Hey Friend,
Your mind is a muscle. And just like the muscles in your body, your mind needs consistent training to stay strong.
If you neglect your physical training, your muscles atrophy (waste away).
If you neglect your mental training, your mind atrophies.
Building a body you’re proud of takes an immense amount of work, especially in the beginning.
The same is true for your mind.
But once you’ve shaped your body or mind into what you want, it’s easy to grow complacent and neglect the training that got you there.
When I find myself slipping mentally, I reach for a great book to realign my thoughts.
My favourite for this is As a Man Thinketh by James Allen. It’s a tiny book (you can finish it in an hour), yet it’s packed with wisdom.
Allen uses a different metaphor, a garden, but the lesson’s the same:
“Man’s mind may be likened to a garden, which may be intelligently cultivated or allowed to run wild; but whether cultivated or neglected, it must, and will, bring forth. If no useful seeds are put into it, then an abundance of useless weed-seeds will fall therein, and will continue to produce their kind.
Just as a gardener cultivates his plot, keeping it free from weeds, and growing the flowers and fruits which he requires, so may a man tend the garden of his mind, weeding out all the wrong, useless, and impure thoughts, and cultivating toward perfection the flowers and fruits of right, useful, and pure thoughts.
By pursuing this process, a man sooner or later discovers that he is the master-gardener of his soul, the director of his life.”
To cultivate a beautiful mind (and as a result, a beautiful life), these are the weeds to pull:
- Lust: dwelling on fantasies and treating people as objects rather than people.
- Greed & envy: wanting what someone else has, or resenting them for having it.
- Pride: needing to feel better than others, or chasing applause and approval.
- Resentment: replaying old hurts, holding grudges, or rehearsing revenge.
- Deceit: scheming, cutting corners, or looking for ways to get one over on someone.
“Let a man cease from his sinful thoughts, and all the world will soften towards him, and be ready to help him; let him put away his weakly and sickly thoughts, and lo, opportunities will spring up on every hand to aid his strong resolves; let him encourage good thoughts, and no hard fate shall bind him down to wretchedness and shame.”
Understand that intrusive (unwanted) thoughts will enter your mind from time to time.
But these aren’t really your thoughts. Something in your environment triggered them, often what you’ve consumed or who you’ve been with.
The problem starts when you entertain them and dwell on them. You give them life, and they become your own. And what you think about, comes about.
So just like a gardener has to be careful what he lets into his garden, you have to be careful what you let into your mind.
Your news feed, your social media, the people you spend time with: these are the seeds. And plenty of them are planting thoughts of lust, greed, pride, resentment and envy.
“Men will continue to have impure and poisoned blood, so long as they propagate unclean thoughts. Out of a clean heart comes a clean life and a clean body. Out of a defiled mind proceeds a defiled life and a corrupt body. Thought is the fount of action, life, and manifestation; make the fountain pure, and all will be pure.”
So here’s your challenge this week:
- Your feeds. Notice who consistently leaves you feeling envious, inadequate or angry. And get curious as to why that is.
- Your people. Notice which conversations leave you lifted, and which leave you comparing or complaining.
- Your inputs. Swap one bad seed for a good one: a book, a meditation session, a walk in nature without your phone.
And if you find your mind slipping into a negative spiral (which you will from time to time), catch it, tell yourself “I choose to think great thoughts”, and do something that energises you.
