Whatever thoughts you water are the thoughts that will grow.

Imagine that your mind is a garden. You can tend to it in three ways: observe it, pull weeds, and plant flowers. Observing it is fundamental, and sometimes that’s all you can do. Perhaps something terrible has happened and you can only ride out the storm. But being with the mind is not enough; we must work with it as well. The mind is grounded in the brain, which is a physical system that doesn’t change for the better on its own. Weeds don’t get pulled and flowers don’t get planted simply by watching the garden.

It’s important that what thoughts you are feeding into your mind because your thoughts create your belief and experiences. You have positive thoughts and you have negative ones too. Nurture your mind with positive thoughts: kindness, empathy, compassion, peace, love, joy, humility, generosity, etc. The more you feed your mind with positive thoughts, the more you can attract great things into your life.

Your Mind is a Garden,
Your Thoughts are the Seeds.
You can grow Flowers
or weeds...

You can think about things and make believe. All you have to do is think and they'll grow.

Be more intentional about the direction we allow our minds to go. Meaning, when you catch yourself thinking negatively, STOP. REDIRECT to something positive.

Think of the mind as a river: the faster it flows, the better it keeps up with the present and responds to change. The faster it flows, also the more it refreshes itself and the greater its energy. Obsessional thoughts, past experiences (whether traumas or
successes), and preconceived notions are like boulders or mud in this river, settling and hardening
there and damming it up. The river stops moving; stagnation sets in. You must wage constant war on this tendency in the mind.

You truly cannot afford the luxury of even one negative thought. A worrisome thought is like an embryo: it starts off small but grows and grows. Soon it takes on a life of its own. Stop feeding what doesn’t serve you.

The top idea in your mind is where your mind will wander if it's left to wander.

Make sure the idea that keeps popping up is the one you want to keep popping up.

To think bad thoughts is really the easiest thing in the world. If you leave your mind to itself it will spiral down into ever increasing unhappiness. To think good thoughts, however, requires effort. This is one of the things that discipline and training is all about.

Let your thoughts support, nurture and affirm the reality you’re building.

If you had a thought once, it has no power over you. Repeat it again and again, especially with emotional intensity, feeling it, and over time, you're creating the grooves, the mental river. Then it controls you.

You have control over your thoughts; thoughts do not have control over you. They're like little dirt specks on the windshield of life that you simply need to wipe away. […] We give dark thoughts our power. Why would we ever think that mere thoughts are stronger than us? They're not. We can outwit them. Rule them. Survive them. They represent internal stormy weather ... and all storms pass. [...] You know that positivity exists - you only have to sift through the rubble a bit.

If you tell yourself you don’t want to think a certain thought, that is precisely the first thing your mind will produce! That is the nature of the human mind.