Tending to the
Inner Garden

Tending to the Inner Garden began after I finished two years inside an intensive trauma healing program, studying individual, ancestral, and collective trauma. I was in recovery at the same time, newly home from the hospital, tending to my own medical trauma. You can read that story on Heal Out Loud.

I reached for the tools I trust, the ones I have used for years to digest what happened to me and return it to my body. I could have done this quietly at home. I chose to invite the public to come with me.

We met every Monday for a year in Northwest Broward. The circles were powerful. Each person came to tend their own garden. We were not there for your sister's garden or your mother's garden or your husband's garden. We connected to your body. We tended to your inner architecture. We worked with what grows inside you.

Toward the end of 2024, the room began to change. Around the election I felt the polarization arrive. After it, the tension deepened. Our world has become deeply polarized. I was still tending to my own recovery, and I did not yet have the capacity to hold that collective weight on purpose.

So I made a turn. I began to work one on one. I took Tending to the Inner Garden on the road, to wherever I am invited. Recently I brought it to the office in East Fort Lauderdale, our downtown location. The space is intimate. I keep the circle to eight or ten people, a number I can hold with my full presence.

Since then I have tended my own inner cultivation, learning to hold space for each person's humanity, including those who have politically dehumanized me. That was hard work. I decided to bet on love. I turned toward the greater forces that can hold our fragmentation: grace, mercy, love, and peace. I worked closely with those four.

I am proud to say I have sat with patients from across the political aisle and held space for their humanity. It challenged me, and I challenged myself to stay, because we are going to need to heal. We are going to need to reconcile. We are going to need to repair. We are going to need to have healing conversations. I want in on that work. My whole life has prepared me for this kind of truth and reconciliation.

We do not debate these things inside the garden. The work is interactive, textural, and somatic. I know that unprocessed collective material still surfaces in groups, and I am equipped to hold small groups through it. I am committed to meeting you at the level of our shared humanity. This is Tending to the Inner Garden.

A garden is transformed through attention, through stewardship, through tending.

• Some areas need watering.
• Some need pruning.
• Some need protection.
• Some need nourishment.
• Some need rest.
• And some have been quietly growing beneath the surface all along, waiting for the right conditions to emerge.

Tending to the Inner Garden is an invitation to return to yourself with curiosity, compassion, reverence, and care.

It is a practice of noticing what is blooming, what is withering, what is asking for attention, and what is ready to be released.

It is a practice of learning to trust the intelligence that already exists within you.

A garden grows flowers. A garden also bears fruit.

Fifteen years ago I sat with a patient, describing how I move through life, and I told her about the rule of the fruits. I grew up in Haiti, surrounded through the whole of summer by fruit of every kind.

Mango ◆ Soursop ◆ Tamarind ◆ Cacao ◆ Plum ◆ Guava ◆ Avocado ◆ Pineapple ◆ Banana

Every fruit asks to be received in its own way.

Guava

bitten whole, skin and all.

Mango

the skin drawn back, the flesh eaten down to the seed.

Pineapple

the crown and rind cut away before you reach the sweetness.

Soursop

opened soft, the white flesh taken, the dark seeds set aside.

Tamarind

cracked from its shell, the pulp drawn from around the seed.

Cacao

never bitten. The seed is held in the mouth, drawn sweet, and let go.

Wisdom is knowing how to meet each fruit. The same wisdom knows how to meet each teacher, each book, each relationship, and each season of a life.

This became the way I study, the way I read, the way I learn. I can open a book where every chapter feeds me. I can open another where the nectar is a single line inside three hundred pages. Both are worth my hours.

I do not resent the seeds. I do not resent the peel. Not everything on the plant is meant to be eaten, and discernment is what turns hunger into nourishment.

Without discernment, hunger will swallow the skin of the pineapple. For one person nothing comes of it. For another it leaves the mouth and the tongue raw and inflamed.

So I keep my reverence for the book, the teacher, and life itself, and I let discernment tell me what is nectar and what is meant to be set down.

I hold people the same way. I do not discard a person because one part of them is hard to digest. I do not reduce anyone to the place where they disappointed me. Across difference of race, of nation, of gender, I stay in relationship and I look for the nectar in the one in front of me. This is what makes me a healer.

There is more. I can also see the parts that are not meant to be eaten.

So I can guide. I can show a person where the sweetness hides in a fruit they have never held, and which part to set down without fear.

This is what it means to guide. To come close. To show you how the fruit opens. To name what nourishes, what protects, and what is set down with respect.

My work has always been to harvest, and to teach others to harvest for themselves.

The garden that has sustained me over the years has never been a place of perfection. It has been a place of relationship. A place where beauty and boundaries coexist. A place where life is welcomed and protected. A place where growth is cultivated rather than forced.

When I think about the inner garden, I do not imagine a wild, abandoned field. I imagine a cultivated estate. Beautiful walls covered in bougainvillea and climbing roses. Passion flowers weaving through the pathways. Fruit hanging from the vines. Abundance overflowing beyond the gates.

The walls are there because what is growing inside matters.

There is a difference between exclusion and consecration. A nightclub has a bouncer because it is exclusive. A temple asks you to remove your shoes because it is sacred.

The work that I do has always felt closer to the temple.

I am not interested in escaping reality. I am interested in inhabiting it more fully.

A garden does not grow because we think positive thoughts about it. A garden grows because we tend it.

Perhaps that is why I am drawn to the image of the inner garden.

The mystical and the practical meet in the soil.