Bloom Where You Are Planted

I didn’t always like this time of year. The cold, dark days, the forced jollity of seeing in the New Year – I stopped doing that a long time ago. Now I love to be out in nature on the first day of the coming year and I enjoy taking time to reflect on the past 12 months – the new experiences, connections made or forged deeper, lessons learned, knowledge gained…And I savour the sense of new beginnings, new possibilities, new choices

As I walk, I have in my mind an expression that I recently heard: ‘bloom where you are planted’. And I love how this feels like an invitation, a reminder, to stop striving to be somewhere or someone else and to just be fully where we are. It reminds me that we are making choices all of the time and the choices we are making have a huge impact on our state of mind, our level of happiness. If we realised this, if we became more aware of how our choices were making us feel and that it was possible to take a more active stand in our own well-being, then surely that would be something we would want to do

A mindfulness course helps us to realise these choices and their effects and can give us the courage to take that stand, to discover the ways that we can bloom and flourish right here and now