Why You Should Practice Gratitude Meditation
What is gratitude?
Simply put, gratitude is the act of being thankful. It is the ability to feel thankful and show appreciation for all things good in your life, and the acknowledgement and appreciation for the things, people, and circumstances of your life.
You may feel a spontaneous surge of gratitude when someone surprises you with an unexpected gift, like a bouquet of flowers when you’re having a bad day, or a special snack waiting for you on your work desk in the morning. You may feel gratitude when a friend sends you a kind and uplifting message, or when your partner cooks you dinner.
But you can practice gratitude in far more situations than these. You don’t need to wait for a surprise or act of kindness from a friend to feel grateful for what you have. You can exercise gratitude every day, celebrating the small things you have that we often take for granted.
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How does gratitude help?
When you focus on gratitude, you encourage many other positive habits to blossom within. These habits can then help us to cultivate health and happiness, not only for ourselves, but for those around us. When you carry yourself with positive energy, those around you are able to conduct that energy and radiate it onward and outward. But how does gratitude help?
The following are some of the many benefits a grateful attitude can promote:
Strengthens friendships
Encourages humility
Reduces envy and jealousy
Increases fulfilment
Reduces selfishness
Improves physical and emotional wellbeing
Increases empathy
Strengthens self-esteem
Gratitude is the path to a healthier, happier you. Moreover, incorporating gratitude into your life is not as challenging as you may think. Whether you’re new to gratitude meditation or quite familiar with it, leading a gratitude lifestyle can be quite simple and beneficial.
What is gratitude meditation?
Gratitude meditation, as indicated by the name, is a kind of meditation centered on feeling grateful. While there are many other styles of meditations out there, gratitude meditation is one of the easiest you can practice anywhere, even in the midst of a hectic work schedule. It is also one of the most rewarding styles of meditation.
Gratitude meditation focuses on all the various things you're thankful for in life and letting that feeling of appreciation take a stronghold inside yourself. Additionally, you don't always have to meditate on a noticeable act that you’re grateful for. Gratitude meditation also enables you to take pleasure in the simple things in life you're grateful for like the ability to see, hear, taste and walk. It could also be something as intangible as the important lesson you learnt from a difficult phase you were going through at some point in your life.
Benefits of gratitude meditation
Whenever you decide to try something new, the first few steps may be a little shaky and uncertain. However this is quite natural, and mastering your hesitancy is often the most challenging part of the process. So don’t let the uncertainties stop you from starting your gratitude journey! The following are some of the benefits we can receive from gratitude meditation:
Greater sense of happiness
Practicing gratitude daily has been proven to consistently and effectively make you happier. Counting your blessings can make you feel more optimistic and help you develop and maintain a positive attitude throughout the day. Additionally, studies have shown that gratitude could be the most-needed positive intervention that can prevent depressive thoughts and help individuals lead a happier, content life.
Improved mental health
Gratitude meditation can rewire your brain to be better equipped to deal with adversity or difficult phases of life. Practicing gratitude meditation sensitizes your brain towards helpful acts and appreciable things in life, thus enabling us to break free from the endless loop of worries, fears and insecurities.
Stronger personal relationships
Practicing gratitude meditation has even been show to protect partner relationships and strengthen friendships. Expressing your thanks for friends, colleagues and your partner can make them feel appreciated and valued, reinforcing your bond with them and preventing miscommunication or conflict.
Better physical health
Feeling grateful for good things in your life can make a difference in your outlook towards life, enabling you to feel better, live to the fullest, and even sleep better. Moreover, grateful people are more likely to experience a heightened state of mind, eat healthier, exercise more often, and even live longer.
Benefits for emotional eaters
Gratitude Meditation is essential for sustained long term change from emotional eating. When we are healing, we often spend a lot of time focusing on what we need to fix, and less time appreciating what we already have in our lives that make us less anxious and feel more connected to the world. The following are some of the benefits of Gratitude & Self Love when overcoming emotional eating:
Helps to pull you out of your negative narrative
Its so easy to get caught up in the loop of judgement and criticism. Sometimes its our own and sometimes it other people’s experience seeping into our psychic energy. Emotional eating can be a result of this.
