Gratitude And Thankfulness

Adam Wes Namaste, man. Namaste, everybody. Well, where is everybody today? This will be a small group. Let's see, who are we missing? I just texted a couple people. How are you, Harrison?

Harrison M Sorry, I just couldn't turn my mic on. Oh, there you go. I'm well, thank you. A few things are happening. I'm busy with various projects, and I've just gone full-time in my studio, which is pretty exciting. I'm moving to Amsterdam in 14 weeks, so I'm preparing for my first solo show. I'm just super grateful. Busy, but I know I can do it.

Meditation's been an invaluable tool to help me stay focused. Again, it's been an invaluable tool in terms of being able to manage lots of tasks. I feel like the compound interest of meditating when you don't need it helps you so much when things get heavy.

It's an interesting thing. I talk to a lot of people about it. I'm classic now. When I meet people, not in a forceful way, I let them ask. They're like, "Oh, you seem different," or, "Why are you so happy all the time?" People literally ask me that all the time, and it's quite funny.

I try to communicate in the simplest way possible. I'll just say, "Meditation's changed my life." Just say something really straight and sharp, really bold. They're like, "Oh, what do you mean?" I'm like, "Well, I do it every day," and da-da-da.

My brother was very interested, and I split a Transcendental Meditation course with him because it was quite expensive. He's going down that route, which is exciting. But it's definitely very classic, as I'm sure everyone here would understand. People will meditate when they're stressed because they're stressed, and then they do it. They're not stressed a few days later, and then they just don't do it ever again. Breaking that is ultimately why I think your course is so good, because you've got to have a commitment longer than that. People have good intentions, but they never stick to it.

Adam Wes Meditation is more than just the sitting part. What we do between meditations informs our meditation. Really, when you get more advanced or when you enter a certain path, I would say this path especially, the reason why I talk about all these different things and do the sermon each week is because that is a part of meditation.

If you don't live with humility, you're not really a meditator. Right? You may sit down and meditate, but it's humility that carries the meditation. There are so many things. If you don't live with love, if you don't live with mindfulness, if you don't do all the various things that happen between meditations.

When we meditate, we become devoted to something that is more than just that duration of meditation that we do consistently. When we sit down and meditate, we build our energy. We get our power up in such a way that, throughout the rest of the day, we can do those things that are not only reinforcing of meditation, but are also an expression of meditation. So, yeah.

Harrison M It's interesting you say that because, ultimately, I know when someone asks me that question, I can't really answer it in that moment. You're exactly right. I practice a lot. Obviously, we only know each other to some degree, and outside of just the meditation, I'm extremely big on symbolism, extremely big on affirmations, extremely big on repeating things and keywords. I think I'm a little bit unusual in that respect.

Adam Wes You're very unusual. I saw that about you the very first moment you texted me. It's different, and it's great. By the way, I'm not saying that you don't do those things. I'm saying that you do.

Harrison M No, I know that you're not saying that. I'm more saying that it's hard when someone says, "What are you doing to be happier?" Sometimes I say reading off the bat. I say, "Read things. At least have positive reinforcements bouncing around your head."

Everything you consume shapes your reality. If you've got positive, nice things bouncing around your head, not just positive, nice things, but constructive things that bring you closer to your core of who you are and who you want to be, I think that's extremely important. It's an amalgamation of lots of things, as you've said. It's not just the one thing. It's a lifestyle choice.

I do believe, though, that even just recommending meditation allows people, even if they can't understand it in one interaction, to say, "Meditation's really good. It's just a chance for you to sit down, stop, and sit with yourself."

I think a lot of it as well is that it can bring up uncomfortable things if you're not working through those things, and you get forced to look. I'm very big on looking at the fear because I believe that fear, obviously, is of the mind. It's incredible when people actually look at their fear point-blank. It often disappears. When you actually write it on a piece of paper or something, it's not that scary.

Anyway, I could talk forever. I've got lots to say, but I don't want to take up everyone's time. I've been enjoying this immensely.

