This week’s emphasis is about celebrating those healthy fruits of life and harvesting their potential for us. It’s about time, right? We spend so much time, so much energy focusing on the things that are sick and need fixing. Worse yet, we just exist in the stuff, feeling mired and unable to create change for ourselves. How important it is to celebrate ourselves, our lives, all that we are, all that we do.
In Part 4 of 5 for my psychological shedding series, I’ll provide you with tools for harvesting all of the positive gains you’ve made in your life. This will help you see and feel your life force with greater clarity and purpose, allowing you to move away from the tendency to re-create the old, negative, rotten situations that you discarded over Parts 1-3: A Time for Psychological Shedding, Letting Go of Rotten Things, and Clearing Away of Old, Dead Parts of Self.
For this exercise, you’ll once again need:
A sheet of paper.
A pen or other writing implement. Maybe something colorful? It’s your tree. Work those branches in this harvesting, y’all!
The Setup
Bring your tree to mind.
Remember in Week 1 (link) when we identified your tree and you listed those positive fruits at the top of tree and the rotten stuff on the lower branches? In the previous exercises, I showed you how to identify, drop, and clear away the most rotten fruits of your life.
Today, our attention will focus on those positive fruits you placed at the top of your tree.
Once again, draw the tree with the positive fruits, paying more attention to the beauty, the robustness of the positive aspects of your life.
As you bring your attention to the positive things about your tree, I hope that you’re noticing more that’s fabulous in your life than what was visible to you in Week 1. Give yourself the time to draw as many of these positive fruits as come to mind.
Spend some time noticing that big beautiful tree, resplendent in the many positive fruits that you’ve made happen for yourself.
Harvesting
Select three of the fruits from your tree for our harvesting exercise.
Draw the fruit with its name, and list the many things you associate with it: the positive vibes, the affirming awareness that you made a great decision, the cool and joyful aspect of it. If you notice fun sensations in your body (butterflies in the stomach), go with that too.
Remember to complete the exercise for your top three fruits. No need to spend time agonizing if you have 4-5 ripe for harvesting. Go with these.
Stacking
Draw a line under the column of fruit and the amazing qualities you identified with each. When you add them all up, what do you notice is possible for yourself? Give yourself over to whatever feels real, and circle, star, confetti, color, and whatever else you want to signify your statement of all that you’ve made possible through your positive actions. Notice how good it feels to be in this space and name it in a way that feels real for you.
It’s a powerful thing to own our voice and make a decision to proclaim the power of our positive life energy. I hope you’ll continue to reflect on the amazing fruit from your harvesting, and select additional positive fruits you listed as you see fit. There’s no end to what can be stacked, here.
In Week 5, the final blog for the psychological shedding series, “Storing Self-Love for the Dark Days,” I’ll show you how you can overcome life challenges by drawing from these positive experiences we’ve worked to identify.
