To expand it you can go back to the humility practice, which also
involves gratitude and appreciation for all those who have made it
possible for you to be you. The gratitude practice below is meant to be
one you can do daily, to help you appreciate large and small blessings.
This practice can also be done at the end of the day, when reflecting on
whether you fulfilled the intention you set in the morning. You can also
do this practice together with a spouse or friend.
1 . Close your eyes and recall three things from your day for
which you are grateful. They can be anything from the
kindness and generosity of a friend to the bounty of a meal to
the warmth of the sun to the beauty of a night sky. Try to be as
specific as you can be in recalling what you are grateful for.
2 . Write these three things down in a journal. While you can do
this exercise in your head, keeping a list of what you are
grateful for has been shown to have many physical and
emotional benefits over time. Each time you journal, try to
write down three different things. Variation is the key to
effective gratitude journaling.Compassion Meditation
There is probably no word that the Dalai Lama and the Archbishop use
more when describing the qualities worth cultivating than compassion. In
short, the Dalai Lama feels that educating our children to have more
compassion is the single most important thing we can do to transform our
world, but we do not need to wait for the next generation to grow up
before we can start to experience the benefits of compassion. Indeed,
cultivating compassion for even ten minutes a day, the Dalai Lama said,
can lead to twenty-four hours of joy. Expanding our circle of concern is
essential for both our well-being as well as that of our world. The
following practice is adapted from the Compassion Cultivation Training
program. A more extensive series of compassion practices can be found