Life happens – Planting flowers in your mental garden
Your mind could be likened to a garden. You can spend your time removing weeds or you can spend it planting beautiful flowers. If the weeds are a metaphor for beliefs, values and feelings that are not empowering you, and you have a lot of them, then you should spend some time on understanding them and clearing them out. But for the most part your focus is better aimed towards cultivating beautiful flowers.
I will argue that a life well lived is a life where you spend most of your time in beautiful states of mind. Finding or placing yourself in a state of for example love, gratitude, contribution, pride or belonging will trigger a physical response in your body that feels amazing. This goes back to raising the baseline of your happiness level.
What flowers do you want to plant?
The flowers in your garden can be of many sorts. If you’re a beginner at planting then pick the ones that are easiest to nurture; gratitude, curiosity and contribution are three that are easy to find and that will bring immediate energy and ambiance to your life.
Work yourself towards investing in flowers that require focused and deliberate practice such as love, compassion and faith. With time and some effort on caring for the possibly toughest plants to sprout; self-love, discipline and grit you will finally earn a garden that will fill your heart with feelings of pride and accomplishment.
The more space you claim for powerful flowers the less room there is for weeds to grow in the first place.
Playing mind games
The garden of the mind is clearly a metaphor. Have you noticed how much easier it is to understand and remember a new concept if the teacher finds good metaphors for likening the concept to things that you already understand? The more time you spend thinking of a concept, i.e. practicing that concept, the better and more efficient you will become in thinking it. Telling a story, which in the very construct is something the brain also loves, and using a metaphor will activate that practice skill in the brain and let you fertilize the soil so your flowers can grow strong and healthy root systems 😉
Life happens
I believe that life happens. To me that means that you can’t control everything that actually physically happens. The weather, death, accidents and sicknesses are part of life. Layoffs, politics and the impact in your life that comes from other people’s fears are also facts that mostly aren’t efficient to spend too much time trying to mitigate. Life happens and the best thing we can do is manage how we deal with it when it does.
When we spend time practicing the good feelings we build ourselves up. We build a level of resistance that inoculate us from falling into darkness when and if life throws a curve ball our way. When we practice gratitude and love, discipline that leads to a sense of pride, self-love and compassion we are more likely to come back to those feelings even if we falter for a short while.
Enroll your brain to camp
So how can you ensure you have a mind full of beautiful strong and resilient flowers? You start practicing. Practicing and repeating again and again so your brain and your subconscious gets the message loud and clear. You bring your focus back to the feelings and thoughts you want to promote and live in every time you feel you’re drifting.
This conscious practice is why coaches instruct their clients to create empowering mantras and vision boards. You want to practice as often as possible. Daily at least.
Your brain stores information according to your senses; visual, audio, feelings (physical and emotional), smell and taste. The more senses you can get involved in the feelings you’re working into your life the more deeply they will stick.
Create triggers in your daily routine
Many successful people have routines built into their days that include getting up early in the morning and focusing on themselves and their goals in life. I apply this theory partly in my morning routine. I begin most of my mornings on my stationary bicycle waking my system up. While I’m there I focus on two things; everything and everyone I’m grateful for and my goals and dreams for the future. Nowadays I don’t have to be guided through the mental exercises, now I know exactly where to go mentally.
Another thing we do in our family is that we use our wall space for visual triggers for positive emotions. In my bedroom I have a large photo of a warm sun and the text “Step up!” as a reminder of the incantation “I am the Voice” – shout out to my Date with Destiny peeps!
In our living room I’ve drawn Thank you in 40 centimetre letters and laid out pens so that, we in the family, as well as our guests can write things that we are grateful for on the wall.
When my daughter turned 9 I wrote a message by her bed to remind her of everything she is. Translated it says; “I have everything I need within me. Love, courage, laughter, the ability to ask for help, compassion, imagination, gratitude, faith, curiosity, determination, power”
There have been many evenings when I’ve been lying next to her before she falls asleep when we’ve told each other about situations from the day that relates to each word.
Another strong and valuable trick is to keep filling your head with positive and motivating sounds. Keep searching for inspiring talks on www.ted.com or on Youtube; I can recommend Your world within or Mateuszm . Keep pouring good things in – they will activate that pattern recognition and help rebuild your brain.
Enjoy your garden
Like any gardener you should reap the rewards from your hard work. Remember to stop and smell those metaphorical roses now and then!
Stop and really let the feelings in. Snuggle your nose into your child’s neck, kiss her forehead. Sit next to her and if she’ll still let you then pull her close and wrap your arm around her whenever possible. Enjoy the sunrises and sunsets, the starlit sky, the amazing play of sunlight on the autumn leaves. If you look for it you will see lovers holding hands, parents lovingly and with inhuman patience help their kids with small and big things, dog owners caring for their four legged babies and people being helpful to other people.
Give yourself a whole lot of praise and love when you show up, do the work and follow through on the things you’ve committed to. Be good to yourself and find reasons to celebrate often. Lean into life. Share your happiness with the world. Be a force for good!
