Preface

Here I have presented one way of thinking about the mind that might be useful to you on a journey of healing. I would advise every person to pursue healing for themselves, because that is the only way that the world will heal. There are many ways to take care of ourselves and to learn to heal our wounds. Approach your journey with a scientific mindset, paying attention to what you try and what results you get. Just like how science can be described as the process of becoming less wrong through being wrong over and over, progress in healing won’t be linear, but we can continue to make progress by learning from our mistakes. Learn to hold space for things you don’t fully understand, instead of holding tightly to things that are easier to understand or believe. Learn to accept that there may be some things that you don’t believe because you have an abundance of evidence, but instead you believe them because you feel like you need to believe them, as if you might lose part of yourself in letting them go. Learn to recognize what things you’re afraid to let go of and test your beliefs with curiosity and an open mind. And if you know these lessons already, don’t be afraid to let yourself continue to change and grow. And as with everything, take what’s useful and leave what’s not.

The Garden

The mind is a garden. It is full of all different kinds of plants, yielding different kinds of fruit. In a healthy mind, all the plants work together and flourish. For many people, the garden is out of balance, usually because of damage that we received throughout our life. Most parents are woefully unprepared to teach their children how to manage their garden, because they never properly learned themselves. Some controlling parents see their role as managing their children’s garden for them, so their children never learn how to effectively do it for themselves. Some people’s gardens have become overgrown with weeds and brambles. And some gardens are a balanced ecosystem, equally ready for sun and storm. Once the garden has become overgrown, it takes a lot of work to restore it to a healthy ecosystem. Some people have become so complacent with seeing some pretty flowers in spring and a few blackberries in summer, that they think it is the best they can hope for. They struggle to imagine anything better. And if they do try to garden the mind, they run into sharp thorns that hurt to pull out. At that point, they can put on gloves and get to work, or they can continue living in an unruly mind.

Starting to Garden

Before the mind can heal, and before positive change and growth can happen, we must get to a place of acceptance with who we are in the present. Just wishing things were better without accepting how they are makes it difficult to find the roots of the weeds. When we get to a place of plainly observing things for what they are in our life without judgement, then remedies start to become clear. Mindfulness and somatic practices are incredibly helpful for developing this skill. Learning to get in touch with what is going on inside the body and mind as well as understanding the relationship between the two is indispensable. The mind exists physically as a part of the body, and the body exists within the mind through the connection of the nervous system. Learning to understand the nuance of this connection for yourself, inside the unique environment that is your whole self, is an important part of the process of gardening the mind. A good place to start the process is with meditation. There are a lot of tools out there that make it very approachable. Guided meditation is incredibly helpful for those of us that are very distractable. As we learn to observe our feelings instead of living our feelings, our relationship with them changes. When we practice noting emotions and body feelings, we develop an important skill for gardening the mind. The best gardeners are the ones that are most in touch with what is going on in their garden. They know every plant by name, and they know how they work together. By carefully watching the dynamics between the plants, the critters, and the environment we can learn to see how everything fits together. Just how a healthy ecosystem has countless parts that fit together like pieces of a puzzle, when we take up the task of gardening the mind, things will start to snap into place. The journey of gardening the mind is the length of the rest of our life. The more you do it, the easier the tasks become as your skill increases and the work lessens. There will always be weeds to pull, but it can be a delightful and present process, filling us with contentment. But you won’t find your own path until you start pursuing a practice of getting in touch with your inner self.

There are a lot of difficulties that come up during the process. Each of these challenges presents an opportunity for growth as well as a risk of being set back. For people that have lived their whole lives without really getting in touch with their feelings and emotions, the native plants in their garden can seem quite foreign. Many of us struggle to even answer the question “What are you feeling?” because we have rarely been given space to genuinely experience our feelings. In fact, many people when asked that question will respond without any mention of feelings. When we’re upset with someone, we might say things like “I feel like you’re being mean,” but notice how we use the word “feel” without describing any actual emotions we might be experiencing. It takes a lot to feel safe in feeling our emotions and expressing them to other people, especially people who have hurt us in the past.

For many of us, the greatest challenge is learning to listen to and observe our thoughts and feelings without judgement. We might have received a lot of messaging or been told directly that certain thoughts shouldn’t be thought and certain feelings shouldn’t be felt. Our parents might have aggressively pruned our garden, passing down harsh judgement on us in order to get us to behave in a certain way. It is important to learn to see that judgement is ineffective at producing the results we want. In the mind, judgement produces resistance. This resistance can make it hard to even think about the things that we need to change. If we struggle to focus, being punished for getting distracted (whether by someone else or our own internal critic) only makes us more distractable. Instead, remembering why we want to focus by identifying what goals we are trying to meet and how it will positively affect people in our lives, will make staying focused more natural. And when we do eventually get distracted, just noting that it has happened, without expressing judgement, will allow us to naturally return our attention to what we wanted to focus on. This is the process of pruning unproductive plants from our garden. When we learn to let go of judgement, we free up our mind to think other thoughts, providing more energy and resources for other plants in the garden. This takes nuance and practice. Noting should be as gentle as a feather touching a glass.

