Designed to Flourish
Wildflowers
Where to start? Perhaps it feels easier to start thinking about wildflowers. It’s about this time of year I start to intensely miss the early summer days of bright green and abundant wildflowers. Wildflowers are some of my favorite things. They are designed to flourish. In supportive conditions, they will thrive, blooming bright, and creating beauty by just simply existing. Wildflowers innately contain not just the programming to survive, but the impulse to grow as bright and full as they can. Their growth is not arrogant or selfish, simply a fulfillment of their potential.
Perseverance Through Resilience
Conversely, in dry, hot, obstructive seasons wildflowers lack the conditions needed to reach their potential. It’s not any sort of inherent defect, simply an environmental deficit. They are also resilient, lying in wait under feet of snow all winter and persevering through the summer seasons that are less than ideal. I would suggest, pointing to a developmental neuroscience lens, that in these ways we are the same as wildflowers. Our core self is wired biologically for goodness from the beginning.
We Are Programmed For Success
From the get-go we are good. It’s controversial, but we can see evidence for this in our inherent capacity for compassion, connection, clarity, coherence, creativity, confidence, collaboration, and courage. We only need environments that provide us with the conditions in which these core traits can come to fruition. This means, as Hillary McBride frames it, “No one can give it to us, and no one can take it away. We can’t be saved from it, we can’t be so hurt and wounded it is lost forever. It may feel out of reach, but it never disappears forever.” This “it”, our core goodness and impulse to thrive, will not, and cannot leave us, no matter how far from it we may feel.
Our Environment and Experiences Impact Our Ability to Thrive
The conditions needed to thrive as seen in the neuroscience and attachment research are simply safety and attuned relational connection. I write “simply” knowing that they are far too often rare and unavailable to us. And so, in environments lacking safety or attuned relationships or both we develop in different ways. Because like the wildflowers we are resilient, we will survive. However, this survival will often come at a cost and mean developing emotional defensives and even dysregulation in an attempt to protect and support ourselves.
We Have the Power to Settle Our Defensives
We can relearn these ways though. Whether it means finding different coping skills or learning to feel and tolerate our feelings in ways that don’t hurt ourselves and others, we have the power to settle our defensives. Because let me repeat again, we cannot lose our core self, it will always be waiting under the defensives. The core self is full of potential waiting to have the space to be known in its goodness.
It is my hope that whether this idea of self feels buried under feet of snow frozen and lost, freshly sprouting, tentative and hopeful, or in full bloom, we might be diligent and persistent in seeking the places that help us to know its truth. The evidence shows that even the inner longing to be able to believe this truth is the very proof that our core self is inside at work and waiting to grow.
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