Plant a Garden In Your Brain

Have you ever planted a garden? Maybe vegetables. Or flowers. Did you fertilize it, weed it, water it regularly? Of course you did. You wanted your garden to flourish so you constantly worked on it and cared for it.

Have you ever thought about your brain being like a garden? It reaps what you sow in it. We all put so much trash into our minds every day: the worries, the anxieties, the memories of the past, the fears of the future. All contaminating our brains. We do not take care of our brains the same way we do our gardens.

Statistics show the the average person has about sixty thousand thoughts each day. And ninety percent of those thoughts are the same ones they thought the day before.

Why do they do that? Out of habit. Most of those thoughts, though, are negative; and negativity is toxic. Since our thoughts create our reality, negative thinking poisons our world for us. It blocks the enormous potential of our minds and keeps us from living a mentally healthy life. If we don't take care of our garden, the plants won't be the best they can be. And if we don't take care of our brains, they will not be the best they can be, either.

So how do we do that? By being aware and promoting healthy, positive thoughts and repeating our blessings every day. Just as negative thoughts drag us down, positive thoughts lift us up. But it takes work. Constant work. Your garden does not flourish if you neglect it and neither will your brain.

When I was in the restaurant business, I trained new people to follow the steps as they were written in the training manual. I explained to them they need to follow those steps every time they did that task. The repetition of doing it the same way every time would soon become a habit; and once that happened, the work would be simple. They wouldn't have to figure out anything. Their brains already knew how to react to the situation. Forming the habit crystallized their thought process. They would be happier and I would be happier.

We cannot always control the things that happen to us but we can control our attitudes, or thoughts, about them and how we react to them. To do that need to be aware of what we think about a situation when it happens. My awesome dad used to say that there is good in everything. But sometimes you have to look for it.

When you form the habit of searching for the positive side to everything, you become more content and upbeat. You enjoy the day.

Use some of those sixty thousand thoughts today to start your habit and see the positivity in something. Your brain will begin to flourish. Just like your garden.