What Dandelions Teach Us About Effective Personal Growth

Go ahead, pick those bright yellow dandelions.

Plonk them in a green vase. Watch them shrivel up into ugliness. You don’t have your shit together enough to throw them out, so you ignore the dried-up mess. Pretend they don’t exist for so long, you forget all about them. 

Until one day, a miracle!

Your dead bouquet explodes into perfect white balls of star-shaped seed parachutes. They’re fireworks in a vase that you’d never be able to bring indoors otherwise. If you tried, the seeds would catch the slightest air current and fly off, leaving you bereft and with bald spots. So if you want to admire dandelion seedheads indoors, pick the flowers and trust the process.

This happens to humans too.

Sometimes when we want to transform ourselves, we try too hard. Chunks of us go flying off, and we are left with bald spots on our spirit. We become imbalanced. Let’s give ourselves space to let our insides shrivel up and be ugly. Let us not fret, hover, or hurry.

Personal transformation happens deep within, in its own time.

Look at how change happens in nature -- the caterpillar literally liquefies before rearranging itself into a new form, and we are no different. A lot of our old self has to be composted, has to be allowed to fall away, has to shrivel up and die before the seeds of our new self can be sown and take root.

Give it a try.

And when the seedheads burst forth, take them outside, make a wish or say a blessing, and scatter them with your breath.

Enjoy every phase of your transformation.

Anonymous Illustrator, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons