Hola!
Welcome to the wabi-sabi letter, the digital newsletter that promotes healthy living, wellness, mental health awareness, fitness, positive habits, and all around happiness. Clear your head and cleanse your inbox with a tiny space for wellness as you set your intentions for the day. Badabing badaboom.
Lessons from Plants
What can plants teach us? It's a question that Beronda L. Montgomery, Ph.D., shares with MBG Planet. As a professor of plant biology at Michigan State University, she researches how photosynthetic organisms respond to lighting cues and adapt to the world around them. It's technical work, to be sure, but it's rife with lessons that extend far beyond the lab.
Montgomery's new book Lessons From Plants distills some of the plant realm's most phenomenal features into advice that scientists and nonscientists alike could use.
Here are three powerful plant lessons she's seen resonate with people the most:
1. Growth is not a given.
Think about how you'd react if you saw one of the plants in your home or garden struggling. You'd probably rack your brain thinking about what it could need; what you got wrong. You wouldn't blame the issue on the plant itself. But do you extend the same courtesy to other people you see in distress?
"What I see in so many cases is that with our fellow humans, we often look at whether they're growing well or not. And if they're not, we make assumptions about what their capabilities are," Montgomery says.
We'd all be well served to extend the same philosophy of care to our community that we do to our greenery. Just as we don't expect plants to survive without water and sunlight, we can't assume people will grow without proper support.
2. The world needs more pioneers.
Pioneer plants are the trailblazers of the botanical realm, able to survive in conditions that most plants can't. They are the first to colonize tricky new areas (say, in the crack of a sidewalk) and somehow able to make do with the limited resources available to them.
"Everyone must recognize the importance of pioneers—those that have the traits needed to initiate robust culture change at the right time and place—and support the need for leaders to function in this pioneering way," she writes in her book.
3. Diversity breeds resilience.
Though industrial agriculture has made us used to seeing rows and rows of the same type of crop, in reality, plants naturally want to grow alongside different species.
This is something that Indigenous farming populations have long known, as evidenced by the Three Sisters growing method. "This Indigenous agricultural practice exemplifies the positive outcome of reciprocal relationships promoted by diversity," Montgomery writes in her book.
You can order Dr. Montgomery’s book from the Harvard University Press here to take notes from plant life.
Your Post-Pandemic “Friendscape”
This article in the New York Times, How to Rearrange Your Post-Pandemic ‘Friendscape’, offers perspectives on quote: Re-entry offers an opportunity to choose which relationships we wish to resurrect and which are better left dormant.
Rather than thinking about who you want to keep or purge from your social network, Suzanne Degges-White, a professor of counseling at Northern Illinois University tells the Times, suggested imagining how you want to arrange your “friendscape,” where people inhabit the foreground, middle ground or background depending on how much time and emotional energy you invest in them.
It requires daily or weekly attention to maintain foreground friends, so there are necessarily a limited number of slots (four to six, maximum). Some of those may be filled by your romantic partner, parent, sibling or child. Because they are front and center, foreground friends are the ones who have the most profound impact on your health and well-being, for good or ill.
Indeed, depressed friends make it more likely you’ll be depressed, obese friends make it more likely you’ll become obese, and friends who smoke or drink a lot make it more likely you’ll do the same. The reverse is also true: You will be more studious, kind and enterprising if you consort with studious, kind and enterprising people.
What makes good foreground friends?
They make you feel better about the world and about yourself. They are there for you, listen to you and, while they may not always agree with you, they get you. There’s a sense of mutuality and reciprocity in terms of helping and engagement. And crucially, you fundamentally enjoy being with them, just as they enjoy being with you.
Action Item: Practice a friendscape audit. Which relationships are nourishing and worth re-engaging with? And which need boundaries?
A 20-Minute Loving-Kindness Meditation
All we need to kick-start a late holiday weekend work week is to be rooted in the present. This meditation is to help us connect with our own goodness. When we're anchored in feelings of love and gratitude, we can bring loving-kindness and compassion with us out into the world.
You can listen to the guided meditation audio track on Mindful here.
1. Start by taking a moment to listen to your body at this moment. Is there anything that you could adjust? Is there anything that you could soften or invite to soften? Do you soften your heart, your chest, your belly?
2.Allow yourself to surrender to gravity. Allow yourself to surrender and connect with the feeling of being supported. Feeling supported by the chair beneath you, or the ground underneath you. Even the earth, supporting you.
3. Bring your hand onto your body. You might bring it onto your chest, your heart or maybe somewhere else on your body. Let your hands be a kind of soothing, kind support as we continue to go through this practice.
4. Taking a few breaths, allow yourself to feel the support and kindness from just the touch of your own hand, and wish yourself well. It can be difficult to wish yourself well, so feel free to try a few different ways. You could take a moment to think of all the qualities you love about yourself, or you could think of someone who really loves you and sees your goodness. It could be a partner, a friend or even a pet. Take this moment and connect with your own goodness.
5. Take a moment and repeat phrases loving-kindness and self-compassion. You can try some of these phrases and see what resonates with you. May I be happy just as I am. May my body be healthy and strong. I love myself completely.
6. Repeat one word or phrase while remaining connected to your physical body and feel yourself soaking up these well wishes, washing every sell of your body with happiness and ease.
7. When yourself overflowing with these feelings of love and gratitude, you can begin to shift these feelings to someone else. Bring into mind someone in your life that makes it easy for you to love them. Wish for them to be well, to be happy and to be at ease.
8. As you end this meditative practice, take this feeling of loving-kindness and compassion with you as you go out into the world.
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You're amazing. Enjoy the world today.
Love,
wabi-sabi team