Gratitude Meditations — I II III IV V VI
Seeing as it’s Thanksgiving, let’s practice gratitude meditation together all week to celebrate.
Gratitude is a best practice that should be utilized not just for holding hands around a family-ensconced dinner table with a turkey, sweet potatoes, and gravy. It should be so woven into daily life that we feel it pouring from our pores every moment of each day.
But it can be challenging.
Some days the car won’t start.
Your child wakes up sick.
Or your bank account overdrew.
It’s all about how we perceive these things.
We can step back and find gratitude.
We have a car and don’t have to walk to work in the dead of winter. Or pay for a taxi.
It’s just a fever — thankfully they aren’t suffering of cancer.
You’ve got a stable currency that isn’t hyperinflating into nothingness, week over week.
Gratitude practice:
Something I personally try to do is realize when things are GOOD and to verbalize them.
For example, when my cat, Jack, is in my lap, purring away while I write (as he is right now), I stop.
I enjoy the moment for a moment, free of the pressures of anything else, regardless of how urgent it is.
I say “This is a happy moment.”
And finally, I say “Thank you, Lord, for Jack.”
However, even those who don’t partake in religion could still say, “I’m grateful for this ‘right now.’”
When we are self-aware enough to in-the-moment see things that are good, we will find our way of thinking changes, too, and when the bad makes its way into our lives, we can use the same awareness to find the gratitude in that moment.
So — what are you grateful for?
Follow for daily philosophical meditations.
These are distillations from my coming book “YouDaimonia: the Ancient Philosophy of Human Flourishing.”