This is Day 13 of the 14-Day Gratitude Challenge held in Aug 2013, where we practice gratitude for 14 days. The challenge is now over but you can do the tasks in your own time. Visit the overview page for all the challenge tasks.
Hi everyone, welcome to Day 13 of our 14-day gratitude challenge! :D Believe it or not, we have only one day left till the end of our challenge. Let’s make the best out of our remaining two days, shall we? :)
Day 13: Meditation
Do you meditate?
Meditation is a practice I talk about often on PE. I’ve written about meditation in detail before which I encourage you to read here:
While meditation is typically seen as a 10, 15, or even 30-minute session you do daily, these are merely sessions to help you kick start your meditation practice, get into the groove, understand what it entails, and then integrate the practice of mindfulness into your daily life. You can’t possibly drop everything in your life for 24 hours, 7 days a week just to meditate, in the name of seeking peace and oneness–that’s a cop-out way to live life. In actuality, meditation, the state of awareness of your place in the universe and just being in the moment, is something which you should practice every waking moment of the day.
There are many kinds of meditation practices. There’s the character infusion meditation in Days 7–11: Embody Your X Ideal Trait in our premium character-transformation program, Be a Better Me in 30 Days. There’s the ideal-self-discovery meditation in Day 5: Discover Your Ideal Self of Be a Better Me in 30 Days as well. There’s also the meditation exercise in Day 23: Get Advice From Your Future Self in Live a Better Life in 30 Days (the premium life-transformation program on PE), where your future self travels back from the future to give you advice.
Today, as part of the gratitude challenge, I would like you to do a gratitude meditation, where you will be expressing gratitude for things which are about to come true in your life!
Your Task: Do a Gratitude Meditation (15 minutes)
- Get into your favorite meditation position! If you are new to meditation, I encourage you to read How to Meditate In 5 Easy Steps to get yourself started.
- Close your eyes. Clear your mind. I want you to think about 2 goals you would like to accomplish in the upcoming period. These goals can be related to any area of your life wheel–business, career, health, social life, family, romance, recreation, contribution, personal growth, spiritual, and self-image.
So you can have the goals to meet your life partner and to start pursuing your passion. You can also have the goals to lose 10kg in the next 2 months and have a better relationship with your mother. These goals are up to you.
- Visualize your first goal coming to life. Visualize this so clearly like you are achieving this goal right this second. Feel the exhilaration in your soul. See, smell, hear, taste, and touch this moment.
So if your goal is to lose 10kg, visualize yourself standing on the scale now and seeing yourself 10kg lighter. Feel how free your body feels now that it is lighter by 10kg. Visualize yourself looking into the mirror and seeing a thinner face and a shapelier, thinner body. How do you feel? Ecstatic? Amazed? What are you thinking? Wow I’m finally thin again! I look so awesome! I can’t believe I’m back at my ideal weight from 10 years ago! Visualize this moment. Feel these emotions 100%. Embrace these thoughts, one at a time.
Do this visualization for at least five minutes.
- As you do this visualization, express gratitude for realizing this goal. If your goal is to lose 10kg, you can say “Thank you for my ideal weight.” or “Thank you for my beautiful, sexy, thin, healthy, and amazing body.” (Feel free to add on more words of gratitude if you like.)
Repeat your gratitude expression two times, for a total of three times. Feel the gratitude in your heart and your soul as each word part your lips. Bask yourself in the feeling of gratitude. Hold yourself in this state of gratitude for at least two minutes.
- Repeat Steps 3 and 4 for your second goal.
- When you are done with your visualizations and expressions of gratitude, spend your final minute easing back into the physical world.
Note that I say “physical” world, not “real” world, because what you have visualized has in fact happened in another reality. Now it’s a matter of time before your visualizations manifest themselves in the physical world as well. :) Your gratitude for these results, along with your goal planning and action taking, will be instrumental to your eventual success.
Daily Journaling: Write 3 Things You Are Grateful for Today
On top of today’s task, identify 3 things you are grateful for today. These 3 things can be events that occurred today, mishaps which could have happened but didn’t happen, or simply things which have always been in your life but which you suddenly came to feel grateful for today.
3 things I’m grateful for today:
- For dreams (literally). For some reason I’ve been having the most vivid dreams for the past 3 months (at least!). I can only attribute this to a clearer mind, a cleaner diet (which contributes to a clearer mind), and a more clutter-free life. Years ago I used to keep a dream log because dreams contain important messages from our subconsciousness, and by remembering and reviewing our dreams, we can decipher messages they are trying to send to us and put them to go use.
So now that I’ve been remembering my dreams, I’ve been using the chance to understand messages my subconsciousness may be trying to send me through my dreams, and subsequently reflecting them on my life. Believe it or not, I’ve been getting many new insights this way!
- For my fiance for doing my laundry for me even though I didn’t expect him to. I mentioned on Day 11 that we need to do our laundry right now–that’s because our washing machine is currently broken. While we get it fixed up, we are doing our own laundry–and when I mean “we”, I really mean “Ken” because he has been voluntarily stepping up and doing all our laundry, from washing, rinsing, hanging them to dry, and collecting the clothes.
Our laundry — Clothes which Ken washed, rinsed, and hung up to dry early in the morning
Our laundry–Socks! Mine are the second and the fourth from the left!
- For those of you reading PE, thank you for your kind support, always! I appreciate you for being here and supporting me in my life’s journey. ♥
Plus one!
- For awesome parents-in-law-to-be (Ken’s parents) for so generous, sweet, and caring. They are probably the best parents-in-law one can ever have, made especially stark after I hear about horror stories people have with their parents-in-law.
Share Your Results!
How was your gratitude meditation? What two goals did you visualize? How did you feel during your meditation?
What are 3 things you are grateful for today?
Share them in the comments section! :)
Once you’re done, proceed to Gratitude Challenge Day 14: Give Thanks for Your Mistakes.
(Images: Gratitude, Meditation
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