Your Mind Is Like A Beautiful Garden So Plant Happy Seeds!

It is now being proven scientifically that a happy and healthy attitude to both ourselves and to life affects our mind in many noticeable ways. We do not get such an attitude by ignoring or denying negative feelings and pretending to be happy. Rather, we do it by becoming a good gardener, methodically and carefully removing the weeds of discontent while cultivating beautiful flowers.

Qualities such as kindness, compassion and forgiveness are the seeds we want to plant to cultivate a beautiful garden. But the self-centered ego’s need for grasping, gaining, and selfishness easily buries them. We are all capable of losing our cool, getting caught up in hot emotions and causing harm. When we only focus on our own concerns and problems we become too self-engrossed to really acknowledge anyone else’s issues. These are the weeds we need to pull up, as are moments of closed-heartedness or anger, self-doubt and insecurity. We can bring mercy and tenderness to those places, to the wounded parts, so the fight within us can come to an end. And when we step beyond ourselves, then the ability to cultivate kind and caring qualities becomes possible.

When Ed was going through a difficult patch in his life he realized that he was stuck in his mind, which felt like being stuck in a paper bag. He had nowhere to go, just caught up in his own issues. It was like his mind was overcome by weeds, with no flowers to be found. He finally realized that our true mind is like the sky. Just as the sky has storms, wind, rain and tornadoes, but is not affected by these things, so our true mind has worries, upsets and fears, but need not be affected by them.

In our recent book, Be The Change, we interviewed over 100 inspired people in all walks of life who verify the importance of transforming anger and self-negation into acceptance and generosity. Among them is scientist Richard Davidson who, along with the Dalai Lama and psychologist Daniel Goleman, has opened the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Here, a team of researchers will study such qualities as kindness, compassion, and forgiveness, and how they affect the brain. The fact that such brilliant people have established this center highlights the importance of developing positive thinking versus maintaining negative thinking, such as self-dislike, anger, and hatred.

Meditation is hugely important in this. In fact, kindness and compassion are such clear outcomes of meditation that there is now an overwhelming amount of research showing how meditation stimulates the circuits in the brain associated with contentment, happiness and the feel-good factor. Dr Davidson has scientifically studied Buddhist monks while they were meditating. When asked to focus on compassion, their brains reflected a remarkable generation of clarity and intensified kindness. The center is probably the only place in the world where there is a meditation room next to the lab!

“By training the mind, we can actually change the brain toward greater contentment,” says Dr. Davidson in Be The Change, How Meditation Can Transform You and the World. “There is certainly evidence to show that meditation practices designed to cultivate compassion and loving kindness change the brain in many positive ways.”

Next: Pulling Weeds Meditation