Tag: mindfulness

17 Powerful Questions for Connecting to Gratitude

Posted on by Allan Johnson in gratitude, habits

What are you grateful for?  Listing and affirming gratitude is one of the best ways that we can begin to bring positive change for ourselves and those around us.  As we begin to become more aware of the many blessings already present in our lives—from the small things, to the overlooked things, to the big and important things—we are better able to see and connect to the abundance that is around us.

A fantastic way to begin is with a formal gratitude listing practice.  There are a lot of really great gratitude journals available on the market, but you don’t need to buy a new journal to start recording the things you are grateful for. Any notebook will do, and all it takes is a few minutes at the beginning or the end of your day to make a list of the things that you are most grateful for right now.  Your gratitude journal can include anything, big or small.  There will be some days when things are not going especially well and you struggle to find anything to be grateful for.  These are the days when the most important invitation to you is to return to the simplest gifts that are with you all the time: fresh air, beautiful sunlight, clean water.  On other days your list of gratitude might be more plentiful.

I’ve been keeping a daily gratitude journal for over five years and have seen immense benefit from it.  A study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology called ‘Counting Blessings versus Burdens: An Experimental Investigation of Gratitude and Subjective Well-being in Daily Life’ showed that ‘a conscious focus on blessings may have emotional and interpersonal benefits’.  Starting your day with a list of gratitude sets the tone for the day, and once you’ve turned gratitude into a daily practice you’ll begin to experience greater awareness, acceptance, and compassion.  These powerful questions can be a great starting point for connecting to gratitude and starting a daily gratitude practice:

  1. When did you find inner strength to overcome a great challenge?
  2. What has made you smile recently?
  3. Who helped you to achieve a recent accomplishment?
  4. What inspires you?
  5. Who has shown you kindness this week?
  6. Where are you best able to express yourself?
  7. When did you feel cherished?
  8. Where do you feel most at home?
  9. What part of the natural world inspires you most?
  10. What wishes have come true?
  11. Who brings joy into your life?
  12. What negative experience ultimately led to something positive?
  13. What can you see outside your window?
  14. Who really listens to you and hears you?
  15. Who or what has recently entered your life that you are grateful for?
  16. What room in your home most inspires you?
  17. Who has helped you to make a difficult decision recently?

Download your free 21-day course in The Path of Mindfulness. In this life-changing 21-day mindfulness journey, Dr Allan Kilner-Johnson guides you through a series of self-guided mindfulness exercises and shows you how and when to bring mindfulness into your daily life. 

The Mindfulness Principles

Posted on by Allan Johnson in meditation, mindfulness

Mindfulness doesn’t merely teach us to centre our minds in the present, but to powerful reorient ourselves to the full timeline of our lived experiences.   In doing so, we learn to recognise our experiences of the world around us in powerfully transformative ways.  While some may start with the concern that mindfulness is a selfish turn inward that removes them from the facts and realities of the world, that inward turn is only for a moment—the ultimate aim of mindfulness practices is, in fact, a return to the world that we are unconsciously watching pass by. 

Jon Kabat-Zinn described a number of mindfulness attitudes, which I like to summarise like this:

  • Non-judgement refers to the practicing of observing the moment without attributing positive or negative traits to it—instead, a non-judgemental approach seeks to simply recognise and reside with the thought, emotion, or moment.
  • Patience is the ability to allow events to come and to leave in their own time rather than trying to force one’s own expectations of how something should or shouldn’t be.
  • Developing a beginner’s mind enables us to see things fresh so that we are able to fully recognise their full implications without forcing our own preconceptions or expectations onto the experience.
  • By developing trust we learn to recognise that there is a great deal of wisdom in ourselves and as we connect fully to the present we are able to see things as they truly are.
  • Non-striving reminds us that even though our society pushes us towards goals and objectives, that we should allow events, emotions, and ideas to simply unfold without attempting to force a specific aim.
  • Acceptance is the willingness to see events, emotions, and ideas as they are and not trying to change things unnecessarily.
  • By letting go we can allow our mind to release unnecessary patterns or ideas that do not serve a greater purpose.

Download your free 21-day course in The Path of Mindfulness. In this life-changing 21-day mindfulness journey, Dr Allan Kilner-Johnson guides you through a series of self-guided mindfulness exercises and shows you how and when to bring mindfulness into your daily life.