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Weeding For Your Mental Health
I come from a family of gardeners. My father breeds flowers for a living (I have a camellia cultivar named for me), my mother has a flourishing backyard of vegetables and Australian natives, and both my sisters have a love for and a way with plants.
Not me.
Don’t get me wrong, I adore gardens and flowers and trees, but I have never been one for actually gardening. But recently, after moving house to a place with a lovely established garden, I have discovered the one aspect of gardening that I love and find quite beneficial — weeding.
You may have seen a little comic strip floating around, that calls weeding therapeutic because it’s like pulling the head off of someone and having the spine come too. There is some truth to that. Weeding can get the aggressive urges out of your system, while ultimately doing something productive. Though I doubt the cartoonist ever weeded an Aussie backyard — our weeds are tough and you’re more likely to snap something mid-stem than pull it up cleanly if you’re not careful.
It’s exactly that level of care that I find makes weeding a very good exercise in mindfulness. You are aware of your surroundings, with all your senses. You observe the weed, you touch it, you make sure you are grasping it near the soil. You pull, and need to vary your strength and speed and angle to make sure you…
