Skip to main content

Focusing On What We Have

We spend so much of our energy and focusing on what we want—the things we don’t have. 

What happens when we choose to focus on what we do have? Finding gratitude shifts our perception towards the abundance of gifts and blessings that are present for us in this moment. Especially during hard times, a moment of gratitude can remind us of just how much we’ve been given: love, support, simple pleasures, material resources, our health and safety, this breath, this moment, this life.   

To take it a step further, we can give thanks not only for the good things in our lives, but for the challenges and difficulties that push us to grow and give us the opportunity to put our spiritual work into practice. 

“We should be especially grateful for having to deal with annoying people and difficult situations, because without them we would have nothing to work with,” writes Acharya Judy Lief. “Without them, how could we practice patience, exertion, mindfulness, loving-kindness or compassion?”


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Recreating Your Own Life

Everything has causes and effects, and that only understanding such causes and that nothing is unchanging can yield to spiritual freedom. Envisioning this death and rebirth can lead to liberation and serves us as an exercise to rehearse how the mind shapes our reality, embodiment and environment.  Such that realising that nothing is permanent and everything is changing has the power to awaken within us our ability to recreate our lives moment by moment.

Discovering the patterns of your mind

When you meditate, sitting quietly, trying to focus, on your meditation anchor you start to notice what takes you away from your point of focus. Generally, this is a thought of some kind or another. Meditation practice is not intended to stop you from thinking but its purpose is to help you discover what and how you are thinking .

Can I meditate if I have a breathing problem?

You can still meditate if you have a breathing problem. Remember that  meditation is not about the breath . It’s about familiarizing yourself with your own mind it’s about  awareness  and the  cultivation of mindfulness . To do this in meditation, we use what’s called a  meditation anchor  so that whenever the mind wanders, we have something to bring it back too.  An anchor can be a mantra, the body, sounds or an image it’s a point of focus to which you return when your mind wanders. Remember that meditation is not about what anchor you use.   But the anchor is simply there to remind us that no matter how many times or for how long your mind wonders the anchor is there in meditation as a reference to which we bring the mind back to the present moment over and over again.