In the light of the passing holiday season for many of us, I wanted to touch on the act of giving and receiving, and how they must balance each other out. There is always a balance to everything, we see this in abundance in the natural world, the sun rises and sets, we sleep and we wake, the tide rises and recedes. There is a constant act of giving and receiving, one aspect simply cannot exist without the other.

One of my dearest friends has a saying that always makes me laugh yet it is true to some degree. She says that in life there are two kinds of people, those that garden, and those that are the garden. The gardeners are the type of people that give and give of themselves, and often give more than they can to sustain their own well being. The gardens on the other hand are those that need a great deal of nurturing and watering, they take and take and often do not give back. I personally do not like to put people into categories and make generalizations, as we are all a little bit of everything aren’t we? We have all been the garden and the gardener in our lives!

The mindfulness practice in this is to find the balance between both ends. For those of us that tend to give a great deal, we may not feel that we are worthy of receiving and so we fill these gaps with caring for others more than our selves. And for those of us that constantly feel that we need to take from others, we must be mindful that we too are trying to fill a gap within that no outside force can do.

Let us always keep one hand open to receive and the other open to give. There is an abundance of love on this planet. Every single person can practice being the gardener and the garden at the same time. Learning to nurture and care for one another, while also allowing ourselves to be nurtured at the same time. In this internal balance we will find that we can cultivate more balance on the earth, our garden who sustains us so beautifully. And we must give that same love back to her.