The Power of Your Mind

The mind is like an empty space, where whatever you put into it is what you will experience. It is neither good nor bad.

You can think of your mind like a garden. Whatever seeds you plant and water will grow. Whatever thoughts you think regularly will be perpetuated and create your life experience. Like the example we used before, if I think I’m a failure, I’ll feel like a failure, then behave like a failure, ultimately experiencing myself as the failure I thought myself to be. 

There are many ways we plant seeds in our mental gardens, even if we are completely unaware of it — the music we listen to, the movies and shows we watch, the books we read, social media and newscasts, the people we choose to spend our time with.

All of these outer experiences impact what is happening in our minds. 

Make a mental checkmark if you can relate to any of these examples:

• You feel angry or afraid after reading something on social media or watching a news broadcast.

• The friend you are spending time with is talking about how they are unhappy with their weight or some other part of their body, and you start to judge your own body.

• You watch an intense movie before bed and have stressful dreams.

What we feed our minds not only influences our mental, emotional, and even physical well-being but actually impacts the outcomes of our lives.

I invite you to take out your journal. For these next few moments, write down all of the seeds you’ve been planting in your mental garden that may be contributing to negative self-talk. 

You may not always see a direct correlation, so it can be helpful to consider that simply engaging in things that create stress can impact our thoughts:

• The people you spend time with.

• The entertainment you watch, read, and listen to.

• The thoughts you entertain.

What are you becoming aware of? Are you starting to see how your environment influences your thoughts?

Now, write down all of the seeds you’ve been planting in your garden that contribute to greater kindness, compassion, and care toward yourself, things like meditation, yoga, dance, therapy, nature.

There are many ways we can positively influence our minds. One very popular technique is the use of affirmations. Affirmations are short statements spoken in the positive and present tense.

Affirmations are so much more than a feel-good exercise. Repeating an affirmation regularly with emotion has the ability to retrain our minds and rewire our brains. 

Here are a few helpful points for using affirmations.

• Repeat affirmations in the present tense, as if what you want is already happening: I am healthy and strong. I am living in my dream home. I am loving myself completely. I am working in my new career and loving it!

• If you feel strong resistance to an affirmation, there’s no need to force it. Find another affirmation that works for you.

• It’s normal for an affirmation to feel awkward for a while. Many of us choose affirmations that are foreign to our minds and even oppose our current belief systems, so it may take some time for the new affirmation to start to feel more natural and true. 

• Feeling strong emotion while repeating an affirmation is what causes new synaptic connections in the brain to be made. Do your best to conjure the emotion that you feel matches the affirmation while you repeat it. You might remember a time from your life when you felt that way or imagine a scenario where you would feel those emotions. 

• Affirmations are not to repress emotion. This is very important. 

Let’s say you feel sad and start to repeat, I am JOY! I am JOY! For some, repeating this will actually awaken joy and the sadness will dissolve. This often happens when we are simply in a pattern of sadness.

But for others, it will feel like the weight of the sadness is still there and being pushed down inside. This is called “spiritual bypassing” and can be harmful to our well-being. 

If an affirmation isn’t helping to shift your state after some time, it’s probably a sign that you need to tend to your emotions in a healthy way first. This might look like letting yourself cry or yell to move the energy of emotion before repeating affirmations.

Let’s take a few moments to practice affirmations together. 

Sit tall, and close your eyes if that’s comfortable.

Consciously relax your body.

Feel yourself slowing down.

As you hear each affirmation, I invite you to conjure the emotion you feel matches it as you repeat in your mind out loud. 

I am caring with myself.

I am grateful for my life.

I acknowledge myself for doing my best in every moment.

I love the person I am.

I listen to myself with kindness.

I am strong, I am powerful.

My life is a gift.

I am beautiful inside and out.

I believe in myself.

I am worthy of love and respect.

I honor myself.

I love who I am becoming.

I am deserving of all good things.

Today I am choosing myself.

I deeply love and accept myself.

Beautiful. Take a slow, deep breath in and out, and when you’re ready, open your eyes. 

What do you notice inside? Can you see how repeating affirmations regularly can positively impact your mental state?

You can repeat affirmations any time of day — during meditation, while taking a walk, in the shower. You may wish to create alarms on your phone and write affirmations on Post-it Notes stuck to your mirrors to help make these new positive thoughts a habit. 

Well done, my friend! You made it through your 10-day journey. And this is just the beginning of a new, beautiful life experience. Remember, your mind is a garden, and you are planting and watering seeds every day with your focus and what you choose to feed your mind. 

I invite you to choose at least one technique from our journey and commit to yourself to take it on as a regular practice. Can you imagine how much joy, peace, calm, and kindness you would feel if you fed your mind with positivity every day? How much more free and full of love your heart would feel?

You are so powerful, and you are the captain of the ship called life. Sometimes the waters are rough. We experience challenges, the ups and downs of life, but keep moving forward. Take one baby step at a time toward a mind of greater peace — with mediation, compassion, and movement — and you will be thrilled to one day recognize that you are a completely different person — a person who not only thinks more positively, but is in love with this life. 

I am so grateful you joined me for this journey.

What has shifted in you from lesson 1 up to today? Are you more aware of your mind?

Have you been able to embody greater compassion toward yourself? Your emotions? 

And please know it’s perfectly okay if you haven’t noticed a drastic shift inside. The work we are doing to retrain the mind and rewire the brain takes time and consistent repetition of these new, more compassionate thoughts and behaviors. It’s like we’re trying to drag a car with our bare hands through the sand.

It may seem difficult at first, and at times you may feel discouraged, but keep going. Don’t give up on your precious self. Before you know it, the car will be on the road again, and you will feel the ease and freedom of a liberated mind and heart.