Gratitude is recognized as a very powerful mind/body emotion that can help you shift the energy and/or mood of your day.
Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow.” – Melody Beattie
Blessing Bowl Movement Meditation
Evidence suggests that positivity practices actually change the way we see the world. I encountered a woman who experienced this to be true. She had been practicing a gratitude practice for over a year. She attested to the influence it had on conditioning her to see goodness everywhere she went. She began to trust it — and expect it.
Sometimes our wiring for a negativity bias is so strong that it can really feel like work to recall positive events. The “wheels” of our minds may feel like they’re churning slowly or may feel stuck in the mud of our clouded lens. Work, life, and relationships can feel strenuous and depleting. It can feel as if this is our only reality. But mindfulness practices that hunt for and savor the equally true blessings, sometimes hidden but always there, can retrain our brains..and even our eyes…for appreciation and blessing. I start every coaching session with an invitation for my client to tell an upward spiral story of a recent event that produced positive energy.
Sometimes people really struggle with this. I had a client unable to come up with a single uplifting event. Instead, we generated positive energy with a mind-body activity to shift into the mood needed for a productive coaching session. Thirty-five minutes onto our session, he interrupted our dialogue to report his recollection of a positive event! He seemed relieved that he had reached an inner freedom that allowed that positive memory to bubble up.
A Mindful Pause to practice the Blessing Bowl Movement Meditation breaks the chains of negativity that feel heavy and oppressive. This connection to the positive restorative emotion of gratitude sustains a lightness of being… not just in the mind…but into the body. Train your way to a sustainable and deeply satisfying way of being in the world.