In the beginning of our gardening journey, we are learning to think in a very different way than we’re used to. When we want to let go of judgement, it is very natural to find ourselves responding to judgement with more judgement. Instead, once we understand the role that judgement plays in our minds, we can note it and let our mind do the rest. As with anything in a garden that has become overgrown, it can be trimmed back and composted to nourish different plants. In the mind, it isn’t a violent process, but it is rarely an easy one. And we ought to remember that the nutrients and energy that feed even the most undesirable plants should stay in the garden. When we deconstruct unhealthy behavior, we shouldn’t do it in a violent or destructive way that costs us parts of ourselves. Instead, when we find ways to heal the wounds behind the behavior, we return the nutrients to the dirt, and in so doing, feed the whole garden for the next season.

It is hard for a lot of people to honestly express their feelings. Saying “I feel upset” or “I feel frustrated” might even feel selfish to do at times. Often this is because we have been made to feel responsible for other people’s feelings at times that we shouldn’t have been. A lot of parents pass their own damage on to their children by making them responsible for their feelings. They may say things like “You’re upsetting me by being disobedient” in an attempt to get their child to behave differently. Notice how this isn’t just a statement of how the parent is feeling, but an evaluation of the behavior of the child. It leaves no room for understanding how the child’s choice to do something other than what was asked is an attempt to meet some need of their own. But no amount of taking it out on our parents will help us heal, help them heal, or prevent harmful conversations in the future. What will prevent future damage and start the process of healing is taking responsibility for our own feelings. When things happen in our life, it is very natural to experience a wide range of emotions and body feelings, but when we blame the person or thing that prompted it, we are giving control of our emotions to forces outside of our control. When someone says something hurtful to us, it is natural to feel angry, but that anger is a reaction to a story that our brain is telling us about the situation. There is a lot of very valid and justified anger, and we can express that anger in a healthy way. But if we want to have a productive conversation, we would do a lot better by first hearing the needs behind the other person’s words before sharing about the pain that we experienced upon hearing them. And this becomes easier to do as we bring the garden of our mind into balance. Reacting hotly in an attempt to make someone feel what they have made you feel creates more pain without fixing the original hurt.

Thriving through the Seasons

Patience is an incredibly important skill to have throughout the process. We must remember that progress is never linear, and we won’t always be doing better one day than the day before. Even when things get hard, we can keep working on our practice of gardening. In this way we will learn how to do it when life is easy and when life is hard. By learning to listen patiently, then we start to see the right time to respond. By learning how to observe patiently, we start to see the right time to act. Acting rashly out of a place of uncertainty will result in harm to ourselves and others time and time again. We can learn to be patient in everything, and when we feel like acting rashly or speaking swiftly, we can say to ourselves “patient even in this.” We can’t expect fruit to ripen on command, just like we can’t expect happiness to come to us whenever we want it. All fruit ripens in its season, and we can’t have a healthy garden without sadness or grief. As our lovers turn into exes, happy memories turn into sad and painful ones. We can even enjoy the grief with contentment when we learn to appreciate the cycles of the seasons.

Love is the well that waters the garden all year long. A healthy mind allows us to receive love when it comes to us in our life, in the same way that the aerated soil of a healthy garden can absorb rain instead of letting it run off. And when the rain gets deep, it can feed our well. But if we learn to master self-love, then our well will be filled by a living spring that will never run dry. The deepest love that we have experienced for other people can be felt for our self. By repeatedly asking ourselves “What would it feel like to love myself like I have loved others?” we can learn to love ourselves like we never have before. It isn’t conceited or narcissistic, in fact it is selfish to expect other people to love you more than you love yourself. It isn’t their job, even if they’re willing to do it. All the greatest feelings of love you have ever felt for someone else have been trapped inside your body and mind. Those happy chemicals can never physically leave you and enter someone else’s mind. You can do things to express your love to someone, and they might feel love in response, but their love also starts and ends within their self. In this way, all love is rooted in self-love. If someone feels no love for themself, they could be surrounded by all the love in the world and just feel smothered. There are plenty of challenges that we will encounter along the path that might make it difficult to stick with our journey. Sometimes people might even tell us to our face that we are undeserving of love, but as we learn to recognize the hurt and unmet needs behind these kinds of messages, we start to see the truth behind their painful words, without feeling the pain they are projecting out. In time you will learn to validate your feelings and needs, even when no one else will, and you will learn to do it better than anyone else can.

