How do you thrive, flourish and bloom when it feels like you've been planted in the soil of darkness, despair and death? Are there any practical steps that you can take in order to tend to the garden of your heart and soul and begin to bloom? This week's episode is part one of a two part mini-series on Tending to the Garden of Your Heart and Soul. This week, we look at tending to our own heart and soul in these three ways:

1. Caring for your heart and soul brings you light when you feel the darkness surrounding you
2. Connecting deeply with God, self and others brings you love when you feel like your sinking in a pit of despair
3. Community is the lifeline you must hold on to in order to turn your season of death into a season of life

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So how do we show up to the lost, lonely and brokenhearted? How do we walk alongside of those living in darkness, despair and death? What does it take to make sure that we are ready when the time comes to show up and be fully present even when the sights, sounds and smells make us want to run the other way?

"To be the one who shows up for others in their pain, we have to show up and face our pain." - Nate Gustafson

1. We show up and face our pain by naming our pain
2. We show up and face our pain by refusing to numb the pain
3. We show up and face our pain by going into the place of our pain.

Quote from Henri Nouwen in his classic devotional Inner Voice of Love

1. "You have to live through your pain gradually and thus deprive it of its power over you. Yes, you must go into the place of your pain, but only when you have gained some new ground. When you enter your pain simply to experience it in its rawness, it can pull you away from where you want to go. What is your pain? It is the experience of not receiving what you most need. It is a place of emptiness where you feel sharply the absence of the love you most desire. To go back to that place is hard, because you are confronted there with your wounds as well as with your powerlessness to heal yourself. You are so afraid of that place that you think of it as a place of death. Your instinct for survival makes you run away and go looking for something else that can give you a sense of at-homeness, even though you know full well that it can’t be found out in the world.

   You have to begin to trust that your experience of emptiness is not the final experience, that beyond it is a place where you are being held in love. As long as you do not trust that place beyond your emptiness, you cannot safely reenter the place of pain. So you have to go into the place of your pain with the knowledge in your heart that you have already found the new place. You have already tasted some of its fruits. The more roots you have in the new place, the more capable you are of mourning the loss of the old place and letting go of the pain that lies there. You cannot mourn something that has not died. Still, the old pains, attachments, and desires that once meant so much to you need to be buried.

   You have to weep over your lost pains so that they can gradually leave you and you can become free to live fully in the new place without melancholy or homesickness.”