The most direct way to grow strengths like determination, sense of perspective, positive emotions, and compassion is to have experiences of them in the first place.
- If you want do develop more gratitude than keep focusing your mind on being more thankful
- If you want to feel more loved; look for, and stay with experiences where you feel included, seen, appreciated, liked or cherished.
The answer to the question of how to grow good things inside your mind is take in experiences of them.
- Activate mental states and install them as neural traits
- When you need them, you will be able to draw on these neural traits which are your inner strengths (the good growing into your mind)
The brain is good at learning from bad experiences, but it is bad at learning from good ones.
If your mind is like a garden, the soil of your brain is more fertile for weeds than for flowers
- So it is really important to plant the seeds for inner strengths by repeatedly taking in the good.
Re-source: Reproduce
create something very similar to (something else), especially in a different medium or context
Imagine that your mind is like a garden.
- You can simply be with it, looking at its weeds and flowers without judging or changing anything.
- You can pull weeds by decreasing what is negative in your mind.
- Negative meaning what leads to suffering and harm.
- You can grow flowers by increasing the positive in your mind.
- Positive meaning what leads to happiness and benefits yourself and others
craving and resource from “Hardwiring Happiness” by Rick Hanson