Becoming a Master Gardner

In order to effectively garden our mind, we must make a commitment to the truth, both in trying to see the truth in a given situation as well as pursuing the full Truth of the world around us. The full Truth really only exists on the scale of the entire universe. Anything else is just one perspective of that truth. What we see is just a slice of all of reality, and we can be okay with that. We get closer to the full Truth the more tolerant we become of differing perspectives. We can learn to accept ourselves as we are, even when the full picture eludes us. And from there we can train our intuition. Our intuition, our instinct for what we should and shouldn’t do, is like the gardener in our mind. As we learn, increasing in knowledge and wisdom, we are providing our intuition with the resources to make good decisions. The more that we are able to be knowledgeable about and in touch with what is going on in our garden, the more easily we will make the right choices for ourselves.

Train intuition in this way:

1. Get in touch with your needs and what your intuition tells you about how to meet them.
2. Listen to it, responding promptly.
3. Observe what happens to see if your needs end up feeling met or if there are undesired consequences.

And at every step of the process do your best to remain present and patient. Acting either rashly or too slowly can both cause undesired consequences. As your intuition improves, you will find yourself making increasingly better decisions about how to take care of your body and mind and how to support other people in your life. Life and mistakes teach us wisdom, observations provide knowledge, and intuition guides our decisions. All three feed and are fed by each other. The decisions that we make can be internal ones about what thoughts we choose to water or external ones about actions we decide to take. If we are constantly indulging angry thoughts, then the part of our brain producing those thoughts gets stronger. By identifying the things that produce anger in us, we can interrupt the habit and see the root of our negative feelings. Only by getting down to the root can we really stop anger from shooting up in places that we don’t want it to. We can listen to our anger and then consider other perspectives that tell different stories about what is going on.

The external decisions that we make have a huge influence on the garden of our mind as well. We live in a world shaped by the consequences of our actions. When we make decisions to do things that contribute to life and its enjoyment, it is much easier to feel pleasant feelings. When we choose to try and anticipate our needs, make healthy choices, express ourselves creatively, or to pursue play, then we shouldn’t be surprised to find that we generally feel better. And when we make decisions that harm ourselves or others, of course we are likely to end up experiencing a lot of negative emotions. For a lot of decisions that we make, there comes a temptation to defend our actions. If we defend harmful choices, then we are fertilizing the parts of our mind that led to the harm. If we aren’t careful, we can quickly find ourselves believing that we are justified in harming others. Everyone is capable of causing harm, and when we convince ourselves that we aren’t then it is inevitable that it will happen. We have the option of recognizing the needs and logic that went into our decisions, while also recognizing that we didn’t have to do what we did. We also have the option to not feed the angry thoughts that might come up as a result of criticism or anticipated criticism. We can watch our anger run its course, then extend empathy to ourselves for our initial reasoning and for the consequences that we experienced. Emotions that produce resistance and tension in the mind make it very difficult to stay in touch with our intuition. Don’t be afraid to assert and enforce healthy boundaries, and to ask for space when needed. We can practice gardening the mind no matter what we are doing. Every task is an opportunity to be present and engaged with our self and our environment, from the smallest chores to the toughest conversations. We can delight in remaining focused and doing a good job, even when it’s a job we’d rather not be doing. In this way, we can turn any action into an artistic expression and bring magic into our world.

Throughout the entire process, love can keep us nourished and motivated. It is like a deep cistern beneath our garden, but for some people who have experienced a lot of hurt, the well can be cracked and leaky. We might find some people needing constant external expressions of love in order to feel it in their garden. But we all deserve to feel love. All of the chaos and miracles of The Universe that happened to lead to your birth have given you an opportunity to experience love. And love is such a wonderful thing that it is worth thanking The Universe just for the chance to experience it.

Once we get in touch with our self and our needs, then it becomes easier to also see the needs of others. But in the gap between understanding our needs and understanding the needs of others, we can become very hard to be around. It can be easy to say things like “That’s your problem, not mine.” or “I’m not responsible for your feelings.” But it is important to remember that we can cause harm without knowing it, and only by healing our wounds and working to stop the cycle of trauma can the world heal. We must learn to understand instinctively that to harm someone else is to harm ourself, because we are all cut from the same cloth. We all are divisions of God. We all contain the spark of the divine. We are The Universe experiencing itself, and we are doing it together. Just because our emotions are trapped inside us, doesn’t mean we have to feel alone. We can enjoy love together, like sharing a meal grown in different gardens. We can savor every morsel without wasting our energy comparing it to other meals in different times and places. And there is so much power in the community we build along the way.

No one is an island entire of itself. Every person is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. And if a single clod be washed away by the sea, the earth is the less. So too if a promontory were. So too if a home of your friend’s or of your own were. Anyone’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in humankind; so too does everyone else’s pain and suffering diminish me. And therefore, never send to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls fo