A 5-Minute Gratitude Practice: Focus on the Good by Tapping into Your Senses

Waking up this morning, I glanced at my cell phone and noticed the weather app ominously predicting many days of snow and icy temperatures ahead. Brrr! I could feel the chill of dark thoughts starting to gather. I could feel my body creak with cold and aging.

Life’s challenges were seemingly everywhere. And yet…I was smiling. I was cheerful. I was grateful. What? Was I crazy?

As one of my New Year’s resolutions, I’d made a point of tuning my awareness toward appreciation of life’s small delights. I was curious about what I would discover if I focused intentionally on the things that I appreciated. This morning, as I let wakefulness peel the dark back, I could smell my neighbor’s coffee brewing. The snow outside gently buffered the sounds of the world. I could sense my husband’s warm weight in the bed. I took a long moment to enjoy the muted winter light edging in around the slats of the window blinds.

There was nothing particularly special going on, but I noticed that being grateful for little things was already lifting my dark thoughts. Difficulties were still present, but awareness of my gratitude was shifting my view, letting me see that everything was not dark and cold—in fact, many sights and sounds were quite lovely.

There was nothing particularly special going on, but I noticed that being grateful for little things was already lifting my dark thoughts.

Would you like to join me in cultivating a bit of gratitude together?

Mindfulness Practice: Cultivate Gratitude Through the Senses

Use the breath to anchor yourself in the present moment. Our minds are always so easily pulled to busyness. Bring particular attention to feeling the breath, or something in the body, as you bring your shoulders down and orient your attention toward gratitude.
Next, bring to mind a sight you are grateful for. Move through your senses, and find one thing to start with that you appreciate that comes to you from the world of sight, if you have this available. It could be a color…a shadow…a shape…a movement. Remember, it will never be like this again. What do you see right now, and can you feel grateful that you get to see this, whatever it is?

Comments

What is mindfulness?

E ver heard someone say “You are here, but you’re just not here”? Pretty confusing eh, but there’s a lot of truth in it. People tend to dwell so much on the past or worry so bad about the future to such extent that they lose the opportunity to live and savor the present. By making a fuss about what cannot be changed and those that are yet to come the “now” becomes nothing but a frustration and obsession to gain control over yesterday and tomorrow. Mindfulness has a lot to do with living in the present. It enables one to live at peace with what was was and what will be and simply enjoy the current moment. Mindfulness is a concept incorporated in both Eastern and Western cultures. It came from the Indian word “sati” which means awareness, attention and remembering. These three are completely different yet highly associated with one another. Awareness enables you to be conscious about what’s happening. Attention, on the other hand, is a more centralized version of...

Top Benefits of practicing Mindfulness

M indfulness has several important benefits; each one supports an important part of well – being. Relaxing the body, calming the mind, soothing one’s emotions and discovering one’s self. People love massages because it will relax their bodies, while it really does it has little to offer compared to mindfulness. The body and the mind are so intertwined with one another, that when one of them is tensed or stressed, the other automatically gets affected. This is because of the composition of the human body, when stress is experienced it begins a chain reaction in the body, and you prepare to either fight or flee the situation. There is so much energy throughout the body and that energy doesn’t have any direction that is why it builds tension. The aim of mindfulness is not to eradicate the tension or make one feel relaxed, instead it aims to create awareness and acceptance of your moment – to – moment experience. It brings about curiosity to ask and feel. In the ...

6 Key Benefits of Mindfulness in Schools

Solid scientific evidence suggests that mindfulness interventions improve attention, self-control, emotional resilience, recovery from addiction, memory and immune response. Here’s a summary of benefits particularly relevant to educators: Attention Strengthens our "mental muscle" for bringing focus back where we want it, when we want it. Students who did about an hour of "mindfulness training" for eight days subsequently did better on the GRE as well as tests of working memory and mind-wandering. Researchers at University of California at Santa Barbara had 48 undergraduate students take either a mindfulness class or a nutrition class. Classes met for 45 minutes four times per week for two weeks. They were taught by "professionals with extensive teaching experience in their respective fields."...

Brisk Mag

Search This Blog