I love metaphors. Especially when they fit juuuust right.

In the conversation that’s following “What’s Your Attitude Environment?”, Carolyn Manning injected a great metaphor about marinades, to which Jean Browman wrote:

Actually, I don’t think of my “attitude environment” as a marinade, I think of it as a garden that needs regular tending…pulling the weeds, nurturing the flowers. If yours were a garden, what would be the weeds that need pulling? The flowers you’re trying to nurture? What tools do you use?

Well, I started to write a reply, and realized a post was in better order. So, picking up the garden metaphor and running with it…

I’m a believer in the “bio-intensive” approach to gardening. And lo and behold, the approach transfers over to your mental environment wonderfully…

1. Prepare your soil first.

Deeply-dug beds and good rich soil are going to provide the perfect environment for healthy plants (they say that if conditions are right, roots can penetrate up to 8 feet into the soil!). Spiritually speaking, that means prepare yourself before the slugs show up.

Regular spiritual connection, through meditation/Remembrance/prayer/etc. is going to help you dig deeply into your being, and find the richness that lies within you. And in turn, you’ll become richer and more fertile as a person.

2. Plant your seeds close together — it crowds out the weeds.

In other words, if you plant the good stuff densely enough, there’ll be little room for opportunistic weeds to pop up.

The more you focus on the positive, the less room there is for the negative. Simple as can be.

3. If a weed does come up, pull it early.

Why wait? With tools like EFT, dealing with negative belief systems is as easy as plucking dandelions. You don’t have to set aside a half an hour (or more) to defeat a sticky thought pattern — thirty seconds of tapping, and you’re done, in most cases.

Also, using dialogue-centered, Remembrance-based methods, where you gain insight and perspective through your heart’s connection to the Divine/Source/Truth/Oneness, helps you expand beyond your old assumptions and beliefs, and literally grow into a new way of being.

Now, that alone is advice to live by. But as I wrote all of that, it reminded me of an article I’d written almost two years ago to the day, about this exact same concept (and since so many people have enjoyed “That’s What The Lonely Is For”, where I did a similar blast-from-the-past update, I figured you might appreciate it). But, if you want to stop reading here, that’s fine — I won’t mind.

But, if you want to really get a much deeper explanation of how this all works, then please, read on…

Ecology of Your Mind

Have you ever really paid attention to what’s going on between your ears?

Well, given that you’re reading this, you probably have – and so you’ve noticed that it’s usually a pretty noisy place, with lots of voices and patterns of thought that paint quite a picture.

And while most of the time, you probably don’t think much about the quality of what you’re thinking of, it’s the health of that little mental ecosystem that determines a lot about how you live your life.

Right now you may be saying, “I know this, man. Everyone tells me about thinking positively. Been there, done that, wearing the t-shirt, okay?”

It doesn’t take a whole lot of logic to see that if your thoughts are polluted, your experience of life will be polluted. Think ugly, live ugly. Think beautiful, live beautiful. Right? Sure.

But what they didn’t teach you in spiritual kindergarten is that ecology isn’t the whole picture.

Ecology, the health of a system, is one piece of the puzzle. But what determines ecology is environment.

Environment, you say? How does environment influence ecology? Especially in this metaphor, where we’re really talking about my head?

Glad you asked.

This is your mind. Picture, if you will, a flat chunk of land with lots of water. A swamp, right? The water stays where it is because there’s no elevation change to make it flow away. This is what your mind is like when what you build your beliefs upon is what you learn from the world around you. Everything you believe is informed by your human experience of creation. The lay of the land (your consciousness) affects the flow of water (your thoughts). And you know what’ll happen if water remains standing too long? Funkiness. Stench. Mosquitos. Stagnation. So how do you get it flowing?

This is your mind on Oneness. Now picture a mountainous hillside with the same amount of water as before. Rather than a swamp, you have a flowing stream. The lay of the land has now become elevated, which affects the flow of the water (and everything else) in a much different way.

How did this happen? By tapping into your spiritual connection, your beliefs are now informed by more than just the world around you. Your experience of life is no longer flat, because you have been given perspective, or elevation of consciousness.

Rather than being limited by your humanity’s view of the world, you have tapped into the wisdom and flow of the spiritual dimension, and that changes your internal environment greatly. This, in turn, impacts your ecology.

So, the choice is yours… you can let your mental ecology – your thoughts - stagnate, which it’s pretty much guaranteed to do if the environment of your mind is flat, informed only by your humanity’s view on life. Because even if you read, talk with others, listen to audio tapes, etc., you are still only getting the perspective of humanity. It’s all flat ground.

Or, you can let your mental ecology be in a state of flow, which will ensure its health and vibrancy. You do this by opening your mind to your heart’s connection to the Oneness. This teaches your mind what it couldn’t know otherwise – and that builds mounds of spiritual insight on your swampland, changing the flow of your thoughts. Over time, if you keep connecting, those mounds become mountains, and your inner environment evolves and develops into a rich landscape, flowing with streams and pools, trees and moss; the mind of a gnostic.

So which landscape do you want between your ears?

Image from infomatique by Creative Commons license.

And thanks to all who have commented on the previous post so far: Christine Kane