Enhanced Living - Gratitude Sadhana Blog Post 1 of 21

First Published on Thrive Global

Photo provided by Stokpic

Shifting Awareness, Moving Energy

This is the first exercise in a series of 21 upcoming blogs that are designed to shift your level of awareness to help you get unstuck from engaging in a loop of life-diminishing patterns and behaviours. These exercises will be various meditation and contemplations which will be the trigger to get the energy moving in the right direction. Complete each of the 21 exercises or 'sadhanas' which will be presented in the blogs so you can begin to experience a shift in your way of thinking as you create your own path to enhanced living!

The Universe Provides

If you go back to my introductory post about this blog series, you’ll see that they’re designed to help bring you to a place where you can experience enhanced living through a practice of sadhanas, you’ll also remember that you were asked to write down the thing you want to experience or transform in your life. That piece of paper will become an anchor for you to keep focus on and it will serve to assert to the universe your intentions.

Photo Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/E. Churchwell University of Wisconsin-Madison

Gift of Gratitude

The most effective way to achieve everything you want in life is to engage in your human experience from the highest level of consciousness possible and the quickest way to get there is to flow into deep gratitude. Regardless of what you’re grateful for, the energy of the emotion is pure and it comes from the same place, however, it must be truly felt as recognition of a blessing or a gift received.

Language of the Universe

Gratitude is more than just being thankful. True gratitude is an experience of the deep connection from your heart to the heart of the divine or to whatever force greater than yourself that you resonate with. The experience of gratitude transcends the ego-self as I explain in my book ‘The Golden Link to Oneness’:

“Gratitude is dialect foreign to the ego because gratitude denies the ego of any compensation, there are no fringe benefits, and it will get nothing in return. When you enter into gratitude, you become humbled by the love and Grace of the Divine that has chosen you to experience Its Grace…where you become a worthy recipient of Divine attention.”

The Breath of Life Sadhana

In this focus-based meditation technique, you’ll bring you attention to counting your breath starting at one, incrementally to 15. Your inhale and exhale will have the same count to complete one full breathing cycle. So when you start, in your mind as you inhale, you’ll count “one” and repeat the same count on your exhale. On the next cycle you’ll count “one, two” as you inhale and repeat the count on the exhale. The following cycle will be, “one, two, three” on your inhale, and “one, two, three” on your exhale and so on until you reach the count of 15, altering the speed of your breath to synchronise with your ascending count. You may notice it becoming more challenging as you get closer to 15, but this is part of performing a sadhana, don’t give up, keep at it and surrender to the experience! Once you’ve reached 15, you’ll return to your regular breathing pattern and bring into mind the gratitude you have for everything in your life at this very moment in time.

Step-by-Step

1- Take out the piece of paper that you’ve written your intention on for this 21 day blog series and as you read it, let the intention fill your mind and your spirit.

2- Sit in a comfortable position with eyes closed and the back of your hand resting on your lap.

3- Start the breathing cycle by taking a deep breath-in, counting in your mind to “one”.

4- Release your breath and on your exhale count to “one”.

5- Inhale counting “one, two”, exhale counting “one, two”.

6- Inhale counting “one, two, three”, exhale counting “one, two, three”.

7- Continue this process until you reach 15, then return to your natural breathing.

8- For the next 5 minutes, in silence, bring into mind the gratitude you have for everything in your life at this moment in time.

9- Now congratulate yourself for having completed your first sadhana. You may want to journal your experience!

The Next Blog – Blog 2 of 21

In my next blog post “Enhanced Living – Flow, Blog 2 of 21” you’ll let yourself flow into a mindfulness moment through a powerful yet easy meditation technique. You’ll experience how being in ‘the flow’ is the natural state of the universe and it’s our resistance to being in the flow that contributes to the obstacles in our lives.