Week Twenty-Nine: Remembering the Small Things

Continuing on the theme of how to cope with threats of terrorism, it’s all too easy, when things are frightening or uncertain, to place a hyper-focus on what’s wrong, what’s scary, what’s not going right, or on frightening news reports of terrorist attacks to come. We offer ourselves an opportunity when we take a moment to pay attention to the quality of our thinking and the fantasies we allow ourselves to develop internally. When we take the time to do this, we offer ourselves some relief by shifting our focus when we discover that we are in a fear-based state of mind.

Each morning when I wake up, I take some time to notice that I am beginning a new day, and I allow myself to consciously experience my gratitude that I have another day of life to engage. This shift to gratitude can provide an important antidote to fear-based thinking. In previous experiments, we’ve focused on exploring the effects of focusing on what’s going right. In this week’s experiment, I invite you to focus on moments of gratitude that can arise throughout the day in minor and major ways.

A shift to gratitude immediately changes your perspective and emphasizes the important focus of looking for what’s already in place, what’s not uncertain. Focusing on gratitude and on what’s going right provides, in its own way, a source of comfort. The question may be how to do that in the throes of distress.
As with last week’s experiment, where you could practice settling into whatever comfort you found in your body, here you can invite yourself to settle into feelings of gratitude that arise in your awareness in any small way, even as you may be aware of your fears for the future. This week’s experiment is about choosing where to put your attention and to practice shifting from fear to gratitude. This doesn’t mean you need to ignore or disallow that which is frightening or uncertain. It just means that you can choose to put the primary focus on what generates gratitude, is soothing and settling, in any given moment. Shifting between what’s soothing and what’s uncertain allows you to support a greater sense of settledness and centeredness in the midst of so much potential distress.

As with all experiments, be sure to allow yourself to explore shifting from fear to gratitude with a sense of effortless curiosity, opening yourself to whatever emerges as you engage this practice.

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