Good morning everyone! Are we slowly getting into the habit of using that fuzzy period (between sleeping and being awake), to remind ourselves that we intend to have a great day?
Don’t worry if you forget sometimes. If you keep trying, over time you’ll succeed more than fail, and then it’ll become a habit without you noticing. And that will have a much bigger effect than you might currently feel is possible.
Today I have a two-fer for you. First, we get to experience gratitude during a tough time. Gratitude is always valuable. But it’s even more valuable during the stress of the pandemic.
Gratitude under duress is like being in a deep crater, but having a hot air balloon. It may not let us completely escape the depression, but it can lift our perspective from dark and oppressive, to something more hopeful and bright.
The second thing we get is a lesson in graciousness. Moments of graciousness are when life invited us to have a negative reaction, and instead we choose to be generous. It’s a wonderful feeling for the person doing it, and it tends to be contagious.
Despite how good it feels for the gracious person, it’s still such a rare occurrence that most people are not familiar enough with the emotional dynamic to be able to relax into the generosity. In fact, we’ll often reject it, argue against it, or be awkward about receiving it.
In order to become more comfortable with receiving other’s genuine and respectful attempts to connect with the best parts of us, we can repeatedly review our past experiences where someone offered us their graciousness. It works kind of the way that athletes use visualization.
Pure repetition will acclimate our minds to these positive expressions towards or about us. Then, the next time we have an opportunity to give or receive a gracious gesture, our minds will be in familiar territory and we won’t find as many stress hormones triggered.
Also, while reviewing our lives for times where we received or offered graciousness, we can feel truly grateful that the other person, or we ourselves, took the opportunity to create positivity in the world, when negativity would have been more the norm. That is a great thing to feel good about.
So, have we all got it? We recall when someone was gracious towards us or we were to someone else. We spend some time really living in the feeling of being grateful that the kindness was shown, when other worse options were common.
After that, we should just repeat the process until we grow comfortable with having more positivity in our lives. And thanks for joining the rest of us in these meditations that are trying to improve humanity’s spirits during these tough times. It’s very much appreciated.
None of us ever knows how enormous our effect may be. A tiny bit of positivity has saved more than one secretly suicidal person. So none of us should underestimate what our positivity can do. And that should be all the motivation we need to share our our good feelings widely.
peace. s
