Imagine yourself as a gardener, your experience of life is the labor of gardening, and your subconscious mind is the garden. From a very young age, without knowing, you were gardening.
Seeds of happiness, joy, love, and fear along with others, were planted and began to grow. As they matured, these seeds transformed and manifested into the reality you are experiencing now, a reality that bears little resemblance to the original seeds.
This phenomenon happens because the seeds grow with other seeds that influence each other, so when they manifest, they change.
The tricky part is that the garden of your mind isn’t accessible to you in the same way as the garden at your home. It is a subtle garden, a magical garden. There is only one door in, and no visible door out. The input you send to your mental garden can only return as the output of your mind, in the form of thoughts or emotions. This means that you can’t simply reach back and extract what is unnecessary to you.
Similarly, numerous expressions of your mind today—reflected in your thought patterns and your system of judgment regarding good and bad, beauty and ugliness, right and wrong, and all the other elements of what you call “taste”—constitute the original seeds that have blossomed into mature trees within your enchanting garden.
It’s good practice to search for those seeds, understand their origins, accept them, love them, and forgive them. This way, they are just seeds of illusion, a part of the game, and not the core of your personality, which, whatever it may be right now, can change.
To become a genuine gardener, master the art of self-talk, sow new seeds, and craft your fresh garden, yet, exercise with caution. Just as a real garden can’t handle too many changes at once without disturbing the soil, practice patience and make gradual adjustments.
Don’t force planting seeds that are not in harmony with the rest of the garden yet. It is the art of creating a harmonious garden, not the art of forcing. If you have no money at all, don’t tell yourself that you will become a billionaire tomorrow. This seed will not see life in your garden, no matter how hard you try to plant it.
Compel your garden step by step as a practice, as an art. Plant seeds that can be accepted in the magical soil, step by step in accordance with the garden you have right now.
This is the essence of manifestation. It is like a gym in which you build the perfect body—you don’t show up one day and push beyond your limits, you will get burned out and injured, and that will probably be the end of it, and thus you might think that exercising in the gym is wishful thinking.
In the case of the garden, it is a mental gym, but it works according to the exact same principle: the principle of building from the ground up, learning, and making a routine out of it, a mastery, a ritual. If your garden is in disarray, start by nurturing it with love, forgiveness, and acceptance. Working from this foundation will make your garden harmonious.
One could wonder, how exactly do we plant these seeds? If we consider the garden as a representation of our interpreted emotions, it follows that the most potent method to plant seeds involves infusing them with emotion, engaging in self-affirming thoughts, and having unwavering self-belief.
Perform a short daily practice to keep you mindful throughout the day and help you stay in good mental shape.
Find what drives your positive emotions and use them to plant seeds. Feeling love? Take a moment and say to yourself – I love myself. Feeling lucky and happy? Say to yourself – I am lucky, and more luck is coming my way, and in this moment – you have planted a seed.
Planting seeds, like planting real-life seeds, is not enough. Seeds need nurturing, care, and love. So, tend to your garden in the same way that you tend to your seeds. Make time to take care of it every day, at least a decent amount of time that you feel ok with. If you leave it to grow without nurturing, it will die, and only the strongest seeds will prevail. What are the strongest seeds? You already know the answer to that as your life experience has shown you time and time again.
Fear and negative emotions are the most potent, fast-growing seeds in your garden, and to make a case for it – say you walk down the street when suddenly a stranger stops you and says: “Hi, you look beautiful today, I love you.” How would you feel about it?
Mostly you will be uncomfortable and surely you will not jump and hug this stranger.
But if a different stranger stopped you from walking and said: “You are so strange”, how would you react? Rage, violence, sadness?
So you see that seeds of negativity grow fast, but what if the loving stranger with the kind words would show up every day or so, and say more and more of these compliments? With time, you would learn to love this stranger, appreciate his words, and even share some kind words back. So you see, positive seeds take longer to grow, but they grow if nurtured, and are sustained if you are mindful of them.
And so, this is the formula – plant seeds with positive emotions and nurture them until they have the natural power to grow and sustain. Seeds of fear, anger, or any negative seeds – accept them, love them and forgive them. When you learn to do that, you will unlock the power of using bad energy for a good cause in the same way that one does in martial arts, music, and more.
Taking care of your inner garden is the underlying power of sustained motivation, a higher awareness, and more energy.