This quote caught my attention lately:

Your depression is connected to your insolence and refusal to praise

Rumi

You can shift how you experience your life by including gratitude in your everyday practice. Praise what is supporting you, praise what’s going right, praise all the ways that you are being taken care of, little and large. Include everything that allows you to live and thrive.

There are many ways to do this, and it can be a wonderful process in itself to try out different ways of offering gratitude to learn what resonates with you and weaves a more abundant attitude into your default modes.

Offering gratitude before meals is one I have been doing for about 10 years and really. I thank the earth, sea, soil and stars for creating this food in front of me. I thank the hands that grew, transported and prepared this meal. I may offer a first bite to the ancestors and spirits of the land to come and eat with me. I speak gratitude so that I can receive the meal with kindness in my heart and a wish to share this energy for good purposes.

Before I sleep at night I like to count on my fingers all my blessings. It keeps it creative to have to think of ten! And I sometimes fall asleep half-way. I also have gone through times of writing down morning gratitude lists in a special journal, along with an intention for the day, which is a really great way to orient to the good first thing. This has been a really helpful tool in times of lots of change and some tough emotions.

All these ways of offering and focussing on gratitude invite us to be playful in the mind. Maybe you’re grateful for the zingy sweet tang of a tangerine. Or how your favourite human smells. Or grateful for the teeth and the gaps of a comb that all together create a combing ripple of pleasurable sensations when you rake it gently over your forearm. There is no shortage of things that delight and unrepeatable encounters that are deeply lovable.

All these tiny moments that make up how we feel about our life and inform what we bring our attention to. 

I hope you get to feel the good effects of gratitude in your life through this meditation.

Please share and subscribe if you liked this and there’ll be more soon: short meditations to support different intentions. 

Love

Kim