It's All About the Gratitude

Since I started meditating a few months ago, I've done a lot of research on the power of the mind and meditation. Today during my meditation, I decided to see if I could teach myself how to cultivate gratitude. I have a gratitude journal, but I've found myself in robotic mode some days with just listing out "things" rather than digging deep and feeling what I'm truly grateful for in that moment. 

In today's meditation, I visualized who and what I am deeply grateful for. And I don't mean "I'm grateful for coffee" level, but more so, "I'm grateful for my 4 healthy, thriving sons" level where I pictured all 4 of their faces and felt the love and gratitude within. During meditation, I focus on various parts of my body and with gratitude in particular, I can feel it deep in my gut. I pictured this feeling as a small bundle of beautiful light and held that image. Then I thought of other things I am extremely and deeply grateful for and watched the bundle of light begin to grow. I sat in that moment, feeling that light and I held it as long as I could, enjoying the internal "movie" of all the things that make me the happiest and feeling all the feels. 

When I opened my eyes, there was a lighter sense to my emotions. I didn't have the anxiety I had started my day with. And my To Do List, while still very long, didn't overwhelm me as much anymore because everything was thrown into a different emotional perspective. The things that matter, that truly matter, are in your gratitude movie. Your To Do List is just that; things to do. Rather than cultivate that feeling of dread, work on expanding gratitude. Eventually dread will just be a small speck that will fly to the surface on occasion, but gratitude will begin to win every time. 

An exercise I'm going to try moving forward: any time I feel dread, rather than letting it overtake me, I'm going to recognize it and stop for a moment to find my beautiful bundle of gratitude. That big bright light is so much stronger, so much more important than the likes of dread, anger, hate, envy, etc.. Eventually I'll start feeling a lot less of the negative and a lot more of my gratitude movie warm and fuzzies. I realize that this type of reprogramming of the mind doesn't happen overnight, but that's part of what makes it magnificent. It just means that I am focusing on gratitude more often which naturally will change my way of thinking, feeling, and living to be a much better version of myself.