Adam Wes Wonderful, and thank you for what you shared. Did you practice meditating on the chakras this week?

Harrison M I did, actually. I do my own exploration in the sense of intuition based on everything we've learned. I love acknowledging when I do things for the first time. I'm like, "Oh, I've never done that before. Wow, and now I have," and you build on that.

I had an intuition at points, even in moments between my day and when I was driving, to put my finger over my third eye and feel the energy there as I'm driving. When I'm trying to repeat a mantra or focus on something in particular, I follow those intuitive things.

Then I put it on my heart center. Meditating on my heart center is a little quirk, I guess, or a habitual thing that I do constantly, every single day, almost just out of habit now. It was interesting when we were doing the meditation with the heartstrings and pulling on those. I often grab my fingers from my heart center, and when I want to show gratitude, I pull from the center and pull it out into the world.

I do this when I'm walking around or anything. If I have a thought and I'm like, "Oh, I want to appreciate that," I pull from my chest and push it out into the world. Sometimes, when I finish a meditation or at other points, I put my hand out to the world. I start on my chest, as in presenting my heart to the world, and then I also bring it back, accepting the universe back into my heart. I'll do that however many times feels right.

Adam Wes That's a chakra exercise.

Harrison M Yeah, but I've not looked that up. It just felt right to me.

Adam Wes Just keep doing that. It's important to be intuitive, right? Because then it's real. Otherwise, you're just mimicking a pattern that you saw, which may not be real. That's very central to the practice as well. Thanks, Harrison. Wonderful.

All right. Hi, Praveen. Hi, Mom. Hi, everybody.

Well, tonight's talk is a very special talk. I was hoping there would be more people here for it, but I'm going to do it anyway. Perhaps we'll repeat it.

The topic, the sermon for tonight, is gratitude and thankfulness. It's interesting. Harrison said gratitude quite a few times already.

Gratitude and thankfulness are two distinct things, but they correlate. Let's think of gratitude as the center and thankfulness as an add-on.

To be grateful is to be in a state of non-resistance. It's also to be in a state of expansiveness and heart. When we're grateful for something, we are in communion with it. We count our blessings. We come to know our blessings by embodying them. We become aware of something that we can cherish in the moment. It brings us into the moment, and it brings us into a deeply spiritual state.

Ultimately, we feel gratitude for existence itself, for the substratum of all temporal transformations. That eternal side, which is the backdrop of all change, time, and space, becomes a substrate from which we can draw gratitude and feel this fullness and happiness.

Gratitude is a choice and a practice. You build momentum in gratitude. It's good to sit down and literally practice gratitude. One thing that I do, and a lot of people see me do this because I do it quite overtly in public, is I'm constantly feeling grateful. When I do this, what I'm doing is expanding, looking at the moment, and saying, "Yes. Thank you."

When you say yes, you expand. When you say no, you contract. The heart field will expand. Your heart chakra will expand when you say yes. When you resist, it's energetic retraction.

Gratitude is a way for us to expand and expand and expand, to encompass more as a heart, as our heart energy field, and also to become aware of and live with our blessings.

One can have a great deal of blessings in their life and be largely unaware of them. They may not acknowledge them, feel them, or inwardly be touched by their blessings. In the practice of gratitude, we focus on the blessing.

How do you do this? Because it's a subtle, energetic occult practice. I'm grateful for something, someone, or some condition. Gratitude can be for the substrate, but it can also be for a condition. Generally, most people would think of it as being grateful for a condition, and I think that's a good thing. Find the things that you can be grateful for now.

I'll get back in a moment to the occult practice of it. A key principle in gratitude is learning to go beyond entitlement. Entitlement blocks our ability to be grateful and thankful.

When you feel that the very perception of color is a miracle, "I'm alive, and I can see color," that is dimensionality upon the substratum of the true self, the nothingness, the eternal side. It's a miracle.

I sit down and see purple flowers. I look, become aware of the frequency of purple, and feel grateful for the fact that I'm touching purple, embodying purple.

