Today’s mini meditation practice is a practice in recognizing the gifts that your time and attention bestow on you. Every breath, every thought, every feeling is a gift from your soul to your ego-self.

Every breath, every thought, every feeling is a gift from your soul to your ego-self.

Will you waste these gifts obsessing about your next to-do, or will you witness that obsessive thought with a smile and a “thank you” as you honor the gift of wisdom that just landed in your lap?

Today’s episode of The Mindful Minute is a practice in recognizing the gifts. ALL the gifts.

With every distraction, every discomfort, every joy, every mundane thought, we will remind ourselves, “this is a gift.” Curious what comes from a practice like this? Try it for yourself and find out!

I’m currently reading Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. In it, the author writes of providing an antidote to what she calls “plant blindness” - the learned ignoring of the plant life around us. This blindness “impedes the recognition of the green world as a garden of gifts.”

Kimmerer offers an antidote via a cycle of experience-

• Attention

• Gift

• Gratitude

• Reciprocity

I recognize this cycle as also being the cycle of waking up. This is the cycle of an ever-deepening meditation practice. And it begins with paying attention. Let’s try it together in today’s mini meditation.

My February meditation series lays out a map that moves us through this deepening cycle from a mindful mind to an awakened heart with plenty of practice time so you can feel for yourself what love has to do with it 💛⁠

Meditating at sunset is an invitation to honor the ritual of cycles in our lives and the wholeness that comes when we don’t miss any of the steps in the cycle.

Join me for today’s mini meditation as we learn how to meditate at sunset and cultivate the quality of compassion as part of this practice.

Sunset is the opportunity to invite in the element of compassion within our meditation practice. We can feel the sunset wrap her arms around us like a wise, ancestral grandmother and say something warm and lovely - Good job today. What a beautiful heart you have. I love you.

We need those words spoken to us and it is quite possible no one else will say them as often as we need. So, we learn how to say them to ourselves - literally and metaphorically.

Join me for today’s episode of The Mindful Minute as we learn how to meditate at sunset and cultivate the quality of compassion as part of this practice.

Today’s mini meditation includes 3 special steps that we can use to infuse our meditation practice with a bit more sacredness. It’s an upleveling, if you will, for times when we really need our meditation practice to support big emotions and important moments in our lives. This practices is inspired by this reminder from Martin Luther King Jr. -

“Along the way of life, someone must have sense enough and morality enough to cut off the chain of hate. This can only be done by projecting the ethic of love to the center of our lives.”

Today’s class will be a discussion of what to ‘do’ with hate/anger/grief/fear - all the heavy emotions - within our meditation practices and how to project the ethic of love to the center of our lives. Please join me <3