“Both abundance and lack exist simultaneously in our lives, as parallel realities. It is always our conscious choice which secret garden we will tend… when we choose not to focus on what is missing from our lives but are grateful for the abundance that’s present— love, health, family, friends, work, the joys of nature and personal pursuits that bring us pleasure— the wasteland of illusion falls away and we experience Heaven on earth.”
One of the emotions I find myself avoiding most is overwhelm. When the demand for our time or energy or money is greater than our capacity we feel overwhelmed. I used to think this was how every mom felt most of the day–and especially at dinner time. Then I learned some amazing tools that helped me feel calmer and happier in the midst of overwhelm.
It was “happy hour” at our house, 5:00 pm. It was a far cry from the happy hour you might be imagining of colleagues gathering for a relaxing time after work. My baby had a death grip on my leg and was whining “hold you!” while I tried to sauté garlic. “Ugh, I should have cooked dinner this morning so it wouldn’t be so crazy tonight” I thought as I tripped over some magnetic letters strewn in front of the fridge. “The house is trashed, my kids never clean-up” I mumbled as I took a deep breath, picked up my baby. My older daughter looked over from the table and asked if I could help her with her math homework. I left my cutting board full of veggies and turned off my half-sautéed garlic in the pan. I sat down thinking, “I’ve got to try to be patient or she’ll have a melt down.”
We had only made it through a couple of problems when the baby pulled the table cloth and spilled the cup of water. “I hate this time of day. I don’t know if I can handle one more thing!” I thought as I stood up to get a paper towel. Comic relief arrived just in time—a pillow case monster just the size of my middle daughter came barreling down the hallway bumping walls and people to be as scary as possible! I hardly had time to smile before she knocked right into the chair and cut her toe. Of course, tears and wails followed—and not from the monster. I set the baby down to get a band aid. I felt guilty as I thought. “I know I should be more compassionate but hello, what did you think would happen when you walk around with a pillow case on your head!”
The baby started whining again, my older daughter reminded me she still needed help with math, and there was still the fountain of band aid tears…my overwhelm exploded. “Everybody just calm down! I’m just one person, I can’t help everyone at the same time.” I yelled. Everyone stopped. Their eyes were big and then my shame attack hit.
For many years, this was a familiar scenario for our family—and not just at dinner time. Overwhelm and irritation were my constant companions. And of course, discouragement was a close cousin. I didn’t know there was any other option; I thought everyone felt overwhelmed in demanding situations. My feelings just seemed like the natural result of the things going on around me. I felt exhausted and guilty a lot of the time and so frustrated I couldn’t seem to be the mom and person I wanted to be!
In the last few years, I’ve learned something very powerful. It has changed everything.
This may seem like a simple concept, but it’s been around a long time. Two thousand years ago Epictedus the Greek philosopher taught, “Humans are disturbed not by things but by the view they take of them.” The Buddha taught a similar truth. “Suffering comes from thoughts not what actually happens.” The bible teaches us, “As a man thinketh, so is he.”
Three of the greatest teachers on earth taught this same principle. This truth means that we have the remote control to our own feelings. We can choose what we want to feel and create it by how we choose to think. We aren’t dependent on anything outside of us.
Let’s circle back to vignette of “happy hour” at my house as a case study about how this can help us:
This is powerful stuff. If you would have told me a few years ago that 5 pm-6 pm could actually be one of the happiest hours of the day, I would not have believed it. The practice of changing my thoughts about this time of day has changed “happy hour” into an actual “happy hour!” It’s not rainbows and unicorns every night of course, but it’s certainly a lot more smooth. When I supervise my brain and deliberately substitute these types of thoughts for the other ones, I feel peaceful, empowered and loving! And, I don’t have to yell to get things done…which means I don’t feel guilty either.
We have the ability to choose our own feelings by deliberately choosing our thoughts. In other words, happiness is a skill! We don’t have to wait for anything around us to change in order to feel different.
What’s a time you feel overwhelmed?
Stop and notice what thoughts you are having during this time. What feelings do they create? Replace those thoughts with thoughts that create a more helpful feeling.
When most of us think of luck, we think of shamrocks and superstition–like luck is something that happens to us. But lucky can be a feeling we have about our lives, and whether or not we feel it is not dependent on finding our Leprechaun or pot of gold. Feely lucky is something we can feel at any time, and we can feel it simply by choosing carefully what thought we compare to our current situation.
