Thanks-giving: A Meditation on Gratitude

In the spirit of the Thanksgiving holiday, here is a guided meditation that centers on gratitude.

You can listen here and follow the script below. 

***

Whatever your state of being, your state of body and mind, you can take a couple of big breaths, drawing in and letting go.

And do that again.

Breathing out, extending the exhale, letting it all go. And for the next few breaths at your own rhythm, I invite you to continue to extend the exhale. Just breathe out a little bit longer than you normally do on the out-breath, getting rid of any stale air at the bottom of the lungs, triggering your nervous system to open up and relax. 

When we're anxious our breathing tends to be really shallow, engaging the sympathetic nervous system. When our breathing is deep, our exhale long, it triggers the parasympathetic nervous system, the rest and digest network in the body. 

So give yourself a moment to just settle in.

Good. As you do this, you'll notice distractions: thoughts in the mind, sounds activities in the world. That's fine. Just notice them and as you notice yourself noticing distractions, you can just keep coming back to the breath, letting go, letting go.

You can now just come back to normal breathing. Just feel the way the breath breathes, the way life just moves through you. And no matter what's present in the body right now — whether you're really comfortable and relaxed or whether you feel wound up and intense — it doesn't matter because at a more subtle level, you can just hold an attitude of acceptance towards the body exactly as it is. 

Notice the difference between struggling to relax, efforting to come into a mindful place, and accepting right now that the body is as it is. Maybe you like how the body feels, maybe you don't, but at a deeper level notice that you don't have to struggle with the body. And just the act of picking up this attitude of acceptance can help you relax at an even deeper level, deeper than the body for a moment. 

And you can just relax into this deep capacity of your awareness to be accepting, to let this moment fully inform you to not be in denial of things as they are at a more subtle level. You can do this with the emotions in the body and thoughts in the mind. 

Maybe emotionally you're feeling up positive, you never want it to stop, or maybe you're feeling down, dejected, gloomy, and you wish you felt better. But again, notice that you can just make space for what you're feeling and make space for what thoughts are coming and going the same way. 

Weather patterns aren't a problem for the sky. You don't need to make a problem of the weather patterns of emotion and thought. You can just rest as the sky, letting it all come and go. Letting it all pass through, changing somehow. All of the conditions of this moment, all of the conditions of life can easily fit within awareness and because everything fits, everything belongs, and you don't need to struggle. 

You can deeply relax from this place of rest and relaxation. I want you to open up your awareness, open up your senses to just feel into the fullness of this moment, the fullness of sensation in the body, the fullness of emotion and thoughts, the fullness of all of your life's conditions, the favorable conditions, the challenging conditions, everything. Whatever your sense of total fullness is in this moment, I want you to just open up to it. And open yourself to the fullness of the world — over seven billion human hearts and minds, feeling, thinking, yearning, and dreaming. Open up to the fullness of all of humanity, the fullness of the earth itself — this living, breathing organism that sustains life, the rock, the plants, animals, the mountains, the seas, the plains. As you open up your awareness to all of us, to all things, you might sense a quality of abundance, overflowing, everything happening at once. 

Oftentimes when we think of giving thanks, when we think of being grateful, we think of things we're grateful for: Our health, our family, our dreams, our hopes, running water in the tap, sunshine in the sky. All good things. But at the deepest level when we really just relax into a sense of being, just our own beingness, we intuit that we are always and already in deep exchange with everything or part of everything. We're connected to everything, all of life, all of creation pours forth its abundance in this moment, and we are the recipients of all of those gifts. And receiving deeply we can't help but be generous with everything we have. Life itself infuses us in this moment. Life breathes us in and out, sustaining our life, connecting us to all of life everywhere. And a profound and pervasive sense of love sustains us, supports us, gives us our very being and love we and move and have our being. 

Feel at the level of the heart, the way you're connected to everything, so how much you care and this love seems to be an exhaustible. The more we love, the more love there is. 

And the light, a gift of light, the simple fact of being awake and alive and present to have any experience at all. It's a gift and we received this gift every single moment of life. This gift of being, this gift of wakefulness, the gift of experience at the level of our personality. We give thanks for the blessings that we recognize in our lives, the things we love, and sometimes we even managed to give thanks for the things we don't love, but at the deepest level of our being pure intelligence, consciousness, spirit, whatever your language for it.

At this deepest level, we are Thanksgiving. We are pure gratitude, which is to say fully receiving the abundance, the fullness of this moment and fully pouring out from this abundance as generosity and action. So how deeply life gives to you on this moment with an in-breath, a new lease on life and with each out breath, you give yourself back. Offer yourself fully to the bloom of this moment.

***

Take the momentum of this practice into your Thanksgiving week with your loved ones. If you find yourself feeling cramped, small and claustrophobic, caught in your outworn patterns of feeling and thinking number, you can just feel your feet on the ground. Take a relaxing breath and open up as wide as the sky fully receiving these gifts of life, of love, of light, and giving back in your own unique way as mindfulness.

***

Want to deepen your practice? Download the Mindfulness Essentials course.