"Tending the garden of my mind"

Regular readers know that my favorite book is My Stroke of Insight, by Jill Bolte Taylor. Jill is a brain scientist at Harvard who had a stroke, causing her to lose the function of her left hemisphere of her brain. Over an eight-year period, she regained the functioning of her left hemisphere. However, during that time, she realized that she did not want some portions of her left hemisphere to be as dominant as it was prior to the stroke. In fact, she realized that there were some parts of her left brain that were downright harmful to her mental health. She calls it the "story-teller" portion of her brain.

She writes, "I'm a devout believer that paying attention to our self-talk is vitally important to our mental health. I wholeheartedly believe that 99.999 percent of the cells in my brain and body want me to be happy, healthy, and successful. A tiny portion of the story-teller, however, does not seem to be unconditionally attached to my joy, and is excellent at exploring thought patterns that have the potential to derail my feeling of inner peace. These are the cells in our verbal mind that are totally resourceful in their ability to run our loops of doom and gloom. These cells tap into our negative attributes of jealousy, fear, and rage. They thrive when they are whining, complaining, and sharing with everyone about how awful everything is."

She then consciously asks her brain to stop hooking into these negative emotions. She has found that adding an appropriate feeling to her phrases, and feeling them with genuine affect, has the effect of making the story-teller more amenable to what she wants it to do.

"I have also found that when I am least expecting it - feeling either physically tired or emotionally vulnerable - those negative circuits have a tendency to raise their hurtful heads. The more aware I remain about what my brain is saying and how those thoughts feel inside my body, the more I own my power in choosing what I want to spend my time thinking about and how I want to feel. If I want to retain my inner peace, I must be willing to consistently and persistently tend the garden of my mind moment by moment, and be willing to make the decision a thousand times a day.

I have been practicing these ideas, and have found them immensely helpful. Therefore, I am sharing them with you, my dear readers, who mean so much to me.