Gratitude Meditation Practices, With Sean Fargo

There are many ways to bring gratitude into our meditation practice, and just as many reasons for doing so. Gratitude is grounding. It deepens our awareness and invites a sense of awe. And it naturally inspires generosity. Like mindfulness, gratitude is cultivated with practice. In this episode, I bring you some recordings that were until now only available to students in our teacher training program. In these, I share some techniques for meditating on gratitude, even if we're feeling resistance. I also offer tips on practicing and teaching in advanced practice, which may be one of the most powerful means of remembering the preciousness of each and every moment. So let's settle in by beginning with how we might use gratitude to settle into a meditation practice. Sometimes when we practice mindfulness in a formal meditation, sometimes it's difficult to settle into the body or to stay focused around breathing or wherever you're directing your attention. And so one of the ways to help our nervous systems to settle and to allow our minds to relax is to actively reflect on something or someone that we're grateful for. We could reflect on a moment in your past that you're grateful for. Could be a moment of connection with a person, maybe a moment of profound peace. We could reflect on a moment in nature or in meditation, a moment that maybe we're proud of, but a moment in our past that we can allow our hearts to find that appreciation for. Maybe that was very meaningful in some way. I like coming up with a top 10 list of moments in the past that I easily feel grateful for. And you know, if you are like in meditation or if you are around connection with people, if you are like accomplishments or things that I feel a wholesome sense of pride around, it can be helpful to reflect on one or more of these moments near the beginning of a meditation practice. Can help the mind to concentrate. And by actively reflecting on that moment, we can open to the sensations of how that emotion feels, allowing that emotion of gratitude to pervade throughout our body, can open to those feelings and the sensations, and this practice can often help our nervous systems to relax, can help our prefrontal cortex to come back online, can help our insula to sense into physical sensations the body a little bit more easily, can help our amygdala to relax, and you know it can bring a smile to our face along the way, too. We can bring mindfulness to that experience of gratitude in this moment, and that can be a great segue to then practice mindfulness of breathing or a body scan or whatever practice you want to do with a little bit more focus, a little bit more of a settled mind. And my encouragement for a lot of us is to reflect on more and more of these kinds of moments, both in formal meditation and also in daily life, and to allow those feelings of gratitude to pervade in the body more and more. So that when these feelings naturally arise in our day-to-day life, we have practiced being able to allow them to be here. We can tend to them with this non-judgmental moment-to-moment awareness. You know, sometimes it's easier to access these feelings of gratitude than others. You know, there's no right or wrong here. If we weren't able to access them, that's totally fine. But we can try again at another time, maybe with another style or another time of day. Many of us are well practiced in doubt, judgment, pessimism, and noticing the negative. And that's okay. Negativity bias is very human. However, we can bring tender, gentle awareness to that too. We can offer ourselves self-compassion and grace in the midst of our negative thinking. It's also human to be chasing distraction all the time. Meditation isn't always exciting, so it can take time to get comfortable with stillness, presence, being without distracting. The good news is resting in gratitude and mindfulness does get easier with consistent practice over time. This isn't exactly exciting. It can seem boring in the beginning. You know, when we're used to instant gratification, when we're used to things kind of needing to capture our attention quickly, we're always kind of grasping for the thing that's going to stimulate us. I'm speaking very generally, of course, but the more we're sensitive, the more that we open to the senses and actually notice what's actually happening from moment to moment, we move from this territory of needing coarse stimuli towards finding interest in the subtle. So we're moving from the coarse to the subtle, and we gain the ability to notice more subtlety in ways that we may not have been able to imagine with physical sensations, with emotions, with sounds, with sights, smells, nuance of movement, we pick up on so many more subtleties of life, which makes the moment so much more full. A lot of boredom comes from feeling like there's really nothing interesting happening. The more that we open to what's happening, the more nuance and subtlety we experience, and the more interesting it becomes. At the end of a long retreat, or even after a full day of just practicing mindfulness, we can become highly sensitized to what we previously would have thought of as banal or boring or ordinary. We can look at the sidewalk or the walls, and you know, the more we're truly present for it, the more beautiful it can become. Much less the trees or our family or the miracle of our own breath. You know, and this is one of the profound benefits of continued practice that we're increasing our sensitivity to the full spectrum of emotion of all of our sensations. We notice how stimuli can then lead to perception, feelings of pleasantness or unpleasantness, or boredom, lack of interest, reactivity. As we practice gratitude meditation, we literally change our brains. The intentional practice of gratitude makes it more likely that we'll apply gratitude outside of meditation to all sorts of moments throughout our everyday lives. And when we embody gratitude at that deeper level, we naturally want to speak it out loud, to share it with others. And so, in that way, gratitude opens us up to generosity. We want to tell people we're grateful for them. We want to wish them well. So gratitude has this heart-opening quality as well. We tend to talk about you know, wishing ourselves well, wishing each other well, and then regrounding back in the body. That's a great way to connect and remember that we're all kind of a common path, and we're here to hopefully be more mindful and help others with mindfulness. It's kind of a