Cultivating your Garden of Happiness

What is the secret formula to being happy? It seems most of us, no matter how hard we try are always coming up short. Why is it we work so hard at trying to be happy but find what actually comes our way is stressful, painful or disappointing? For me, I believe happiness is learning how to be a good Gardener. We are taught many things as small children but no one ever tells us how to be truly happy.

So let’s look at a typical garden. If we want to plant green beans and tomatoes, we drive to the store and buy green bean and tomato seeds. We prepare a patch of fertilized soil, place a fence around it to keep the critters out and plant our seeds into the ground. After enough water and sunshine, behold; green beans and tomatoes rise up out of the ground – amazing!

Now of course we’ll have weeds to deal with; that’s just part of having a garden. So everyday we spend a few minutes pulling them out in order to reserve the rich soil for the crop we are trying to grow.

When it comes to being happy, this exact method for gardening can easily be applied into your life. So how do we create a garden of happiness? Since the most important ingredient in any garden is the seed we push deep into the soil, we need to get some happiness seeds. These seeds are abundant and come from every kind thought, word and action we offer to ourselves or other people in our life.

Let’s say we want a loving relationship. We begin with a seed that focuses on how we feel about having the relationship we want. We imagine we already have it instead of letting weeds grow in our garden representing the thoughts that focus on the lack of having a partner. To fertilize those seeds, we become loving companions to others. Perhaps we have a neighbor who is too old to go out and get their mail everyday. To plant companionship into your life, you plant a seed by bringing your neighbor the mail. You can even plant this seed by visiting someone who is sick or helping a small child across the street. Any act of kindness to another has no alternative but to grow into an act of kindness into your life. Weeding the garden continually when the negative thoughts arise when you start taking score that it hasn't grown yet, will bring the desired result into your life that much faster.

However, if you tend your garden being angry at others or blaming them for the the reasons why you can't be happy, your garden will have no choice but to become overgrown with weeds, blocking out the sunlight for all the wonderful things you've been wanting to grow. Your thoughts, words and actions are the most powerful seeds in the universe and it's up to you to decide what you want the abundance of your life to be.

The universe is wired this way. How we treat ourselves and others is what our garden grows. Let’s say you want more money in your life. First plant seeds of gratitude for what you do have instead of allowing the weeds to grow over how you want more money and don't have enough. Be generous to others with your time and caring. You can start by giving someone a phone call you haven’t talked to in a while or buying a stranger a cup of coffee. It doesn’t have to be a lot of money just a focused intention behind the giving to plant a seed for yourself. The garden will grow according to the method you use to tend it and how frequently you're willing to tend the fast growing weeds that sprout up every time you believe the money hasn't grown yet.

This may sound as though it makes no sense but I promise if you try it, you will start to see the seeds blossom. The more loving and positive you are to people who don’t behave in a way that’s loving, the more love will come into your life and in time the less negative people you will attract in your life. For me, there is nothing wrong with negativity or weeds, it simply becomes something that lets us focus on what we do want. Without a negative experience, you could never plant a thought to create what you do want.

Life is just a big garden of cause and effect; it’s beautiful really. If you can grow your understanding that every negative experience was simply a result of a bad seed you planted in your past, meaning a negative thought or emotion that you never bothered to weed out. When you can recognize the uncomfortable feeling of that negative emotion, you have the choice to pluck it right out of your garden and find something that makes you feel better to plant for your future.

So to really be a good Gardener, you invite yourself to be kind to yourself and others. You start to make your life better by understanding the thoughts that make you feel good will reap the most reward. The soil responds to whatever you plant and the universe is no different. Whatever you think, you shall grow. You add to the joy of your life by being kind to others; holding a door open for someone or throwing out a bottle you find on the ground. Anything you do to help someone else will plant a powerful seed in your garden.

Just imagine if everyone on the planet behaved this way. Each person taking care of their emotions while helping another because they knew the law of attraction had no choice but to match them up to the same behavior. If instead of being better than the competition, we actually helped promote their business, that would blossom into others promoting ours. Whatever you do, whatever you say, think and feel, is the harvest you claim. Each one of us has takes responsibility for tending our gardens and when you become a Master living blissful in what you have grown, everyone else will want you to show them how to do it.