Tend the garden of your mind

"Just as a gardener cultivates his plot, keeping it free from weeds, and growing the flowers and fruits which he requires, so may a person tend the garden of their mind, weeding out all the wrong, useless, and impure thoughts, and cultivating toward perfection the flowers and fruits of right, useful, and pure thoughts.

By pursuing this process, one sooner or later discovers that they are the master-gardener of their soul, the director of their life. One also reveals, within oneself, the laws of thought, and understands, with ever-increasing accuracy, how the thought-forces and mind elements operate in the shaping of character, circumstances, and destiny.

Thought and character are one, and as character can only manifest and discover itself through environment and circumstance, the outer conditions of a person’s life will always be found to be harmoniously related to inner states. This does not mean that a person’s circumstances at any given time are an indication of their entire character, but that those circumstances are so intimately connected with some vital thought-element within oneself that, for the time being, they are indispensable to each individual's development...

As a progressive and evolving being, each is where they are that they may learn, that they may grow; and as we learn the spiritual lesson which any circumstance contains for us, it passes away and gives place to other circumstances.

Humans are buffeted by circumstances so long as we believe ourselves to be the creature of outside conditions, but when we realize that we are a creative power, and that we may command the hidden soil and seeds of our being out of which circumstances grow, we then becomes the rightful masters of ourselves."

~James Allen
As a Man Thinketh (slightly edited)