Gratitude is something we can practice, not every moment, but constantly throughout the day. As much as you can, focus on, "Wow, look at the sun. Wow, look at that cloud. Wow, I feel happy. Wow, I love my family, and they're healthy. Wow, I've got these wonderful students, and I get to teach meditation."

A lot of times, we can look back and say, "There was a time in my life when I didn't have that, when I longed for that." The problem is, we become very acquainted with our blessings to the point where we take them for granted.

If you take things for granted, it's a lack of energetic vitality. It's laziness. Right? "I already got that. I can put it aside and focus on the next thing that I want to get to, strive to."

But the practice of being in communion with the blessings takes a vitality of mind, a vitality that grows and stays with you. It's not exhausting. It's revitalizing because you're constantly feeling the blessing that you achieved or gained at some point.

It's important to be without entitlement. You also want to feel free of that thing without cultivating attachment. It's a very sophisticated practice, being grateful. "I'm grateful for this new job, but I'm also detached."

Then you constantly flow into new states of gratitude. You may lose the job. "Okay, I'm grateful that I don't have a job. Now I have time and space for a new job, and I'm grateful for that moment." Then I get a new job, and I'm grateful for that job. It's about being in a state of flow.

Life is a challenge because we come into this world, we're born into these bodies, and we get all these blessings. But unless we flow through them without sticking to the transformations, we cause pain for ourselves. This is a part of Buddhism. Attachment causes suffering.

Gratitude, done in a really particular way, allows us to be with our blessings without attachment. You can see that this is an optimal state. Imagine, you're in touch with all the beautiful things. How happy are you going to be? You're also not fearful of losing them at the same time. This is an optimal state.

I'm not saying this is easy. I'm not saying I do this perfectly, because to do this perfectly is to enter into a state of enlightenment. How can you revel in form but be completely free of it? This is subtle yoga, esoteric yoga we're talking about here.

Bhakti has some key principles that are very evident in its practice. Gratitude is one of the centers of bhakti. A bhakti person feels gratitude constantly. They have a great deal of momentum around gratitude. I shouldn't say constantly, but there's momentum that has this constant, high-level energy of gratitude.

Blessing, blessing, blessing, grateful, crying, thankful, constantly. This is a really excellent practice. I know my mom has seen me do this for many years. She's like, "Why are you so grateful for the suitcases coming by on the conveyor belt?"

Because this moment of this trip, when I'm about to pick up the suitcase, is so special. There's a sentimentality to it. It's very sweet. Gratitude has a kind of romance, sentimentality, and sweetness to it, and you can embrace that.

When you do this, it brings a joy and happiness within you that would have otherwise remained inert. A lot of people live a life where they feel empty. They're missing so many things, and they live with the things they want that they don't have. They feel an insufficiency and emptiness.

But if you turn it around and say, "Okay, what am I grateful for?" you get in the habit of counting your blessings.

Let's go back to that occult practice. Gratitude is more than thinking of something in the head. No. Feel it in the heart. Really come to know and be with the blessing. If you do it right, it may bring tears to your eyes. If you do it right, your heart chakra will activate and get charged. If you do it right, your neighbors will ask why your eyes twinkle and why your light is so bright.

You will be generating, fundamentally, a state of blissfulness, a state of non-resistance.

When you sit down to meditate, meditate on gratitude. That's not to say you're thinking. It's to say you're merged into the moment. You feel abundant. You can't think of all the things, right? Thinking is a very linear, fragmented approach to knowledge.

You can feel the reverberation of something you're grateful for, an aspect of your life for which you're grateful, in your field without thinking about it. This is where it gets into more of an occult practice. You want your field to reverberate with all the things that bless you because then they can all happen at once. They can happen while you're eating. You're just filled with love.

Gratitude is an essential practice. It's one of my favorite things. It's helped me move through difficult times. Without gratitude, it's easy to fall into depression, anxiety, or a lot of things that a lot of people experience.

Gratitude is a remedy for these things. It's powerful medicine for many of the challenges of the human condition and the human psyche.

