Hey there everybody,
This is Kristen from Teaching Balance and I am here with you with this week's mindfulness meditation practice.
We are continuing in this month focusing on gratitude and as we move our way through the month,
Interesting things happening,
It's of course about mid-November,
We've already set the clocks back which always has an interesting impact in terms of our perception of time and all that sort of thing.
So it's just a comment to make about how there are these natural phases that we go through.
Now as I was thinking about that and I was also thinking a little bit about just sort of you know,
It's a little,
You know,
Take it for what it's worth but what do we aspire to and I don't mean like the lofty goals of you know goodness and all of that sort of thing but I was getting ready earlier today and I was thinking about that I was just sort of feeling this quality of relaxed peaceful contentment and I remember as I observed that about my experience,
I remember thinking like yeah this is what it's about and by that I mean,
Excuse me,
That is kind of what I'm most of the time aspiring to be as a state that I'm aspiring to find myself in and so I don't know,
I just wanted to honor that because I do think even though it's not quite as literal an interpretation of the whole concept of gratitude connecting to this peaceful contentment but I do think that it's a factor because when we allow ourselves to be slightly more predisposed to focusing on the positive i.
E.
Things we have to be grateful for,
The blessings in our lives,
It does slightly loosen our tendency or perhaps habit to constantly be scanning for problems and worrying about this or that.
Those things happen too but the point that I want to make is that the result is I think this quality of a peaceful contentment and so I guess it's just something I wanted to point out for us for today and I think I'm going to very loosely weave it into our practice as well and just remembering that we can have this quality of peaceful contentment during our practice even when our practice isn't necessarily going in any particularly ideal way.
So we'll see kind of when we get started but let's go ahead and get our timer going for 10 minutes.
Last week we did more silence,
This week I'm going to come back to a little bit more of a guided of course.
So just beginning as we do either with your eyes closed or your gaze lowered,
I always like to roll my shoulders back too because I find they're naturally somewhat hunched but you do whatever feels right to you and if you have not already,
Allowing yourself to take some of those slow,
Deep breaths as best you can in this moment right now.
And remembering you can always come back to them,
They're not exclusively for the beginning.
With those deep breaths do activate your body's relaxation response which is also useful for getting a little bit more in touch with this quality of peaceful contentment which we're going to be circling around during our practice today.
So let's just take a few minutes just to settle in silence and then I'll come back in.
Okay,
Thanks we're of time.
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