While meditating, we close our eyes, part of that is the act of temporarily giving up sight, we give up the pleasure of consuming our cell phones, TVs, computer screens. And sometimes as a product of meditation when we open our eyes at the end, we can have a renewed sense of gratitude for our ability to see.

We live in a society that tells us we do not have everything we need, that we need to consume, to buy, to get more money, and to work more in order to do that. It really is a delusion, because actually, we have everything we need. You are okay exactly the way you are. If you have people that you love in your life, friends, family, now is a great time to tap into your gratitude for that, and if you do not have those things, you are able to get them, you deserve them and you have everything you need as a human being to find them.

It is important to reflect on the fact that our minds are set up to cause us unnecessary anxieties and worries and this comes from evolution, this was useful most likely when we were cavemen and women, and we had to avoid the predators to survive. We do not face those kinds of dangers today, yet we still have those reptilian features of our brain that make us go with fight or flight reaction, give us a negativity bias and cause us stress, make us competitive perhaps. When we can step back and realize when those things are at play, it can become a lot easier to access a sense of gratitude for all the things that we have in our lives as human beings.

I am speaking from experience; when we are younger and more ambitious, we want everything, lots of money, the best car, the best wife/husband, the best house, the best job, but with age and experience comes other priorities and the meaning of happiness and wealth changes from physical to spiritual and emotional. When that happens, we feel the privilege of being able to look at people, life and the world from a completely different point of view.

And that is exactly when we become a more mature and accomplished human being, with more to give to our loved ones and to the society. We become people who have more to offer others, who have more to enrich their lives and ours at the same time. Wouldn’t you agree?