If your thoughts were things, would you be surrounded by monsters of madness or saints of sweetness?

If the media were reporting on the monologues in your mind - especially those of negative newsworthiness - would you be able to face your friends and neighbors?

If your feelings were food, would you be killing yourself with toxic shame and indigestible anger? Would you be dining on dread? Would you be starving yourself on sadness or filled up with fear? Or would your soul be sated with joy, excitement, curiosity and positive anticipation for what your future will bring?

Our polluted earthly environment is the focus of much talk, consideration, and action for many. But how often do we think about the ways in which we pollute our mental, emotional, and spiritual environments?

Energy follows thought, and thinking begets feeling. Every thought we think and feeling we feel emits an energetic pulse. So, thoughts and feelings are energy in motion. They get on everyone and everything, whether we know it or not. And the higher we go in awareness, the more impact those they have on us and the world around us.

Not only that, but we are creating our future with every one of those energetic emanations. That's how the Law of Attraction works. We are magnetic and creative beings; every thought and feeling attracts its perfect match.

How do you clean up your internal environment? Notice, manage, and transmute (turn negative into positive).

Watch what you're thinking and feeling. Is this what you want your future to look like? You can't stop your thoughts, but you can train them to "sit, lie down, roll over, and play dead." You can bring forth a more powerful inner life through conscious awareness and intentional self control. That is called Inner Authority.

Watch yourself as if you were on a reality TV show, or being interviewed by a news reporter. If it's not a thought or feeling you would want to show on air, have a conversation with yourself to re-write that script. Try giving yourself a pep-talk, or enlist someone else to do the pep-talk for you. Turn your crazies into curiosity. Why is this happening, what is it trying to tell me, and what steps do I need to take to address it? You can listen to a happy song or go out dancing. Or practice prayer and meditation! There are a gazillion ways to change your mind. The more you work with yourself consciously, the more power you have to you change unconscious patterns.

Watch to see: Do you dwell on the pain of your past or the possibility of the present? This doesn't mean that you can never have negative thoughts or feelings. As human beings living in an ever-changing world, we will have lots of things to think and feel. But who's in charge? Are you being run by your thoughts and feelings, or are you able to dance with whatever is going on? There's a spiritual concept called Dominion versus Servitude which means: Are you in charge of your inner life, or are you a slave to it?

It is OK to feel sadness and grief at the loss of a job or a loved one, for example. Those aren't negative, they are appropriate. We make them negative when we dwell on them, exaggerate them, feed them, and become them.

What truly constitutes as negative are things like:

• the critical voice that tells you you're bad, an idiot, stupid or the like;
• core fears making you feel unlovable, not valuable, unimportant, or worried that something bad is going to happen;
• resentments, grudges judgments, and criticisms you hold against others (which are your critical voice and core fears pointed outward instead of inward);
• the suffering we are addicted to (see: From Suffering to Serenity).

These are the kinds of negative patterns we get hooked on, and they create significant amounts of toxic waste in our inner world that emanate out and negatively affect the people around us.

Is that what you want for yourself? Is that the kind of impact you want to have on others?

We have a responsibility to take care of our environment - both inwardly in our mind, heart, and soul, and outwardly in the physical world. I hope this message will inspire you to clean up your inner space and practice spiritual ecology, so that you attract joy and peace in your life as well as providing the same for others.

Two interesting and related quotes, from Vera Stanley Alder in her book The Fifth Dimension.

"Here, indeed, we have to be stern. For the mind is the greatest tyrant whom we have to face. It is determined that we shall not by-pass it into the realms of wisdom and enlightenment. For then it would loses its power over us. So, it fights with us, with doubts, with fatigue, with endless interrupting thoughts, with illusions, with wishful thinking, with ambition, with excuses! Oh, well was it said by the ancients: 'The mind is the enemy of the real!' Evidently, they knew - but evidently they conquered, else they could never have made that saying."

"The spirit of Guardianship comes alive in the mature person. He then has a great need to know how best to use it. The awakened person considers always what are the results of his acts and his needs. He watches the effects of his way of life on himself and all that he contains...."