It's an energetic practice. We did chakras last week. We felt the heart chakra. Do gratitude and feel the heart chakra. Make the gratitude have an actual energetic repercussion and effect that is noticeable in your energy field. Your chakras should be brighter, more activated from gratitude.

Thankfulness is another aspect. I had considered not doing these together, but I thought that maybe we should do them together. Thankfulness is a beautiful way of being.

What I mean by it is: thank everybody and everything. "Thank you. I'm not worthy, and yet I receive. Thank you. Thank you for my car."

It's very much like gratitude. I walk out to the car, and my car is sitting there. I have my own car. It works. I'm grateful. It's not in the shop today. I'm grateful.

At the same time, I like to feel thankfulness for the car. I look at the car and say, "Thank you, car, for being here." I say thank you to the neighbor. I say thank you to the person who allowed me to drive in front of them.

Thankfulness is a very beautiful etiquette, a very spiritual form of etiquette that has an energetic effect as well.

Thank you, Harrison, for being on time today and being here. If I take you for granted, how does that feel to you? It doesn't feel like love. But if I feel the humility inside, "Thank you for being here. Thank you for your practice. Thank you for honoring these sessions."

Thank you, Praveen, for all that you do. If I really say it with sincerity, "Thanks, Praveen," look how that changes me and how it changes you.

People really love to feel recognized and appreciated. What's more, it feels wonderful to recognize and appreciate others. When you have expectations of others, ignore them, and take them for granted, it hurts us inside.

Thankfulness is not only a beautiful etiquette, but it's an energetic practice that touches the heart in a similar way to gratitude. You can be thankful for your cup. "Thank you, cute cup. Thank you, computer. Thank you, candle." I say thank you to my plants. "Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you."

This is a little different from gratitude, but it's similar. It opens up gratitude, but there's a sort of interpersonal dynamic that occurs, even if it's with an object, a cloud, or a sunbeam.

It's very bhakti. Bhakti is the yoga of love, the yoga of heart. You may have heard it's the yoga of devotion, but essentially, what it is energetically is an orientation where you prioritize love and heart.

What is included in love and heart? Gratitude, thankfulness, honoring others.

Somebody said that to me earlier this week. He actually gave a talk at his church about that. I was like, "Oh, that's wonderful," and I felt so grateful that my neighbors are the kind of people who give talks at churches about honoring others. It seemed very synchronistic.

It would be wonderful to practice this this week. One thing you can do is make a gratitude list. Sit down and say, "I'm going to be grateful." You can do the same things every day. "Grateful for this, this, this, this, this, this, and this," or, "This person, this person," or whatever.

It can be five minutes. It can be 10 minutes. It can be 15. More than 15 might be quite a bit, but go through your gratitude list and practice gratitude informally.

Go around, feel grateful for things throughout the day, and be thankful. You can sit down and take a moment beyond 15 minutes to say, "What are all the things I'm grateful for?" Journal about it. Get in touch with this, and then meditate on gratitude.

There's a feeling accompanied by gratitude, an energetic state. You can sit and bask in that state. You're just generating love and gratitude. When you're done, it's easy to feel grateful.

Sometimes we have a blockage to gratitude and thankfulness. There's something inside us that says, "No. I'm not going to be grateful. I'm not going to be thankful to this person. I don't like them. They bother me. They're actually a big problem to me."

But those are opportunities too. We ultimately don't want to be in a state of rejecting gratitude and rejecting thankfulness. These are paid-in-full states for us. We want to unravel the equation and discover the variables inside that are blocking us from truly embracing a state that is a blessing to our own lives and our own happiness.

I am grateful for this woman right here, Colleen, my mom. Very, very grateful for her. Oh, my God. Sometimes gratitude can be a little overwhelming.

That's my sermon on gratitude. I almost was nervous to give this one because it's so special to me. It's almost a little private, but we're building community here. I'd like to invite all of us together to build a collective momentum around gratitude and thankfulness.

