Imagine the mind as a beautiful vast garden with many garden beds within it. Picture one garden bed planted with tomatoes, another with kale, another with green beans, and so on. There are at least forty garden beds in this vast garden, each bed is planted with a vegetable or an herb, and all are equally spaced from one another with gravel paths separating them.
Imagine that every day for a month you only watered the garden bed that had tomatoes planted in it. The tomato plants would grow tall and beautiful, but all the other plants—the green beans, kale, pumpkins—would start to wither, become flaccid, and die. Only the garden bed that is watered would thrive.
Now see your mind as a big garden with lots of garden beds in it, but in this visualization, each garden bed represents a different area of the mind. One garden bed could be compassion, another happiness, another jealousy, with the one next to it anger (anger and jealousy are neighbors, you know), another joy, and so forth.
When your awareness goes to the angry garden bed, that is where your energy is flowing. This means that you are watering this garden bed and everything in it will start to grow. As energy flows here, the angry garden bed, this area of the mind, starts to strengthen.
The more energy you deposit here, the stronger this area of the mind becomes.
If awareness goes to the happy garden bed, the happy area of the mind, then that is where your energy is flowing. This garden bed, this area of the mind, begins to thrive and strengthens as it is infused with more energy than the rest.
If your awareness is constantly going to one particular garden bed, or area of the mind, then that is where your energy is flowing, and this is the area of the mind that you are “watering,” so to speak. The more you water this area of the mind with your energy, the stronger it becomes. There are consequences to a particular area of the mind getting strengthened, and we will look at that soon.
So how do you control where your energy flows and which area of your mind is being strengthened? The answer should be quite evident now!
Control where your awareness goes, and you will control where your energy flows. Control where your energy is flowing, and you will control the area of the mind that is being strengthened and, essentially, what is manifesting in your life.
You must strive to grasp this fundamental principle of how the mind, awareness, and energy relate to one another. First understand it intellectually; then strive to experience it within you.
You can probably already identify areas of the mind, garden beds, that you have been watering over the years. Some of these garden beds are areas of your mind that express the best of you and others are perhaps the gnarly, thorny weeds that we all need to manage and eradicate.
