How to practise gratitude
North Bondi
A lot of things you hear around meditation and spirituality can sound cheesy and easy to dismiss.
Take gratitude. You hear about it so often – Oprah or Deepak extolling its benefits or you see it emblazoned on a T-shirt or mug.
Its blandness and ubiquity turn off your critical faculties quicker than a tepid Starbucks in an airport departure lounge.
You’ll be familiar with the basic premise.
Be grateful for the good things in your life and you’ll be happier
So far, so blah. It’s ripe to be filed under “things that sound fine that I’m not going to act on”.
But the key here is not to let things of value pass you by just because they’re obvious.
We’ve been programmed by evolution to favour the novel and that important information will come from the new or unfamiliar.
So when we come across a dusty old concept like gratitude, we tend to hurry past looking for the next shiny new thing.
But if we’re able practise what Zen calls Beginner’s Mind, we can see things with fresh eyes again, free from our usual preconceptions.
We can start with the scientific evidence that it actually works.
In one study, two psychologists asked one group to write a few sentences each week about things they were grateful for. A second group wrote about things they hadn’t liked, and the third wrote about anything at all. After 10 weeks, the gratitude group were more optimistic and felt better about their lives. (Harvard Health)
A few sentences a week – surely you could give that the benefit of the doubt even if you weren’t 100% convinced?
Write it down
Probably the most effective way to practise being grateful is to write things down. By taking the idea out of your head, it makes it more tangible. You also create a record you can refer back to at a later date to remind you of all the good fortune you’ve had over time. You can either keep a formal journal, digital or paper, or instead jot things down in the notes app of your phone whenever you remember to.
Make a mental note
If writing is not your style, you can instead take a moment to quietly make a mental record at a certain point of your day or week. If you stack it on top of another habit, it becomes easier to remember. For example, you can spend the first few moments of your morning shower reviewing the previous day or maybe the quiet time at the end of a meditation session before you open your eyes.
The beauty of this is that you don't need to post it on Instagram for it to work. You can quietly acknowledge things to yourself without having to bore the rest of the world with it.
Meditation is one of the best ways to cultivate an attitude for gratitude. Find out more about how to learn Vedic Meditation.
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