How beautiful would it be if there were a nice, full community of people who deeply practiced and understood these things? We would be so sweet together, and it would be powerful.

Thank you. I'm grateful.

Any questions? What about you, Mom?

Colleen Thank you for this sermon, and I'm grateful to you for all these Tuesdays and wonderful times with the community.

I'm hearing that thankful is more immediate and kind of verbal. If somebody does something, your response immediately is, "Oh, thank you."

Adam Wes A recognition, yeah.

Colleen Right. Gratitude is the deeper, more emotional feeling.

Adam Wes Yeah. I'm making a semantic distinction here. You could use any words you'd like, but if you think about it, when you say thank you, you say it to somebody.

Colleen Right.

Adam Wes Yes, they're different. Grateful is like, "I feel all the blessings."

Colleen "Thank you so much for doing that." You made me see the difference. Every night, as soon as I put my head on the pillows, I go through my gratitude list. I don't get through it because usually, by then, I've fallen asleep.

Adam Wes That's a beautiful way to fall asleep. Wonderful.

Colleen Thank you, Adam. Thank you. Grateful to you. Grateful to you.

Adam Wes I'm so grateful that I have such a beautiful relationship with my mother. For four years, she's been coming here and meditating with me on Tuesdays at six, basically.

Colleen I'm not doing my homework.

Adam Wes Well, remember, entitlement and expectation are the blockages. When we say, "I wish I had this. I wish I had that," it's a very courageous thing to feel grateful for being alive, and everything else can be an extra.

We'd like to set the bar low, and then everything above becomes a blessing. If you go even below being alive, you're grateful for existence, for the part of ourselves that's eternal. This really does connect with the non-dual philosophies of yoga.

If I become content and grateful for the unchanging, non-dimensional point of existence, which is within all beings, then everything in life becomes a miracle and a blessing.

This is an aspiration. It takes courage to find that, but it's also an energetic transformation. You can be so blasted by the light of eternity that you just feel gratitude. It doesn't matter what's going on. You're so full with happiness. Light is essential to this too.

It's always funny to me when we hear these stories about people who lost money in the stock market, and their life becomes so unhappy. You should not be drawing happiness from superficial things as much, especially if you have your basic needs met. That's all getting into ego, expectation, and things.

If it's daunting to start saying, "I'm grateful that I exist," you can just start with warmer things, like, "I'm grateful for all the real blessings in my life." You don't have to be so courageous as to take it to a level that confronts you in a place where maybe you're not ready.

But we should always move toward greater gratitude because life is transient. We want to feel blessed all the time, especially when we have so much to be happy about.

Colleen You're right. Thank you.

Adam Wes You're welcome, Mom. Thank you. Thanks for sharing.

All right, Praveen. Do you want to say anything before we start our gratitude meditation?

Praveen S It's amazing.

Adam Wes What was that?

Praveen S It's just simply amazing. Thank you for this.

Adam Wes Praveen, if only I could find a whole bunch of people who wanted to participate with such recognition, like you. You really add so much to these sessions. We have so few people here today, but we're actually just getting started.

I've been in a warm-up mode, building everything, and it started this week. I'm so excited to have you here helping build this community because, inside you, you have the wisdom of valuing gratitude and valuing the things that I'm sharing.

I always love to find people who value the spiritual path and spiritual wisdom. Then we can just be in it together. I see that in you, so thank you.

Of course, I'm grateful for Colin, who you may not know is my father, my dad, for being here. He's having a nice time over there, I'm sure. He's always here too.

All right, guys. Today, let's meditate on gratitude. We're going to exude gratitude. Just try to find it. This is about self-mastery. How do we find it inside ourselves?

You can think of a few things, but ultimately, in meditation, we shouldn't be thinking. You move into a state where you're just steeped in bliss.

We just feel, "I'm so grateful to be here. I'm so grateful to be meditating and sitting here. It's so beautiful." That's what meditation should feel like. Then your mind just stops because you can feel all your blessings are there. You don't have to think about them. You're merged with them. You are them.

