What are you sowing in the garden of your mind?

What seeds are you sowing these days? You may think this is an odd question for this time of year. The northern climes are facing patches of colder weather. We were shocked to wake up last week to the brightly colored leaves dusted with a white blanket of snow. Now is the time we’re deciding whether to cover plants or to bring them in for the winter. Does this seem familiar to you? This doesn’t seem like the right time to be sowing seeds – but maybe it’s exactly the right time, as we will explain later.

Recently, more sowing, and growing ideas showed up in our life. In the mail, we received a book on gardening and how to grow food. We had a wonderful friend gift us home grown cucumbers, tomatoes and peppers of various shapes, sizes, and colors. So fresh and delicious! This got us thinking about possibly growing some plants of our own, so we saved some seeds. We don’t know if that will happen but maybe we can learn.

Last week there was a front-page article in The Chanhassen Villager on what students can learn through gardening. Even a church sermon we heard was on sowing. As you might imagine, the sermon was not much about growing tomato and pepper plants. The message asked, ‘What seeds are you sowing?’

It was the young pastor’s first sermon at this church after graduating from seminary and serving in a church out of state. He reminded us of the fact that what the audience was observing was the result of what was ‘sown’ by them years ago. People from this church had funded a scholarship for a prospective student that wanted to attend seminary but couldn’t afford it. He got picked to receive the scholarship and actually ended up being called to that same church to be one of the pastors. He did a great job – without even using notes! This is a perfect example of how the congregation was able to reap the benefits of what they had sown.

Years ago, a relative of ours worked with a famous author and radio personality, Earl Nightingale. Nightingale made a record called The Strangest Secret. That record became the first spoken word record to sell over a million copies.  Can you guess what the ‘strangest secret’ is? The answer is – We become what we think about.

Nightingale used the metaphor of planting and how the mind is like the soil. The soil will return whatever you plant in it. If you plant corn, it will return corn. If you plant weeds, it will return weeds. Likewise, the mind will return whatever thoughts you choose to plant in it.  Norman Vincent Peale put it this way, “If you think in negative terms, you will get negative results. If you think in positive terms, you will get positive results.”

This got us thinking about what we might be sowing right now, not only individually, but as a community and country. Are we sowing seeds of division, or of cooperation? With all the division in families, politics, communities, and the world, we can see how important it is that we sow seeds that can help bring people back together.

It all starts with the thoughts and words that we choose to plant in our minds.  We are reminded of the following saying by Lao Tzu:

We want to sow good seeds – seeds of love, forgiveness, understanding and peace. A good seed can influence positive change. We also need to nurture the good seeds and not neglect them. They need regular “watering” through reinforcing their importance in our mind and in how we live our life.

It’s also important to pluck out any bad seeds – seeds of anger, bitterness, and unforgiveness, that could grow up and smother out the good seeds.

What about you? What seeds are you sowing? We encourage you to avoid bad seeds and grow good seeds instead. This can help the garden of your mind to produce an abundant harvest of good results. As we all sow and nurture good seeds, we can contribute to positive change, not only in our lives, but in those we touch.

Chanhassen MN residents, Doug and Lynn Nodland are success coaches and owners of The Balance Center in Excelsior. Contact them at WeCare@SharingLifesLessons.com

© Doug and Lynn Nodland 2022 Articles and videos may be shared in their entirety with attribution.