Welcome Zen friend. I hope, wherever you are, you are doing well, and if you celebrate Thanksgiving in the United States, then I hope you had a very happy Thanksgiving. Keeping with the theme of gratitude, today's guided meditation, or drop of Zen, will be focused on connecting with gratitude, so I invite you to find a place where you can sit or comfortably lie down, and we'll begin by closing our eyes or a nice soft, gentle gaze downward Before we connect with the things we are grateful for. I want you just to allow any annoyances, anything that's kind of driving you crazy, or maybe anything that didn't go well for you during the holiday, just anything at all that feels negative. Just allow it to come up for you. Just allow yourself to be with your annoyance or your sadness or hurt or embarrassment or any less than pleasant feelings that might be there. Just remember that everybody feels this way at times. Emotions come in and emotions go out. They don't stay forever. It can be really helpful just to allow ourselves to feel our feelings whatever they are. They have less of a chance of getting our attention with physical sensations that are often unpleasant, like headaches and stomach aches, so just allow yourself to be with anything that doesn't feel amazing as far as emotions and just know that you can be there with yourself and you can feel feelings, even those that feel uncomfortable. We'll stay with them for just another moment, just allowing them to be sitting with them, being with them.
Speaker 1And now I invite you to start connecting with something that you appreciate. It could be a pet, it could be having comfortable socks. It doesn't need to be something really big, anything at all that you can feel true appreciation for and notice where you feel it. Do you feel it in your heart center? Do you feel it somewhere else? Really invite that sensation and experience of appreciation into your body and then see if there's anything else that you can appreciate as things come to mind. Allow yourself to feel that deep feeling of appreciation, and if you're not connecting with that feeling, that's okay. Just an invitation to feel it, whether or not it happens, we just are opening a door for that possibility.
Speaker 1And now see if you want to stay with appreciation or are you able to move into gratitude. Is there something that you feel gratefulness for? Notice what it is invited into your body, just as you did the feeling of appreciation. And again, it doesn't have to be something really big, it could be something simple Notice if there's something else that you can connect with, feeling appreciation or gratitude for, and again invite that in.
Speaker 1I typically feel appreciation or gratitude in my heart center, but it might be different for you, so just allow it to be however it is. And two more times I'll ask you to connect with something that you are appreciative for or feel gratitude for, and then one last time, what comes to mind that you feel appreciation or gratitude for. I'm just connecting with the feelings that are coming up for you and staying with them for as long as you'd like. When you're ready, we'll take one nice deep breath in and a long, slow exhale and softly and slowly opening your eyes. I'm so glad you joined me here today and until next time, friend, I hope you'll continue to take some time today and every day to do something kind for yourself.