May 10 2021

By: Jackie Naginey Hook
Monday, May 10, 2021

Continuing with our theme of “Tending Your Inner Garden,” the question arises, what do you mean by my inner garden? As we've talked about in this blog before, I like to think of us all as having four dimensions – physical, cognitive/intellectual, emotional and spiritual. It's important that we tend to the gardens of all those dimensions. In particular, when we think about dying, death and grief, we really do need to tend to all four dimension gardens. We pay attention to how our physical body is reacting to these experiences. What changes are you noticing? Are you tending to it tenderly? Our cognitive/intellectual dimension is busy at work during these experiences. It wants to control what it can and it spends time with questions that never have answers, such as what if? or if only? Our emotional dimension is a big part of the dying, death and grief experiences too. Are you tending to your emotions gently and compassionately? And then there is the spiritual dimension. It is definitely touched during these experiences. Sometimes in the dying process the other dimensions start to dwindle and the spiritual dimension actually grows.  

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