Weeding Our Minds

“If you don’t like what’s happening in your life, change your mind.”

—His Holiness, the Dalai Lama

Where do our internal weeds come from? As young children, without highly developed discernment skills, we absorbed erroneous messages, such as “I’m not good enough, smart enough, good-looking enough,” from the world at large and the adults closest to us. Untrue and invalidating, these messages became our underlying assumptions and implicit beliefs, and continuously guide our lives. Underlying is the operative word, as these assumptions are under our conscious awareness and lie to us about reality. Since most of these values, beliefs, and attitudes are hidden, we are not aware of the extent to which they rule our actions and reactions.

Why do we believe these lies? Because our minds are two-faced. Both friend and foe. As friends, our minds are co-creators with God, taking us to great heights of creativity, love, and joy. As foes, they are destroyers of all we want and need and can cast us, quite literally, into a hell of hopelessness, self-destruction, and fear. The wonderful news is that we are not hapless victims of our minds’ whims. In fact, one of our greatest God-given powers is the ability to change our minds. We can consciously search out lies and transform them.

Excerpted from How to Stay Upbeat in a Beat Down World by Sue Patton Thoele. Available on Amazon.