Mindful Monday - Feeling Grateful

Well, I wrote it on Monday, but I forgot to add the pictures and publish it until Tuesday...

Maybe it's because my birthday is this month or because I love beautiful flowers and the return of warm weather, or perhaps it's because as a child I knew the school year was drawing to a close by now, but for whatever combination of reasons, I've always looked forward to May. I've noticed that my mindfulness practice has helped me tune in to a few of the incredible details we city dwellers can miss this time of year if we aren't careful--especially in nature.

The Biltmore Estate azalea gardens on my birthday!

I'm also finding that mindfulness and gratitude very much go hand-in-hand. Gratitude increases mindfulness; mindfulness encourages gratitude. How can you feel grateful for something you barely notice because your mind is elsewhere? Watching for reasons to be thankful is a type of mindfulness practice. Even when I wasn't meditating regularly, I kept a gratitude journal in which I recorded about 5 things I felt grateful for each day--or most days.

Keeping a gratitude journal--something I still do--can be fun, especially if you don't give yourself too many rules to follow. I fell into that trap, initially, having started the practice during a low point in my life when I wasn't in a very positive frame of mind. I read somewhere not to repeat the same gratitude twice and to challenge yourself to increase the length of your list each week. But that proved to be the recipe for a resentment journal, which wasn't at all what I had in mind.

The point isn't to challenge yourself. (Life is already plenty challenging.) It's to cultivate the habit of watching for what is good and also to remind yourself that no matter what is going wrong, there are always things going right that you can feel good about. Over time, the shift toward focusing on the good can be life changing.

Like meditating, if you decide to start a gratitude journal, there's no need to worry about doing it wrong. The important thing is simply to do it. If 5 feels like too many things to list, start with 3 or even 1. No entry is too trivial: the feeling of a breeze, the texture of fabric, the taste of ripe fruit, the sound of rustling leaves or a cat purring. If you don't want to make your list at the end of the day, you can record things as you think of them or first thing in the morning. If there's a stretch of amazing weather, write it down every day, if you like. If you have an awesome day and want to enumerate a dozen things, go for it.

If you like to write with ink in a paper journal, that's great. If it's easier for you to use an app on your phone or tablet, that works just as well. If writing or typing is a challenge, you can record daily voice memos. If you like to take pictures, you could even keep a photo journal, full of things you feel grateful for. How wonderful to create a gratitude album you can look through when feeling low! (Come to think of it, perhaps most photo albums are gratitude albums?)

If you aren't ready to commit to any of those ideas, consider simply pausing for a couple of seconds to make a mental note any time you notice yourself smiling or feeling good.

In some forms of meditation, we are encouraged to notice when our mind wanders from our chosen point of attention (often the breath) and to consciously label our thoughts, "thinking" as we refocus. Why not similarly note and label "gratitude" when we notice something we feel grateful for?  Or mentally pause to say, "thank you" each time. Author, Anne Lamott, says that you can boil down most prayers to one of three: Help, Thanks, and Wow. I'm inclined to agree. For those of us who pray, thank you is a perfect prayer, however you choose to offer it.

As for my weekly checkin, I do indeed have much to be thankful for, having just celebrated my birthday with my beloved. I'm in the mood for spring cleaning and clearing clutter. I've been walking. I'm eating more mindfully, although I've made the conscious choice to splurge quite a bit recently. I'm meditating every day and spending more time in nature, which I find both calming and inspiring. I still want do more reading and writing and do a better job of sleeping at night, but I'm optimistic about improvements in those areas in the weeks ahead.