Enjoy Beautiful Flower Garden Time

Imagine that you have this beautiful flower garden. See it in your head. Mine is full of sunflowers. If you do not weed it pretty regularly, crabgrass and all kinds of other unwelcome visitors will inevitably start popping up. Without any maintenance at all, the weeds will eventually take over and choke out the flowers.
Your mind is like this garden. You can pull weeds and plant flowers in the garden of your mind.

In his book, Buddha’s Brain, Rick Hanson writes:
To gradually replace negative implicit memories with positive ones, just make the positive aspects prominent and relatively intense in the foreground of your awareness while simultaneously placing the negative material in the background. Imagine that the positive contents of your awareness are sinking down into old wounds, soothing chafed and bruised places like a warm golden salve, filling up hollows, slowly replacing negative feelings and beliefs with positive ones.
You know that pesky automatic negative mental chatter made up of your subconscious thoughts, beliefs, and feelings? Some of it is material from the present, and some from the recent past, but most of it is comes from the implicit and explicit memories of childhood. He suggests first becoming aware of and familiar with your “usual suspects” that make for recurring upsets and problems through some self analysis. In other words, find the root. Once you do, infuse positive material into it….the weed killer.
The point is not to resist painful memories and experiences or grasp at pleasant ones. That leads to its own kind of suffering. The goal is to pair negative material with and, eventually, replace it with positive emotions and perspectives…the flower, if you will.
For example, if not feeling good enough is one of your common themes, when this thought appears, recall a specific time when you were more than good enough. Really recall the feeling of it. Give it the power of language and verbalize it. Make it into an affirmation. Do this a couple more times in the following hour. Scientific evidence shows that negative memory is especially vulnerable to being changed after it is recalled.
For me, it is just the general fear of the future and anxiety about the unknown. Can I handle it? How will it turn out? What if the worst happens? I remind myself that I have not only recovered from a serious brain injury with no professional guidance just by my sheer determination and tenacity, but I am better than ever. If I can do that, I can handle anything. I will figure it out. And you know what? I really believe it now!
You can do this any where and at any time. With repetition, this actually changes your brain and builds new positive structures and weeds your garden. Here’s to beautiful gardens!