In order for a body to be at its best, it needs healthy food full of vital nutrients. When we feed our bodies unhealthful food, they will function, but not as well, and the long-term harm begins to pile up. When we eat and breathe toxic chemicals, those toxic chemicals can cause cancers and other harm to our bodies. Our minds are no different. What we feed our minds affects how we interpret the world and how we function. When we feed it junk, the mental cancers begin to grow. Just like our physical bodies need carbohydrates, fats and proteins, our minds require good nutrients from our inner, outer, and metaphysical worlds.
Outer World
When we watch news repeatedly, we see the worst of what happens in the world over and over, and we come to believe it is representative. Researchers have a name for it, mean world syndrome: the finding that heavy consumers of frightening media come to believe the world is more dangerous than it is. When we listen to music that demeans women, men or any other class of people we invite hatred, separation from our brothers and sisters, and a disconnection from our experience of ourselves as divine and sacred beings. Spending time around people who do not love us, support us or treat us well reinforces the belief that we are not worthy of loving, healthy relationships. Our Outer World experiences are digested and directly affect our Inner World experiences.
Inner World
Our thoughts, feelings, sensations, and core belief systems are all affected by Outer World and Metaphysical World experiences. While we can make more healthful choices about what we allow in our Outer World experiences, we cannot always avoid negative influence, which will affect how we think and the stories we tell ourselves about our lives. For example, if the majority of the media in the US tells me I should be a size 2, and I am a healthy size 10, I may start to believe that I am “too fat.” If the culture we live in cultivates the belief system that being a heavier person means we are “weaker” and have “no self-control,” we may start to tell ourselves “I’m fat, worthless, weak, and so on.” What human heart could withstand the onslaught of such harsh commentary?
And notice who is saying it. That voice is not the culture. The culture only supplied the line. A part of us picked it up and has been repeating it ever since, in our own voice, all day. It took the job because somewhere it decided that if it criticized us first and hardest, we would be safe from being criticized by anyone else. It is not a cruel part. It is a frightened one, doing a job nobody should have given it.
Metaphysical World
This is the world of energetics and spirituality. Have you ever been in a room and knew someone was looking at you or judging you? Have you ever been around someone who you instantly got a ‘good vibe’ or ‘bad vibe’ from? That’s energy. Have you ever been in nature, at church or some other place and felt the sense of God or the Something Bigger? That’s spirituality, and we all need some sense of it in order to be healthy. Western culture does not focus much at all on the metaphysical world, though it’s just as alive as our internal and external world, and it affects us just as deeply. When we do not feed our spiritual and energetic needs, we starve on this plane and our minds feel the effect of that.
Choose Differently
We can make better choices about what we feed our minds. We can watch TV shows, movies, video clips that inspire us and make us feel good. We can select friends who are supportive and loving. We can begin to look for employment that respects our worth in the world. We can attend church, get out in nature, listen to encouraging podcasts, or anything else that connects us to our deeper selves and the Something Greater. We can catch our hurtful thought processes and lovingly correct them.
And then the honest part: you cannot curate your way to a clean mind. Some of what comes in is not yours to control: the news finds you, the comment lands, the culture is the water. Tending is not the same as sterilizing, and a person who tries to keep every unwelcome thing out of their garden ends up spending the whole season at the fence. Some of it gets in. The work is what you do with it once it is in.
A garden is not a project you finish. You do not tend it once and arrive at a tended garden. You go out again in the morning, and something has come up overnight that you did not plant, and you decide what to do about it, and that decision, made again and again over years, is the whole of it. I am still deciding, most mornings. That is not a failure of the practice. That is the practice.