When my husband was attending law school in Boston, we lived in row houses. There was a community laundry that was a few doors down. Boston winters are no joke…the temperatures get so low they freeze the little particles of moisture on your lips. One winter morning, I found myself trying to tromp through knee deep snow with my 4-month-old, a hamper and soap in order to do my laundry. I had to prop open a heavy wood door open with my bottom to try to load everything piece-meal inside (including my baby) and get it all down the stairs to the wash room. When I got down there I discovered I was short enough quarters! “This is so hard” I thought. I dreamed of having my own washing machine and carrying a basket of clothing through a heated home to drop in the washer. That would be so much easier, I complained to myself. Meanwhile my baby was crying and I had to trek out to get more quarters. Every week was the same. Multiple trips in and out of the snow and stairs. Each time I became a bit more disgruntled and frustrated.
One afternoon I attended a lecture up at the university given by a positive psychologist named, Shawn Achor. He was doing research on law students, who are known to be some of the least happy in their careers compared to others and and have some of the highest suicide rates of any profession. In his early research on happiness, one of the biggest determinants of happiness was the thoughts that individuals compared to their situation.
He shared a scenario of a man who walked into a bank and was shot in the arm. He asked people if the man was lucky, or unlucky. About half of the people responded that he was unlucky, because most of the time when people go into the bank they are not shot. However, half of the respondents said that he was lucky, because he could have been shot in the heart and died. Interestingly, the thought they compared to the situation determined how they thought and felt about it. I was fascinated by the idea of determining my perspective by choosing the thoughts I compared my situation to.
The next week when I did the laundry and caught myself grumbling about how hard my task was, I stopped. Instead I thought about when I had lived in Africa. We had to haul water up from the well in buckets. Then, we heated it and washed our clothes by hand with powdered soap in buckets. The red dirt made clothes impossibly stained and it seemed like no amount of scrubbing remedied the mess. When we had washed and rinsed the clothes, which often took a couple of hours, we hung them them to dry on clothes lines. We took them down when they were hard and crispy from the African sun a couple of days later.
When I compared doing laundry in my public laundry in Boston to my experience in Africa, suddenly tromping through snow with a baby and carrying multiple loads through doors and down stairs didn’t feel so hard. The convenience of a washing machine and access to warm water through a hose felt luxurious. Being able to simply push a button felt almost magical. Having liquid soap that dissolved easily and having stain removers I could spray on my clothes seemed like such a blessing. Being able to put a load in the dryer and pull out warm, dry clean clothes seemed incredible.
Changing the thought I compared my laundry experience to, changed my whole experience from resentful to grateful–unlucky to lucky.
What part of life feels unlucky to you?
Feeling lucky is available any time you would like simply by comparing your situation to another situation that helps you see it as lucky. If you just can’t get there, try getting out and working in a less fortunate situation like a soup kitchen or homeless shelter. Even watching a movie about war torn countries or challenging times in history can give insight into the abundance that exists in your situation.
They way we feel is the product of what we think. Just as with physical gardening, we plant seeds in our minds constantly. Sometimes we choose them, other times we don’t. However, whether a seed flourishes depends entirely on how we care for it. In other words the way we think about something that happens will affect how much it grows and impacts us much more than the fact that it happened. A productive yield of happiness requires both planting and nourishing gratitude and abundance as well as weeding and pruning dissatisfaction and lack. As we do we’ll find we can grow happiness anywhere.
My Dad loved to garden, and he put all of his daughters to work planting, weeding and watering each summer. Frankly, I thought it was hot and boring a lot of the time; I tried to avoid it whenever I could. One of the pay-offs of our hard work was the tender, rich acidic flavor of red home-grown tomatoes that we picked on summer nights and ate for dinner.
A garden’s yield is directly correlated to the effort put into it. I remember one summer when we were fairy lazy about watering. Then, we went on a family vacation and returned to find the garden sparse and mostly dried up. I remember my sister running into the house sobbing because it meant there would be no home-grown tomatoes that year.
The law of the harvest states that we will reap what we sow. If we want the home-grown tomatoes, we have to plant them, water them, and weed them.
Because I grew up spending Saturday mornings with my fingernails buried in the dirt weeding and watering our backyard garden plot, I find particular poignancy in this quote by Sarah Ban Breathnach about the gardens in our minds.
“Both abundance and lack exist simultaneously in our lives, as parallel realities. It is always our conscious choice which secret garden we will tend… when we choose not to focus on what is missing from our lives but are grateful for the abundance that’s present— love, health, family, friends, work, the joys of nature and personal pursuits that bring us pleasure— the wasteland of illusion falls away and we experience Heaven on earth.”
This quote hung on my refrigerator for a couple of years to remind me that the law of the harvest applies to my mind. The thoughts I think are like seeds that germinate and grow into plants of feelings and actions and eventually yield the fruit of my overall happiness and relationships and contribution in the world. I determine my yield by the thoughts I choose, and the paradigms I tend and cultivate.
I love the concept that at any time, there are two mental gardens existing at the same time. In any situation, relationship or even with our own self-image, there is always abundance and there are always things lacking. It’s easy to feel that our external situation is the cause of our lack. However, ANY situation has abundance and lack simultaneously. The abundance we feel is directly correlated to how diligent we are in tending the abundant thoughts and allowing the gardens of lack to shrivel up and die.
