How a Garden Can Transform Your Health
02 Aug 2021 | Written by Tom Wolstenholme
Do you ever wonder why you feel more comfortable in some environments than others? Are you aware that your external environment has a direct effect on how you think, feel and act?
Not many of us are. But if you were aware, wouldn’t you do something about it? Who doesn’t want to feel good, think clearly and take positive action? Who doesn’t want to improve their life and become the best version of themselves? Becoming the best version of yourself is not only going to benefit you but everyone around you.
The power of your external environment
To understand how your garden can transform your health, it’s necessary to understand how your external environment affects your internal environment. I should point out that I am no doctor or psychologist. However, I was a Buddhist monk who has helped doctors and psychologists understand how their external environment affects the movement of their minds. Now, I am a garden designer who creates environments with the aim of producing positive, lasting effects.
The sixth sense
I’m going to start with the six senses. Those being: sight, hearing, smell, touch, taste and mind. Think of your body as a receptor, with the first five senses receiving external signals causing innate responses of liking, disliking or indifference.
Keeping on the topic of gardens, let us use one as an example. How does the sight of a cluttered, overgrown garden make you feel? Do you like it, do you dislike it or are you indifferent? What about a dysfunctional garden? Your innate response to these feelings of liking, disliking or indifference conditions your perception of that environment. Your perception of that environment then gives rise to emotions, and this affects your mood.
Your mood then affects how you think, feel and act. Therefore, if you’re in a constant mindset of disliking your external environment, that can have negative effects on your mental health. Your daily moods form habits which then become the narrative for your life. Effectively, we’re talking about cause and effect! That, in a nutshell, is how your external environment can influence your health. It sounds obvious now but important concepts like this often get buried in the hubbub and busyness of our daily lives.
So where do we go from here?
Create an environment that promotes positive feelings and lasting effects! Understanding how your external environment influences you is one thing, how to adapt an environment in a way to promote positive influences is something else. If you have read my bio you will know that, before ordaining as a monk, I studied art, design and photography. I have always been amazed how one could take a camera or a blank canvas and create a picture that provokes so much emotion that it can bring a tear to an eye, or how a sculptor can manipulate a material into a form that will attract people from around the world to come and see it. This is the power that design principles have over emotions.
What are these design principles and how do we adopt them to create a garden that improves our health?
Just to clarify, there are many design principles and I’m not here to teach you how to become a garden designer. That’s my job! However, what is beneficial is being able to understand how they can affect you. Referring to the start of this post, I asked…
“Do you ever wonder why you feel more comfortable in some environments than others?”
Simply put, it’s because these design principles found in nature can influence our perception and, when applied to garden design, evoke positive emotions which subsequently benefit our mood and health.