Practicing Gratitude Meditation To Bring Your Life Into Focus
Gratitude meditation is a focused meditation exercise.
It is a way to express your thanks for the special skills and talents you have, the people in your life, and the many blessings you have received. In sum, all of those things that make your life special are worthy of your gratitude. This practice can be used alongside your regular meditation sessions, or you can devote an entire session to gratitude at regular intervals.
This is one of the most rewarding types of meditation.
It teaches you to be happy with everything you have. You learn how to move from wanting, to feeling content and blissful with what you already have. Instead of troubling yourself by thinking of all that you don't have, you can instead focus your energy on being thankful for everything you do have. When you do so, you will actually attract more wealth.
You can start your gratitude meditation practice by first choosing a suitable place that is free of distractions.
Avoid places with bright lighting. Turn off your cell phone and try to disconnect for a little while. Start by closing your eyes and focusing on your breathing. Identify the thoughts or worries that enter your head and dismiss them. Don't get angry at yourself if your mind continues to wander; that is the natural habit of the mind. Instead, get back on track by focusing on nothingness.
When your body is in a state of relaxation and your mind is calm, you can begin to go over all of the things you are thankful for. You can use generic gratitude affirmations to express your thanks, or you can individualize your practice by thinking of specific things that you are thankful for in your life.
It can be easy to overlook even some of the most basic things to be thankful for.
Take your body, for instance. You have eyes that allow you to see the world, you have ears that enable you to listen to music and hear the words of others, and you a mouth that lets you express your truths to others.
There is so much more that your body alone can do that you should be thankful for. There are people in your life, and there is beauty in the world. There are endless things to be grateful for.
Practicing gratitude meditation on a regular basis is the best way to move towards happiness.
Why? Because unhappiness is actually characterized as a state of desire or want. When you move out of that state by focusing on recognizing the blessings that you do have, you can move towards contentment.
It becomes possible for you to understand that you don't actually need material possessions or any of the other things you desire in life, to be happy. is one of the simplest ways to teach yourself to be happy and experience fulfillment in the absence of desire.
Regards,
Don Weyant/Founder
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Thank you Don for sharing this post. This is definitely a topic where I can improve, there are often feelings of I DONT HAVE, I WOULD LIKE TO HAVE...
But everytime, when I am in a state of consciousness, of presence, there is automatically the warm shining Feeling of gratitude. what is the difference between gratitude and presence, in your opinion?
Thanks Nic, the feelings of I don't have, I would like to have are for the most part and to the degree that permeates our life is a conditioned response put there by the media at a very early age. It's up to all of us to "wake up" if you will and understand what is really important to our own lives.
I like your statement of "the warm shining Feeling of gratitude", nice way to put it.
I feel that the difference between gratitude and presence is that presence is the universal pure positive energy that exists in all things physical and non-physical, that which is seen and unseen.
Gratitude is the alignment of your energy with the universal energy in that moment. It is a connection to the pure positive energy that is the source of all creation and all that is. We may feel that it's out of our reach but that doesn't change the fact that it exists.
Didn't mean to get so metaphysical but in a way that is what we're talking about, meta-physical or beyond-physical. Something to think about on this subject is this, are you a human-being having a spiritual experience on this planet, or are you a spiritual-being having a human experience? Don
Thank you Don! There is still a lot to experience for me... :-)