Helps to set good boundaries
Gratitude helps to keep you centered in the worth you have in the world. It trains your cells to feel good and believe that the world is working in your favor. In attuning to this, it becomes easier to create healthy boundaries and take healthy actions in service of your worthiness without feeling guilty as guilt can often be the sleeper emotion when it comes to emotional eating.
Helps to create better relationships
Being appreciated is one of the greatest feelings in the world. But, appreciating someone else can sometimes feel even better! Gratitude offers the container in which we can get comfortable with being generous. This is important in emotional eating because the feeling of scarcity is often what triggers anxiety and this eating behavior.
How to practice gratitude meditation
Too often we find ourselves caught up in the difficulties of our lives. We get beaten down with the many challenges we face, and sometimes we even find it easier to focus on the negative than the positive. While this is perfectly natural, sometimes we want to steer our thoughts in a more positive direction.
And that’s where gratitude meditation comes into play.
We take a lot of things for granted without realizing it. When you focus on the things that go wrong, you often overlook the great multitude of things that are actually going right in your life, and we are all guilty of it.
These gratitude meditations will help you remember the small blessings you may take for granted in your day to day life.
Grateful mantra meditation
First, find a comfortable position to rest in, either in a chair, or on a comfortable flat surface.
Take a moment to center yourself. Turn off the ringer on your phone to ensure you won’t be disturbed. If you’re able, close the door to the room you’re in.
Now, take a deep breath through your nose. Fill your lungs entirely with air. Let your breath out through your mouth.
Take a few more deep breaths this way. In through the nose, filling the lungs with air, and out through the mouth.
Now, we’ll practice a gratitude mantra.
The mantra is: I am grateful for ______________.Sounds pretty simple, right? All you need to do is fill in the blank with something you’re grateful for.
We will repeat this mantra 10 times. Each time you repeat the mantra, try to come up with something different that you’re thankful for. If you’re having trouble coming up with things, start small, focusing on your immediate environment.
The yin yang gratitude practice
Seat yourself in a comfortable position and take a few grounding breaths.
Draw your attention to something that’s currently troubling you. It’s best to start small with this practice. Draw on a minor annoyance or irritation that’s been bothering you. For example, perhaps the room you’re in is cold and drafty.
Identify something unpleasant you’re currently faced with, and then see if you can flip the negative circumstance to find a positive aspect. For example, perhaps the room you’re in is cold and drafty, but it has a large, beautiful window that lets in plenty of light.
As you continue to identify things you’re unhappy with in your life, do your best to find a positive opportunity that the circumstance provides. Perhaps you have a long commute to work that you find stressful. A positive spin on this situation could be that your commute gives you the opportunity to enjoy some great music, listen to a cool podcast, or even practice some mindfulness on the way to work.
In addition to meditation, there are various other ways gratitude meditation can be practiced. The following are a few simple ways that can help you practice gratitude mediation daily:
Keep a gratitude journal
Establish a daily practice in which you remind yourself of all the gifts, grace, benefits, and good things you enjoy. Recalling moments of gratitude associated with ordinary events, your personal attributes, or valued people in your life gives you the potential to interweave a sustainable theme of gratefulness into your life.
Remember the bad
To be grateful in your current state, it is helpful to remember the hard times that you once experienced. When you remember how difficult life used to be and how far you have come, you set up an explicit contrast in your mind, and this contrast is fertile ground for gratefulness.
Ask yourself three questions
Meditate on your relationships with parents, friends, siblings, work associates, children, and partners using these three questions: “What have I received from __?”, “What have I given to __?”, and “What troubles and difficulty have I caused?”
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Gratitude is not only a humble acknowledgment of how blessed our life is, but also a doorway for attracting abundance, happiness and prosperity our way. Furthermore, incorporating gratitude into our daily lives is very easy and hardly requires any additional effort.
Extra tips for gratitude meditation
Try writing your own gratitude vow, which could be as simple as “I vow to count my blessings each day,” and post it somewhere where you will be reminded of it every day.
Practice gratitude motions. Grateful motions include smiling, saying thank you, and writing letters of gratitude. By going through grateful motions, you’ll trigger the emotion of gratitude more often.
Try using visual reminders when you are practicing gratitude. This could be pictures, written notes, or even the best visual reminder, a person.