My husband is a diplomat, which means our family gets to move frequently to various places around the world. When we embarked on this lifestyle I was optimistic about the many ways we could serve and the blessings it would have for our family. I love to travel, explore new places, try new foods, and experience how different cultures do things. I hoped to broaden my children’s minds.
The reality of life abroad however, brought many challenges. I discovered that even the smallest daily tasks were harder than I had experienced in the United States. The water wasn’t safe, so we had to use purified water to brush our teeth and get a drink. We had to bleach all of our veggies and fruits to kill bugs and bacteria. Finding simple items was an epic challenge; there was no Target or Office Depot like I was used to. One day I remember spending over 7 hours driving around the city looking for paper clips and came home empty handed. The difference in time zones made it difficult to call home, and our internet was slow and cut out frequently. I can remember sometimes having to call 6 or 7 times just to make it through a short conversation with a sister.
Driving was challenging. Many of the streets were not marked, and not knowing the language made it difficult to ask for directions. There were times I spent hours lost and driving around with a crying baby in the car. Traffic was oppressive–one time it took me over 3 hours of white knuckled driving to get my children to school. They struggled with bilingual schools; they felt overwhelmed in an environment where they understood nothing. There were no libraries, and the pollution was so bad it often prohibited going to the few rusty parks nearby. Medical care was not always optimal, and sometimes it was in a foreign language.
On difficult days, I would compare my experience there with the idealized life in America I imagined…the mini-van, the cul-de-sac, walking to elementary school, clean water, and the list goes on. When I compared my life abroad to this, things seemed difficult and unfair. Without even realizing it, I began to tend my mental garden of scarcity. The more I noticed how much harder life was, the more I collected evidence of the challenges in my life and my resentment about our lifestyle grew. My garden of scarcity grew and began to take over some of the real estate in my garden of abundance.
My husband and I accepted a posting in Hawaii–I did finally get a little home with a yard on a cul-de-sac. We could brush our teeth in clean water, shop at Target and my kids could speak English in school. I could communicate easier with my extended family. I had all the things I had dreamed about in an American life. My ideal of life on a cul-de-sac—while wonderful had just as many challenges as my life abroad. They were just different. We lived in a small home, abundant with bugs! We had no A/C and it was oppressively hot. The schools were not as stimulating as our previous experience and everything was SO expensive. My children still struggled, but with different things. I still felt discouraged and frustrated. And, I found I missed many of the wonderful things about our ex-pat life.
I realized it didn’t matter where I was–there would always be lack as well as abundance. I was focusing on where I was, trying to get to the right place–thinking that the abundant garden was an actual physical place or situation–I realized it wasn’t. The abundant garden is in our minds. We get the abundant garden by the positive thoughts we plant and nourish by intentionally focusing on. Lack will always be present as well. But we dry out that garden as we give it less attention.
With this shift in my understanding of abundance, I began to see my life in a new way. The challenges didn’t evaporate, they stayed the same, but I began to notice the abundance in my life and focus on that. I could walk to the beach! My children could go slip-and-sliding in the backyard and we could be outside year round! There were breathtaking hikes just minutes away. We made some wonderful friends and we had lots of family come and visit. Hawaii became my garden of Eden…not because of where or what it was, but how I thought about it.
Similarly as we’ve moved abroad again, I have found a life full of abundance in our ex-pat life as well. The difficult things of living outside of the US are still part of our life. There is still traffic, food and sanitation issues, and language barriers. None of that has changed. At times I get frustrated by them, but I’m learning to prune those thoughts and not allow them to overtake my garden of all the abundant things I do love about our life. When those thought arise, I just allow them to pass through, but don’t let them take root. I try to think of the inconveniences as part of the package deal that comes with so many benefits for our family.
I spend a lot more time noticing the amazing education my children are getting, nurturing relationships with other ex-pat women who have lived all over the world, and relishing our family outings on Saturdays to ruins, natural wonders and historical treasures. I try to stop and notice things; the other day I saw a man riding a bicycle stacked high with cardboard boxes several times taller than himself riding through a developed intersection full of cars. I thought about how fascinating this life is–and how amazing it is to have a car to drive.
This mental gardening has helped my emotional garden of abundance to grow and has helped to prune back my garden of lack. It has indeed caused “the wasteland of illusion to fall away, and allow me to experience Heaven on Earth.” (Or at least moments of it. 😉
What area of your life do you want to improve?
When you think about that area, what is in your emotional garden of lack? What about your garden of abundance? Tend the garden you want to grow. Nourish the thoughts of abundance by thinking of them often, talking about them, writing them down. Acknowledging the lack is fine, but dwelling on it will diminish the sense of abundance.