Eliminating the Weeds of Negative Thinking

It’s 6:30 in the morning. It’s cool, it’s quiet, and I am pulling weeds in my mother’s back yard. I just dropped my son off at the high school for football practice and spontaneously decided to swing by and do the thing I love to do most – not! In Florida, during the summer we do most outdoor activities (like football and weeding) earlier in the day to avoid the intense heat and humidity that comes later on.

As I am yanking the undesirables, I’m thinking about a conversation I had recently with my cousin Steve. “What determines the difference between a weed and a plant?” we pondered. “I mean, why not just let the weeds take over since that’s what they do anyway? Unlike the other plants they don’t require any work and before you know it they are profuse! Why don’t we just give up the struggle over tending to the other plants and allow the weeds full reign?” I decide to google weeds when I get home and wonder how I ever managed before someone invented googling.

This is what I discover: A weed is a plant considered to be troublesome because of its nature to be invasive and reproduce easily and quickly. Interestingly, it’s an arbitrary judgment whether a plant is a weed or not.

I can’t help but notice what a perfect metaphor weeds provide for negative thinking. Negative thoughts emerge and can quickly become invasive if we don’t stay on top of them by plucking them from our minds. Before we know it they’ve taken over, crowding out the positive thoughts (the flowers). Soon, they impair our perception of reality because we’re looking at life through a jungle of weedy overgrowth. The weedy thoughts take root, growing below the surface, invading our subconscious, and affecting our physical health and well-being. Similar to gardening, if we allow these negative thought weeds to grow we can soon become overwhelmed when we’ve neglected to uproot them. Like a motivated gardener, we must begin eliminating them one by one.

As a human being, I want to flourish like a beautiful garden. My sister has a gorgeous garden in Minnesota that she works very hard to maintain. Her garden is a metaphor for how I’d like my inner life to be. But, like my sister’s garden this requires nurturing and effort. Simply keeping the weed thoughts pulled is not enough. I also need to plant some flowers (positive thoughts) and cultivate them so that they become prolific and bloom. I’ve pulled a lot of weeds in my inner garden in the last few years and I’ve planted a lot of flowers. It’s taken some effort but it has made a significant difference. My inner garden is now blooming. The weeds continue to pop up here and there, but I’ve become disciplined in removing them before they take over. I enjoy the beauty of the blossoms and my focused attention, like Miracle Grow, causes them to become even more abundant. The more we attend to our positive thoughts the more they propagate. Just as the beauty of a garden makes the whole property look more wonderful, a radiant inner garden causes our perception of life to be more positive and uplifting. Instead of looking at life through the jungle of weedy overgrowth, we look at life through the stems and the blossoms of peonies and roses. To be sure, life will give us some weeds and even rose bushes have thorns, but if we remain proactive in our inner gardening efforts the landscape of our entire life will be more resplendent.


William James: “The greatest revolution of our generation is the discovery that human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives.”

Bishop Steere: “Do not think that what your thoughts dwell on does not matter. Your thoughts are making you.”

Proverbs: “As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.”

Buddha: “All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts, we make the world.”

Romans 12:2 “…be transformed by the renewing of your mind…”

Please see the photo below.