Thinking about It

Music has a huge influence in our lives. It takes the role of not only the best psychologist when we feel like no one understands or the best motivational speaker when we feel like we need to get pumped up, but it also is the best friend we need during both happiness and sadness. Music can be linked to memories, facilitate social bonding and encourage celebrations. Let us appreciate the power of music and all the wonderful things it brings to us.

Money is a crucial part of our lives, but it is not the most important. Ironically, however, it touches many aspects of our lives in terms of quantity and quality and gives rise to more opportunities. Money has the power of disciplining us, inspiring us, and allowing us to give more. Most significantly, money can be used to fund the change we wish to see in the world. Today, we show gratitude for our money by sharing it.

Gratitude is like many important but non-urgent things that we put off. However, these are usually our life's most valuable things! So today, let us make gratitude a priority by taking gratitude pauses in the day. Stop everything else and simply be guided in your focus. Meditate during these pauses to be grateful for money, places, technology, objects and more.

In our lives, it is inevitable that we face hardships, challenges, and difficulties. It could be through our dislikes, our fears, or our negative encounters. But all these struggles have shaped us into the people we are today. They push us out of our comfort zones, make us do things we would not normally do, and we come out as stronger individuals. These invaluable experiences are that for which we will be grateful today.

A common reality is that many of us do not like our body or manage to find imperfections that we consequently use to judge ourselves. But what we can realise is that the very thing we are dissatisfied with plays a significant role in serving us! And for that, we should be grateful. Today, we will embrace our entire body, both the parts we do like and do not like as much, and be thankful for all that it gives us.

As we have seen earlier, we can be grateful for our incredible sense of sight. But this is not the only sense for which we should be thankful for as all of our senses play an integral part in our lives. Without any one of them, we would feel a sense of incompleteness. Today, let us focus on showing gratitude to another one of our senses. Choose a sensation you wish to be completely aware of, and meditate on it with this session.

Gratitude knows no limits, be it duration, location or anything else! We often go through life perceiving our small moments as fleeting and separate from one another. But in reality, we are not a collection of separate moments; we are bound by time, to be connected. Time has the most valuable role as it allows us to create memories, to learn from experiences, and to try again. Its importance is more than worthy of our gratitude and deservingly calls for our thankfulness.

Like how a flower needs rain and how the ocean needs a shore to break, people need people. We all need each other, not only for us to be able to connect, relate and share, but also for our desire to be recognised and appreciated. Relationships are a key part of this! We have many relationships in our lives, some of which we may easily and unknowingly take for granted. As such, today we will be attentive and try to notice something different about them so we can sincerely be grateful for them.

Gratitude is the result of appreciation and free will. Our gratefulness comes first from our appreciation upon recognising that something is valuable to us. It then stems from the fact that all of this is freely given to us. We can choose to be grateful or we can choose to take our blessings for granted. When we want to start doing things differently, such as opting for the former option, we need our mind to be alert so that we can make these choices. Today we will focus on our choice to be grateful.

Like we are grateful for the glass being half-full, we can be grateful for the glass itself. The more we feel thankful, the more we can start to express it in our lives. As we practice it more, this gratitude that we feel inside will shine brightly outside. But sometimes, we don't realise that we appreciate something until we lose it. Today, we strengthen our minds by giving up something for the day and consequently, being grateful for it when we use it next.