This is where it gets into a little bit of an occult practice that you can explore. First, you focus on it. "Oh, I feel it." Then let it change you. That change is in the manifold of our topology, of our energy field. I'm using math terms.

Our whole field changes, and it's reverberating differently. You're like, "Why do I feel happy? Oh, yeah, my mom. Why do I feel happy? Oh, yeah, the math that I'm doing right now."

You can feel the gratitude is there with you. It has a kind of karmic momentum, very much a karmic momentum.

All right, let me pick a nice song for us. Kira would have liked this talk, I think.

Let's do a half-hour meditation. We're going to stop right on time today. We'll have two minutes to share, okay? Just a quick share when we stop. It's 6:43 right now.

A good thing to do when you're feeling gratitude is to connect it to the heart center, getting to feel the heart.

It's a full moon tonight, so be aware of its empowerment. The first full moon of March. It may actually be the first full moon. I'm not sure if there are two this month.

Gratitude. So much to be grateful for. Reach out and touch the magic of the evening or the morning.

This will be our final song before we have some silence.

Namaste.

How was your meditation, Mom?

Colleen Really nice, thank you. Grateful, thankful. Some interesting things again. A different green color, completely different from usual, and a lot of yellow in the beginning. Then some orange. Later on, I got my purpley pink and red.

I also saw a woman walking behind a hedge, and a stadium with everybody dressed in blue and red shirts.

Adam Wes Wow.

Colleen It doesn't make sense to me, but anyway, that's what I wanted to tell you. That's all.

Adam Wes Psychedelic visions. Very symbolic. Wonderful. Beautiful, seeing the light. In these meditations, it's essential that we experience light. Light means we're having a mystical experience.

It's wonderful that you do that, so always focus into the light. That is an indicator of the depth of the meditation. Wonderful. Namaste, Mom.

I want to say that you can be grateful for the past as well. If you have a really beautiful thing from your childhood, you can experience gratitude for the way that leaves an impression on you now.

"I am who I am now because of this wonderful thing from my childhood." I can feel gratitude for the journey as well. That is still in the now because it's remembered.

What's remembered is stored in the brain cells. It's stored in the field, or whatever the mechanism of memory is physically. Energetically, it's stored in the now. There's only the now, but the now has the residual of the past.

You can feel gratitude for people from your childhood.

Another thing I wanted to share is that you can also, and this is a very wise approach, be grateful for the things you would normally not be grateful for. Be grateful for them as challenges to grow because sometimes the challenge helps us become freer.

Somebody doesn't like me. I could be ungrateful, or I could learn to find that part of myself that can switch and be grateful that they've shown me a way to become free of the attachment, or free of whatever it is that makes me feel incomplete because of it.

Challenges can offer an opportunity. You can feel gratitude for the challenge and then rise to it. It changes the relationship with the challenge when we look at it that way.

Those are two things that came to me while we were meditating that I thought I should add.

Praveen, would you like to share? Then we'll stop in a minute or two.

Praveen S I was saying that it was brilliant. It changed my perspective on how to go about thinking about gratitude. You mentioned that it's not just shifting in the mind, but an energetic factor. It has to reverberate through your energy field, so that's amazing.

I'm also thinking about how to be thankful in moments of difficulty or moments of challenge. I think what you just said right now was helpful.

Adam Wes There's a principle in spirituality that, when things don't go our way, it helps us get deeper into ourselves. The acceptance of pain is actually the ending of the self.

There's an opportunity to go deeper into spirit. As a recognition of that principle, you can start to use it and say, "Okay, my car's not working, or this happened. What does that mean? Now I can learn to feel less attached. I can be freer, stronger, and more blissful unconditionally. I get to practice unconditional blissfulness now."

When things are going great, you don't always get to practice those things. You can trust the universe, God, or whatever you want to call it, and say, "This is what I'm ready to face right now. Thank you for this journey. It's unfolding, and I trust the intelligence behind this is beyond what I can comprehend personally."

What's beautiful about this is that it changes the way you interact with challenges. You see, "Okay, I'm going to use this to my advantage." The wise man or woman uses everything to their advantage.

