blue skies overhead. My thoughts immediately turned to the sunflower seedlings at home, they were healthy and strong but they were too young to withstand the heat and I had left them in an area where the Sun would have been beating down on them, I knew they would be burnt by the time I got home.

When I did arrive home late into the evening, the seedlings were as I expected them to be, they were burnt, the leaves crisp and had fallen to the floor. I took them outside in the now cool air, watered them and fed them just to see if I could revive them. I felt a sadness as I couldn’t help feeling that this was a reflection of all that I had had to let go of, those Spring intentions for teaching yoga, coaching and my intention to be more present in the group that I had created was falling apart as the pandemic intensified.

Over a course of the week the seedlings were not showing signs of recovery and were wilting, but two of them were standing tall and despite the crisp leaves seemed strong and their colour hadn’t faded. I re-planted them in a sunny spot and monitored them over the course of a few weeks. Week after week they grew bigger and then the deep green foliage started to appear. I felt excited and wondered if they would flower. Then one day I was outside in the rain checking my plants when I noticed a sunflower bud, then another and another. Each plant had produced about eight sunflower buds. Eventually they flowered and It was a joy to watch the sunflowers open up to their full glory. Watching these big, vibrant and happy flowers open up from where they had been gave me hope for the future. Still viewing these beautiful flowers as my Spring intentions I started to think that perhaps not all was lost in terms of what I wanted to do. I just needed to think about how I did things. I needed to pause and reflect and be open to taking a chance, perhaps a different approach. I really felt that I needed to create a better foundation for what I wanted to do. My key learning here was that if I truly wanted to do something, if I knew deep down in my heart that I wanted to do something, there would always be a way forwards. I just had to trust this journey and recognise that I didn’t have to achieve all this in an instant, that I could afford to slow down and view all this as a life’s time work. I had to recognise that the journey wasn’t going to be linear, that they were going to be twists and turns, that sometimes things will fall apart, but within those falls there will be lessons to be learned. From those lessons we will always grow from them creating stronger foundations and perhaps if are hearts are open enough we will create something far better than what we could ever have imagined.