nice way to connect with each other on a heart level. It's also just kind of logistically, it's also a nice way to help people stay respectful with one another in a group setting. Not that we would be disrespectful, but when we remember that we're each human, we wish each other well, we tend to open up a little bit more, and it comes through in the quality of our communication and our presence. Big fan of that. You know, and we can also try it just out in daily life, wishing everyone on the street well, or you know, wishing people I'm having lunch with well. And can you know, a lot of people start meals off with a prayer. May we wish ourselves well with this meal and wish each other well and happiness. So we can use this in all sorts of settings. We can start meetings this way. Doesn't have to necessarily be in a formal practice, but we can start days off with our family that way, or family dinners, or anything. It's sort of a lovely reminder, and it just feels good. Regularly sharing gratitude with others enhances our appreciation of our moment-to-moment experience. Lastly, and as promised, I also want to share a bit on how to practice and teach what may be the most powerful method for opening to gratitude. Mindfulness of death. Not many mindfulness teachers teach this, but the ones that do, in my experience, tend to not emphasize the gratitude or appreciation or preciousness that much. Instead, they just emphasize that this very inhale could be the last. And so sensing that opening to that, noticing the emotions that come up, honoring those, not judging them, not trying to get rid of them, but noticing them and then coming back to the breath when you feel ready, remembering that this inhale can be my last. This inhale can be my last. This inhale can be my last. And, you know, generally speaking, over time, once we've open to the strong emotions and thoughts that come up, you know, noticing them, honoring them, allowing them to be here, and then coming back to the actual practice, we tend to react to it a little bit less, open to the truth of the fragility of all of our lives, and sort of form the intention to be present more often because this moment is so precious. And a lot of people will then make decisions about how they want to spend their lives. Maybe they want to spend more time with certain people, or more time meditating, or it tends to clarify our priorities and perspective a little bit over time. But in the short term, some people really struggle with those reactions that I imagine more of you have had, especially, you know, parents, you know, not wanting to leave their children, or sons and daughters not wanting to leave their parents. Maybe we haven't done the thing that we wanted to always do. All sorts of emotions come up, and that's perfectly normal, perfectly natural. And I don't recommend sharing this practice with people brand new to mindfulness, but the Buddha called this the most powerful mindfulness practice, period. This practice has influenced major decisions in my life for the better. So I do think that it's one kind of meditation that should be worth considering as a practitioner. And then when you feel ready, maybe trying it out on someone who's been practicing for a while who may not have significant trauma or you know emotional challenges at that time. And perhaps emphasize those heart qualities that I encouraged to help balance out the depression that can come after this practice. So, you know, I'm not here to say, you know, life sucks and then we die. I'm not trying to be nihilistic by any means. I'm actually intending to be the opposite that life is beautiful, wonderful, precious when we really connect with it. I would like to see this practice shared more in the world safely because it's really hard to find, even from very senior practitioners. And I think that's a disservice because of its power to help us connect with this moment, and because it really can help put things in perspective, unlike any other mindfulness practice I know. It's perfectly normal to resist this death awareness practice. In fact, some teachers might say that if you don't feel any resistance, perhaps you haven't really felt in the body the truth that this moment could be your last. But just as observing the sidewalk can go from boring to beautiful once we truly pay attention, if we keep coming back to this practice, we can move through our resistance and open to how infinitely valuable it can be to remember that this moment really could be our last. Can we do this with love, courage, and warmth? And if it ever becomes too difficult or too overwhelming to back off and find something safe to bring our awareness to. And then coming back to this breath. And this breath, and this breath. Oh yes, like I guess this breath could be my last, if you really think about it. And oh my goodness, like this breath could be my last, and this, and this, and the more I sat with that, and the more I really sort of accepted that truth. An overwhelming sense of peace came. And also a couple times images, it's almost like a video, like it was almost like I was reliving or imagining some completely different experience where suddenly just out of nowhere, I was riding a horse, and I was like looking down at my hands, and I was a different color, and we were galloping really fast along a mountain, and I was holding on to Tibetan prayer flags with both hands, and they were like flying in the wind, and we were racing, and I couldn't tell if we were racing to like save people, or I had no idea like why we were going that fast, but it's still very vivid in my head, and I wasn't thinking about horses or prayer flags or mountains at all over those 15 days. But suddenly that image came up, and I thought, I wonder if that's a past life or a future life. I have no idea. Or maybe it was just some dream state that like I got transported in. I have no idea. But sometimes when we really release into that acceptance of this, some people find themselves in a very different state than they were a minute ago. I know that sounds a little woo-woo, but for some people that does happen. You never know what's gonna come up. Your experience with gratitude meditation will be your own, will be unique to you. But I encourage you to integrate gratitude practice into your meditation, into your daily life, to observe and sense how you feel, simply noticing what changes. So may you be well, may you be healthy, may you be happy, and may you continue to open to gratitude and all of life's beauty from moment to moment to moment.