It's wonderful that embedded in existence itself is the fact that we are fundamentally blissful. Freedom is bliss. Freedom is, "I am nothing. I have nothing. I am only that part of myself that's beyond all change. Okay, I'm bliss. What a blessing. Thank you, universe."

Because of that fundamental truth, we can use things to our advantage.

That's not to say you shouldn't advance your fortunes in the world. It's harder to feel grateful if you love a clean house and your house is not clean, so clean your house, and you'll feel more gratitude.

It's a multidimensional approach. You do all of it. "I want more gratitude in every way. I'm going to get the things that I actually want, and I'm going to use the things that I don't want to get what I want. I'm going to lower my bar to eternity, to go into the deep, unchanging gratitude that can hold steady throughout all transient existence."

If we love heart, expansion, and blissfulness, we'll learn to use all of those things. Make money. Advance your fortunes. Make beautiful relationships. Clean your house. Do all those things too, absolutely.

That's the wise thing to do. That's an act of love. We should all have more of what our soul wants in form and expression. We should also accept what our soul doesn't get in each moment and use that.

Praveen S Sure. You're suggesting that we go deeper. Difficulties allow us to go deeper into our spirits.

Adam Wes Amazing. Wonderful. Thank you for getting it, being here, and worshiping gratitude with me. It's wonderful.

Let's worship gratitude. Gratitude, thank you. I'm grateful for gratitude.

All right. Harrison, do you want to share? You already shared earlier, but maybe you want to share about the meditation quickly?

Harrison M No, that's okay. That was what I needed, and it was lovely to hear from everyone. I think I've said enough for today. Thank you, Adam. Thank you, everyone.

Adam Wes Did you like the talk? Were you able to connect with it?

Harrison M Yes, definitely. I resonated with it a lot because I'm definitely doing all of those things already.

Adam Wes Nice. I felt that. You were so centered in gratitude.

Let's bring in some words and share it together. Let's build gratitude momentum collectively and individually.

Thank you, Mom. Grateful for you. Thank you, Dad. Grateful for you.

Bye, everybody. I'll see you next week. Thank you so much.

Harrison M Thank you.

Adam Wes Namaste. Happy full moon. Bye.

Gratitude is a choice, a practice, and a state of non-resistance that allows blessings to be felt fully without attachment.

• Meditation includes how one lives between sittings, with humility, love, mindfulness, and intuitive practice.
• Gratitude brings awareness to blessings and creates a state of non-resistance, expansiveness, and heart.
• Gratitude is more than thinking. It is felt in the heart and embodied as an energetic state.
• Entitlement and expectation block gratitude and thankfulness.
• Gratitude allows one to be with blessings without becoming attached to them or fearful of losing them.
• Thankfulness recognizes and appreciates people, objects, and the life that supports each moment.
• Bhakti prioritizes love and heart, including gratitude, thankfulness, and honoring others.
• Gratitude can begin with present conditions and deepen into gratitude for existence itself.
• Memories and challenges can also become occasions for gratitude.
• Challenges can help loosen attachment and open a practice of unconditional blissfulness.

Spend time with gratitude as a felt practice. Notice the blessings already present, let gratitude connect with the heart center, and allow it to remain with you during meditation and throughout the day. When a challenge appears, explore whether it too can be met as an opportunity for gratitude and greater freedom.

• Counting blessings without taking familiar blessings for granted.
• Making a gratitude list or journaling about what is appreciated.
• Feeling gratitude in the heart rather than keeping it only as a thought.
• Offering simple thankfulness to people, objects, nature, and daily support.
• Meditating on gratitude until it becomes a felt state.
• Noticing entitlement, expectation, or resistance when they block gratitude.
• Allowing gratitude for blessings without cultivating attachment.
• Considering challenges as opportunities to become freer and less attached.

• What blessing can I feel in my heart right now?
• Where might expectation be making gratitude difficult?
• Can this challenge become an opportunity for greater freedom?