Entrance to Paradise

  

UPWARDS IN THE GARDEN

What Are Healing Gardens and What are You Likely to Find in One?

A healing garden is a composition of nature offering therapeutic relaxation, putting you back on track to feeling better and renewing your health.

By Mark Zuleger-Thyss

 

  

Flowers are God's gift to the earth ...

 

“Every flower is a soul blossoming in nature.” 

- Gerard De Nerval

Pen name of writer, poet, and translator Gérard Labrunie (May 1808 – Jan 1855), a significant figure of French romanticism.

 

 

 

Reflect briefly on what "fall from innocence" might mean to you. 

The word "innocent" derives from its Latin root meaning "not wounded." This is how we all start our lives - we're all innocent. As innocent as a newborn baby.

This concept has nothing to do with being morally right or wrong, but it has to do with NOT YET being wounded.

We all begin our lives unwounded, and at some point, we must leave the garden.

 

 

 

 

The movement of leaving and returning, moving forward and back, is the transformation process. It's how we increase the spaciousness of freedom to have the capacity for actual relatedness.

 

 

Upon any visit to an unfamiliar garden, our assumptions and expectations underlying the garden exert a powerful influence on our human senses, regardless of what the gardener's vision was for its visitors.

With gardens, it's the mood that counts. When we enter one, we enter another realm, and hopefully, it's a safe place that is very different from anything you could create yourself.

A garden is a meeting point of two worlds - a combination of culture and nature. The influence of natural elements on human health and the evolutionary longing for nature leads us to use the healing properties of gardens to restore psychic balance.

Healing gardens are designed for a more passive involvement. You do not need to do anything but absorb the benefits uniquely alongside a diverse population of seekers with different needs.

 

Healing comes forth because Healing Gardens are designed to promote …

 

 

 

A garden's shade of contrasting colors along the ground is a sight that brings much joy to any onlooker. Flowers are elegant, delicate, and fragrant - they easily capture the hearts of everyone.

Healing gardens differ from therapeutic gardens or landscapes, another term used in healthcare. Therapeutic landscapes are thoughtfully created to meet the needs of a specific patient population. And they engage that population actively and deliberately.

 

 

A garden is a deliberately man-made composition of nature on a limited, often fenced plot of land. The cultivated area that forms the garden consists of elements of nature. 

Gardens are called healing gardens when much care is taken to provide an intrinsically appealing benefit to an ailing population of patients. Healing gardens are green spaces in hospitals and other healthcare facilities that aim to improve health outcomes.

They provide refuge and promote healing in patients, families, and staff. 

 

 

Any environment can promote healing, but gardens are exceptionally equipped to do so because humans are hard-wired to find nature enthralling and soothing.

Healing gardens for therapy offer patients a place to relax, regain strength and allow their bodies, minds, and emotions to heal.

Being in or viewing nature scenes can lower blood pressure and respiration, calm an active brain, and help tamp down stress hormones. Lowering stress levels contributes to better health in general.

If you are suffering from symptoms of depression and anxiety, then simply spending time in a healing garden could be a good way for you to relax and heal.

 

 

 

 

 

Jesus told three parables about losing and finding: the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the lost son (Luke 15:4–32).

 

In each case, we think we have it, lose it, rediscover it, and then throw a party. The party only happens after the rediscovery because we don't really "have it" until we've lost it and choose it consciously again.

 

 

That's the human journey, the movement from first naiveté or false innocence to the chosen and conscious freedom God calls us toward.

Use any healing garden in the same way. Enter this soothing realm and leave feeling healed and renewed.

 

  

 

 

God's Favorite Flower – The Blue Lotus

The sacred lotus is the foremost symbol of beauty, prosperity, and fertility. According to Hinduism, within each human inhabiting the earth is the spirit of the holy lotus. It represents eternity, purity, and divinity and is widely used to symbolize life, fertility, and ever-renewing youth.

 

 

 

 

 

© 2005 – 2023, Mark Zuleger-Thyss, Garden of Healing, LLC.

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