Episode 26: Weeds

Welcome to Episode 26, my friends. It is finally spring here and everything is starting to grow.

The rhubarb is taking over the garden.

My lettuce plants are just peeking through the ground.

And oh the weeds.. those are doing much more than peaking through the ground.

As I was working on my 100 dandelion day goal – yes, I have more than enough dandelions around to make such a goal – probably every day for the rest of the summer, I got thinking about how similar our minds and thoughts are to these plants that I love and despise.

1.       We are always thinking similar to the way these plants are growing. I have heard numbers everywhere from 3000 to 60,000 thoughts per day but either way, it’s a lot of thoughts. Many are simply part of our lives. We have learned from other’s ways of thinking - similarly to how we learn which plants are good to keep around and which ones are the problem weeds. Depending on your goals or desires in life the one thought that is a problem for you can be a good thing for someone else. Just the way some see dandelions as wishes and others see them as weeds. But I think the important thing is to remember that you can evaluate your thoughts for yourself and decide what thoughts are good for you or bad for you.

2.       Thoughts are always coming up for us and we get to decide which ones are good and we want them to stay. And which ones we want to weed out and not have around. But either way, they just keep coming.

3.       Some thoughts have lots of thought friends just like them. You pull them out of one spot and you just find them over and over again.

4.       We can plant new thoughts just like I plant seeds in a garden every year. Some need to be started in the house and nourished for a while before they can withstand the more harsh environment of being outside.

5.       Some thoughts start quickly like my lettuce and come up first.

6.       Others take a little longer like the beans and we just have to be patient to see where

7.       Some thoughts are perennials like my rhubarb. Well adapted to the environment they are growing in. Useful for baking so many yummy things and they just flourish.

8.       Some thoughts are like my lettuce. Right now they are tiny little thoughts that need a lot of care, and protection (water, weeding) but they will feed me for months until the conditions around them get such that they cannot survive aka winter.

9.       Some thoughts are like the dandelions. They are relatively harmless. But they are deeply rooted in with a tap root and will slowly spread their influence over the grass and the ground actually killing other plants in their way.

10.   Some thoughts are like the Canadian thistle. They hurt when you try to question them and remove them. They also have a long tap root and can leave painful reminders of their effects if you don’t completely remove them.

11.   Some thoughts are more like hairy milk vetch. They can completely take over your mind. Spreading with rhizomes beneath the ground so they are so hard to root out. Spreading with seed above the ground so they reach further and further.

12.   Some thoughts are like cleavers. They are super fun and stick to anything that gets close to them. They can be confused with healthy plants like flax so they are kind of deceiving or their seed can get mixed up with canola seed and cause even more confusion and issue.

I share all these examples simply as a way to show you that managing our minds can be very complicated.

There isn’t a one size fits all solution for weeds or growing crops. In the same way there isn’t a one size fits all for managing your mind.

I think sometimes we get discouraged in our mind management work because it’s work.

We have thoughts that are painful that we just can’t seem to shake.

We have thoughts that create anger that we just keep coming back to.

We have things that we would love to believe but we just haven’t found the environment to allow them to flourish.

But I think sometimes we need to first step into just accepting our minds and our thoughts as they are.

I look out at my yard and see the dandelions.

Seeing them.

Accepting that the bees love them.

Seeing myself make up stories about what the neighbors will think about how many I am growing.

Then see what I can do.

100 a day - today was possible.

We will see what tomorrow will bring.

Little steps.

Watching the thoughts.

Seeing what they bring me.

Care for the ones that I don’t believe yet but I would love to believe.

Removing the ones that are harming me or not leading me to where I want to be yet are so easy to believe.

Thoughts are a lot like plants.

We can let them run wild or we can cultivate them with care to create the life that we want. The choice is ours.

It will be fun.

Have a wonderful week.