Gratitude and Meditation
Gratitude is appreciating what we already have and meditation is the journey inside us. Both of these are a kind of mental training. These are survival virtues in this pandemic epoch. We all have read about the benefits of these practices but have you ever thought why it is so difficult to practice? This is because while practicing these we are trying to challenge and change our natural affinity. Lets see how.
Our lives are hardwired to get driven to things we don’t possess and we fail to appreciate what we already have. It is very difficult to be thankful and feels like a fake emotion to do so because we are too preoccupied with what is wrong or lagging in our life. This is our natural tendency. Negative experiences have a greater effect on our thoughts than positive experiences of our life. We tend to remember negative experiences longer and this makes being thankful for our positive experiences difficult. For e.g. If we don’t get water in our tap for few hours we become anxious instantly but being thankful for getting clean water daily seems to be a fake emotion. Good things are taken for granted.
Another challenge is that we have become the generation that is so stimulated all the time that we have lost interest in everything. Being aware of our own emotions in a highly stimulating environment is difficult to practice. Sitting idle doing nothing with a mind full of clutter thoughts is defying . This cluttered mind makes any kind of mental training difficult. Frankly, having a placid mind is a rare virtue these days.
The practice of mediation and gratitude will not happen naturally to us and has to be intentional initially and will lead to genuinely positive emotion later. Both these have to be done with the correct technique to achieve the best results.
Gratitude is changing our relationship with how we feel about good things in life. We don’t need to have a logical reason to be grateful. We can be thankful for anything only when we are aware of our emotions. This awareness of everyday experience can be attained by meditation. The most effective form of meditation is an active meditation that is being able to meditate while doing our daily activities. Active meditation of pausing ourselves and doing things single-minded helps a great way.
The best and simplest way to implement these in our lives is to constantly keep doing it the whole day. Don’t wait for the early morning for meditation and bed time for writing your gratitude log. Be thankful for having a warm cup of tea and meditate on the taste and feel of that warm tea. Sounds trivial and senseless, isn’t it? Who has that kind of time?? But this mindful practice can salvage us from a distressing life.
