This is my word for the decade, gratitude.
It is the key to liberation from craving and aversion. It is the antidote to common misery and stress. When grateful there is none of these triggers. Only joyful being. I sit comfortably in my orbital frontal cortex, the part of the brain that stores the relative reward value, remembers it so that I don't fall too easily for immediate gratifications that do nothing for my wellbeing. I see clearly that gratitude is its own reward,
What can I do this year to make gratitude stick, as a habit, as a way of being? How do I develop and live an algorithm of gratitude?
1. Make it part of my meditation practice. Open and close all meditation with a prayer and a feeling of gratitude.
2. Think of every person I'm grateful to before I go to bed.
3. Let people know, every day, how grateful I am.
4. Maintain a gratitude journal.
5. Bring it into other routines, eating, working, cleaning
6. Be grateful now for the good things that are going to happen
7. Make it part of my new contrasting practice. When I visualize success, visualize gratitude for that success. Visualize gratitude to myself for overcoming my addiction to delay.
8. Show people my gratitude by sharing my wisdom, my wealth, my success.
9. Be regularly grateful for those things that are eternal, that I don't have to strive for, or ask for, that I receive as part of being blessed with a life.
10. Every Sunday morning, be grateful for this journal and all it has done to ground me in happiness.
