Sowing Seeds of Happiness

Hi, and welcome to your Daily Mindfulness today. We're going to explore the practice of growing good mental habits, ones that lead to more calm, joy and happiness in our lives. So there's a saying in neuroscience, neurons that fire together wire together. And this refers to the fact that the more you do something, the stronger the neural pathways in the brain become that reinforce that habit or behavior. So when we practice anything enough, whether it be a sport like tennis or playing an instrument like the piano, it eventually just becomes second nature.

You know, eventually you just play tennis without any thinking about it at all. It's just ingrained. Most of us have experienced this effect with driving a car, right? We don't really have to think about it much anymore. The same effect occurs with our mental and emotional patterns. So for instance, If you dwell on angry thoughts, a lot, you gradually become a more angry person and you lay down ingrained neural pathways, and eventually you might react to even the slightest annoyance with rage.

If you dwell continuously own worries, the mind can become prone to anxiety. And if you dwell constantly on gratitude, you can hardwire in feelings of contentment and joy. The term neuroplasticity refers to the fact that we can train our minds and transform those neural pathways. We can train our mind to change that tendency to dwell on worry or anger. We can become less reactive, more happy, confident, and focused.

You could say that your mind is a little like a garden. You can cultivate it to be happier, healthier, and stronger by planting seeds of happiness and pulling the weeds of suffering. We can use our attention and awareness to nurture the seeds we want to grow, and we can choose to stop giving our attention and awareness to the things we want to let go of in our minds and our lives. So with intentional effort, we can stop tending to the habits that really aren't serving us and focus our energy and intentions on the things that do. And every time we think, do or say anything, it sends a little bit of energy down the pathway of the mind.

And when we're restraining certain impulses and habits, it's stops sending that energy down the pathway of the mind. And now there's no better way to cultivate a more calm wise, clear and compassionate mind than through the practice of mediation. With every single practice, we're building positive neural pathways in the mind that eventually moved from being just a state to a trait. So we're gradually becoming the best version of ourselves. So in today's meditation, we're going to be training our minds to cultivate the seeds of contentment, joy, and happiness in this way.

As always thank you for your practice and for your presence here. And let's settle in for today's meditation.