Mindful Contemplation

Explore the Diversity of Contemplative Practice

Cultivating Gratitude

First Cultivate Awareness

 

  • Find a comfortable posture
  • Natural rhythm of breath (in-out)
  • Feel gratitude for your breath – offering life moment by moment
  • Draw attention to your body from head to feet
    • recognizing that you may have judged your body, but it has given you pleasure and life
  • Move a hand to your chest:
    •      Heart has been beating since your mother’s womb
    •      Feel gratitude for your heart
  • Shift to your faces and senses:
    • Eyes, skin, nose, mouth/taste, the gift of your senses
  • Remember the breath
  • Draw awareness outside of ourselves:
    • Home, roof, structure providing shelter
    • Trees, plants, and the beauty of nature
    • All of created life, all that nature provides
  • Draw awareness for the people in your lives:
    • Those who helped
    • Those who may have hurt (for the opportunity that hurt brought)
    • Every moment is a gift, every experience an opportunity
  • Return to your breathing (in-out)
  • Rest in the current moment
  • Trust and feel gratitude for the present moment

 

 

Then Cultivate Gratitude

 

  • Breath that has filled you
  • Heart that has sustained you
  • Body that has carried you
  • Senses that bring joy and connection to the world around you
  • The things that are around you
  • All the things that our beyond your current sight, in your mind’s eye, that bring you joy that comforts you, that inspires you
  • The people in your life now, what they mean to you, how important they are to you and the simple little things you see them do
  • Take a moment to remember people that have shaped your life, that have loved you into being
  • Take a moment to consider the grand universe and the one unifying presence that pulses through all of it and makes it all happen
  • Then reach for your heart again and draw attention to the pulsing of your own heart and let gratitude flow through it
  • Then breathe in the breath of life and let gratitude fill it
  • Let awe fill you at the wonder of it all
  • Be here now in this soothing bath of gratitude