If life was a garden

Recently I was asked by a client in Shanghai about removing negative thought patterns. In fact, I’m kinda asked this a lot however not always so directly. 

Removing negative thought patterns:

One might wonder how good it would be to remove your negative thought patterns however there is a bit more to it then simply just loosing it. If they were removed, what would take its place. One might imagine there could be a vacuum, or an abscence. Since ever action has a reaction. Or every effect, has a cause.

I like to imagine it like a garden.

Hence The Garden Metaphor.

If life was a garden, what would you want to grow?

It’s a simple and effective metaphor to a successful life. Pull out the weeds, grow beautiful plants.

1. Love and warmth
2. Appreciation and gratitude
3. Curiosity
4. Passion
5. Devotion
6. Confident
7. Flexible
8. Cheeky Vibrant Excited
9. Healthy energetic
10. Helping others, fulfilled

We also call these plants, Power Emotions.
Powerful emotions which fuel us and give us strength. Wouldn’t it be great to be feeling these emotions everyday!

Sometimes there are weeds in my garden.  Sometimes there is anger, exhaustion,  sadness.

Removing negative thought patterns:

It’s ok to want to pull these weeds out. Our society often sees them as bad or negative but we need to realise that bad or negative are judgements. Generally people percieve judging as bad, yet we are quick to judge bad or negative emotions. Perhaps we should call these, less plesant emotions. And we need to realise that we couldn’t exsist without them. They form part of the circle of life. However they are part of the circle, and certainly shouldn’t be experienced in excess. 
 
So we need to recognise these emotions are here for a reason.
Sometimes we pull one out and another grows quickly in its place. Especially if the ground is bare.

You wouldn’t pull out all the weeds and just leave it bare would you? No you would pull them out and quickly replace them with plants or weedproof matting. And good gardeners know, there is no such thing as weed proof. Only weed resistant. So I look at the weed before I pull it out. It’s grown there for a reason.  Why is that.  Oh, I need more beautiful plants or perhaps its time to plant some flexibility or devotion.

In order to remove the weeds effectively, what if instead of focusing on the weeds, we were to do our best to grow strong beautiful plants which will bear fruit and seeds for more beautiful plants. Slowly, or perhaps quickly one could end up with a beautiful garden, perhaps so beautiful that any remaining weeds are barely noticed or a problem anymore.
 

Fill your life like a beautiful garden.  Appreciate that weeds are as natural as flowers. I’m sure if you keep a focus on this trying to remove negative thought patterns will be a thing of the past.

 
These Power Emotions came from Tony Robbins. One of my favourite teachers. I spent all this June studying for Master Practitioner in New Code NLP with Daniel Smith in Beijing and of an evening going over Tony Robbins Relationship course. Tony himself uses a fair bit of NLP in his work however he also brings out a lot of stuff I haven’t seen anywhere else. I dream and hope to be able to help people as good as he does. And, I really look forward to helping you and your development in growing loveable life.
If life was a garden

1 reply
  1. Jim says:

    I was looking information about how to remove negative emotions and just stumbled across this article, the garden metaphor did a lot of sense for me, like you said ”
    Pull out the weeds, grow beautiful plants.” Thanks for giving this information for free Adrian

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