If you want to grow something, you must be persistent and consistent with daily actions.
At least that’s the common thinking.
We are now a few days into Summer and the zodiac season of Cancer.
The sign of Cancer is about care. It gets a lot of its significations from the season of Summer. In nature, Summer is a season associated with this energy of persistent and consistent daily actions needed to grow what we have planted.
Tending the soil.
Watering the plants.
Weeding the garden.
It takes a lot of discipline to act consistently, regardless of how you feel.
There’s another side to it, however, that rarely gets acknowledged.
The Unexpected Discipline Required to Nurture Growth
Care and nurturing are not just about taking action. We must also exercise discipline and restraint to refrain from taking action when such action would be counter productive to our end goals.
Nurturing something into being requires finding the appropriate mix of activity and restraint.
Consider the body: if you want to increase your muscular strength you must work against the resistance of weights.
No reputable weightlifting program schedules workouts for 7 days a week.
Muscle growth doesn’t happen in the activity stage of lifting weights. It happens in the resting phase, when muscles recover.
Rest days are a requirement.
Proper care requires that you distinguish between what your body truly needs and what your ego wants.
In the same way, if you water plants too much, you’ll kill them.
Cancer and summer are both associated with the “mother” energy of nurturing.
But too much “mothering” can quickly become “smothering,” drowning and suffocating what we are trying to nurture into being.
The Discipline of Restraint
We often think of discipline as the requirement for what we need to take action. It’s hard to rewire the narrative that we must do more.
In a culture that promotes doing more, stepping back to do less can seem lazy and unproductive.
But discipline also comes into play when we must refrain from acting.
The art of growing anything — a muscle, a relationship, a business — is dependent on giving that thing enough space to grow and be what it is meant to be.
It takes a lot of discipline to step back and refrain from taking action.
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