Gardening People

By Tanis Helliwell

“Like millions of trees which are all rooted in one and the same earth, so millions of human minds are rooted in one and the same universal being.” –Paul Brunton

 Organizations as Living Beings

I have always thought of organizations as living beings. Seen this way, we and our organization live in a symbiotic relationship and the health of the one affects the health of the other. Healthy people create healthy organizations and vice versa.

Joel Solomon, one of the directors of Hollyhock, has a similar view. He once told me that he got his business training from biodynamic gardening. He views organizations as a garden and the people are the various plants that grow in this garden. Using this metaphor he has established “organic business principles”. These are:

1.build healthy soil,

2. find healthy seed stock

3.focus on perennials

4. work hard and carefully nourish young plants

5. create diversity

6. align to cosmic and natural laws and the garden will gradually take care of itself and be abundant with little effort.

7. share cuttings and seeds with neighbours and …

8. feed the soil, feed the soil, feed the soil.

For Joel the soil represents relationships with others, reputation, clarity of values, personal growth, self-mastery, knowledge, skill building and a clean system which is a healthy physical body. It is each of our responsibility to feed the soil in our own garden and if we do we will establish a healthy environment in which our plants can grow.

Gardening People

I believe that people, like plants, need to be given good soil with proper nutrients in which to grow. We need to have the appropriate training and time to do our work. It is also important that there is no competition among us and the other plants for nutrients or we, like plants, will wither and die. Also, when we first start a job, like young seedlings, we must be nurtured along and not expected to give as much fruit as those who have been doing the job for a long time. There must be enough sun in the form of praise to encourage us to blossom. If we are deprived of this and are kept in the dark, by being given negative feedback or not enough information to do our job, we—like plants—will also suffer.

We, like plants, must receive the appropriate amount of water in the form of opportunities to develop our potential. If we are given too much water in the form of others expectations of us or too little in the form of non-creative, repetitive work we will not develop into a healthy organism. Lastly, a pear tree can not be made into an orange tree and we will never be happy in tour work and develop our potential if we trying to be a plant that we aren’t.

Is Your Workplace Growing You?

Does your workplace meet these criteria for good health. When there is a good fit between us and our workplace both thrive and create a healthy environment for clients and co-workers. When we are dissatisfied with our place of work we either put pressure on it to change—thus crowding the others plants—or we withdraw our roots and don’t give ourselves the nourishment we need and become a dwarfed plant. If the workplace is not meeting our needs we, like a plant, may put out seeds or roots to more fertile soil to find a more nourishing environment. This can also happen as we, like plants, outgrow our present work and need to spread out to other locations to stay healthy. Strong plants create strong seeds that will grow in good soil anywhere.

In our world presently, because we have not managed it as a growing organic entity we have depleted its resources and are now having to live with the consequences of our actions. The solution I see is for each of us to create healthy soil where we and others will thrive. We do this through facing our own challenges with love and wisdom and by encouraging others to develop their potential. By so doing we will create a healthy garden in our workplace—and by extension in the world—where all plants can grow.

Balancing Learning, Digesting, Applying

There are three aspects we need to balance for harmony in life and work. These are learning, digesting what we learned and applying what we learned.

How many of us have these three aspects in balance? Some people love to learn and are eager to input new information or experiences but do not spend the same amount of time digesting what they learn before applying the new learning in the world. If we do not take time for digestion we may race from one project to another and feel a lack of connection to what we are doing and perhaps a sense of meaninglessness. We don’t take time to rest, integrate and celebrate what we have accomplished.

A second group of people might overbalance in the area of digestion. They may take a lot of time to integrate and refine what they have learned and, if this goes on for too long, they may not learn anything new to apply in their life. We may do this when we stay in a marriage or a job where we are coasting. We are experiencing little pain, nor pleasure, nor growth. We are not developing the potential of who we are when we do this.

A third group of people prefer applying what they have learned. These people are action based and do not take enough time either to learn new things or to reflect on what they are learning. They may be productive in that they flow where they want and accomplish what they want but may be damaging their own and others environment in the process.

Living in Balance

Only through balancing these three qualities of learning, digesting and applying do we find a natural rhythm. But this is not easy in our busy lives. We need to engage in the first quality of learning through reading books, taking courses and interacting with other people. This learning stimulates us to grow as we are pulled back into the sea of our potential and given gifts from its depths that we cannot see if we are always flowing out.

We also need to engage in the second quality of digestion even though to the outside observer it may not look as if we are being productive. People who are taking time to pause and digest may be seen as non-productive because too often at work we are rewarded only for the application and outflow of our energy. Evenings, weekends, time away from our work, walking in the forest or along a beach, listening to the breeze, and getting away from TV, radio and newspapers is necessary to recover our equilibrium.

Applying our learning, the third aspect, s likewise critical or neither we, nor others, will benefit. A gardener must harvest the crop at the right time, and if left too long it will rot. We also must harvest our own crop of by gifting the world with the fruit of our love and wisdom.

Tanis Helliwell, a mystic in the modern world, has brought spiritual consciousness into the mainstream for over 30 years. Since childhood, she has seen and heard elementals, angels, and master teachers in higher dimensions. Tanis is the founder of the International Institute for Transformation (IIT), which offers programs to assist individuals to become conscious creators to work with the spiritual laws that govern our world.

Tanis is the author of The High Beings of Hawaii, Summer with the Leprechauns, Pilgrimage with the Leprechauns, Embraced by Love, Manifest Your Soul’s Purpose, Hybrids: So You Think You Are Human and Decoding Your Destiny.

For information on Tanis’ courses, click here.