Garden of dreams

Image Credit - aldas-garden-of-treasures.com

Several weeks ago I wrote a meditation called The Garden of Dreams.  In this guided meditation I took the group to a beautiful garden where they searched out the most fertile piece of soil and took the seeds of their dreams and goals and planted them with love.  They watered these dreams with love and desire and warmed them from above with a sun full of belief.  They took time to weed out negative thoughts and worries and soon their dreams grew into the most beautiful reality.

It was a lovely meditation to do and one that can be used regularly to recreate the perfect ground to sow the next dream.  I came across this article on a website called http://silverandgrace.com/a-mind-garden and thought it would be of interest as it mirrors my own meditation.

The Mind Garden
The garden of the mind is a more sneaky matter. It’s harder to keep track of all the seeds and weeds that are blowing into that garden. Even the most diligent mind-gardener, careful to prepare the soil with fertile compost and wholesome nutrients is constantly bombarded with weed after weed in our daily lives.
There are countless weeds coming at us all the time. Weeds of fear that keep us from seeing our spectacular flowers are one kind of weeds that destroy the mind-garden. Weeds with thorns of violence, weeds that breed bramble bushes of negativity, weeds of depression, apathy and inactivity are just a few more that we are in constant battle with.
How can we fight the bombardment of weeds on the mind?
It isn’t hopeless. There are steps every good gardener can take.

Gardening Tricks for the Mind Garden

Fill it with beautiful flowers. It’s a gardener’s secret that if the soil is full, then it is harder for the weeds to take. Be proactive in filling your mind with the happy flowers of your choice. Plant your seeds close together so that the weeds can’t take hold. Create your own unique design. Peaceful, positive, challenging, enlightening, artistic, inventive, or whatever interests you. What would you like your mind-garden design to be? Create a plan. Put it in writing. Look at it daily. The brain is a malleable organ soaking up everything it is exposed to. You have an amazing amount of control over what goes into your brain. Choose to exercise that control and plant your garden the way you want it.
Pull the Weeds. Next, pull the negative weeds out. You might have to look closely to identify the weeds in your life. Some weeds look remarkably like flowers. Or they have been there for so long that we just haven’t paid any attention to them before. It might be that they are in everyone else’s garden so we thought they must be Okay. Take a deep look. Once you have planned your garden design, there won’t be any more room for weeds that will take away from the garden of your dreams. Be very selective. Pull them all! Weeds breed more weeds. Gardeners know that one weed has many friends.
Fill in the empty spaces with new flowers. While it takes effort and time to cultivate friendships and learning, it takes amazingly very little effort to cultivate weeds. You can do nothing but leave them in your life and they will grow, breed and take over. Once you have removed them don’t let them back in. It’s a battlefield in the mind garden and the weeds plan to win! Once you have removed them, fill that space up with new flowers. Remember to water, fertilize and feed those new flowers with positive thoughts, gratitude and celebrations. Take time and attention, carefully care for them and they will reward you with their beauty and fragrance.
Stay Alert. A gardener must always be alert and on the look-out for stealth weeds that sneak in looking like flowers, promising to be a good thing in your life, only to end up taking over the whole garden. Keep in mind, that many nice flowers if left to over-breed can become weeds in the wrong situation. You must choose wisely with balance and determine what are the most important flowers to fill your mind with and in what proportions.
Spend time. A Master Gardener knows you should spend time on your garden every day. Take a walk through it, enjoy it, meditate in it. Get inspiration from it. A beautiful garden will give back much more than you ever will have to put in to it, especially a beautiful mind-garden. Daily short acts of maintenance keeps the job from not getting overwhelming and keeps the weeds at bay.
Focus on the flowers, not the weeds. It’s easy to get hung up on weed control and ignore the power of beauty in the mind-garden. Remember, where our focus goes, our future goes, so focus on the flowers in your life and not the weeds!
You can’t escape having a mind-garden. It will be planted. What goes into that garden is up to you one way or another, by choice of doing something, or by choice of doing nothing.
It’s still a choice.

With love and Blessings,

Jean Fisher-Taylor x