The One About Giving Thanks and Meditation – Episode 024

Why should we take time out of our day or set aside a special day each year for gratitude. Chris and Debbie discuss the power of gratitude and it’s role and benefit in their lives, including grounding them in the present moment. What are they thankful for and how do they practice gratitude? Listen in to see if you’re on the same page!

They go on to acknowledge the difficulty of this holiday season for many, as a time that’s already heavy for so many, bears the extra burden of loneliness and isolation this year.

They wrap things up with a new segment, The Mail Bag, where they answer questions from the Go Bucket Yourself community. In this episode, they answer a question from Danielle about meditation. She said,

“…would love to see…what meditation has done for you! I need the motivation.”

We leave you with this poem by Mary Oliver:

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting–over and over announcing your place in the family of all things.

And with this passage (related to our answers about the meditation question)  from Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now,

“Be present as the watcher of your mind–of your thoughts and emotions as well as your reactions in various situations. Be at least as interested in your reactions as in the situation or person that causes you to react. Notice also how often your attention is in the past or future. Don’t judge or analyze what you observe. Watch the thought, feel the emotion, observe the reaction. Don’t make a personal problem out of them. You will then feel something more powerful than any of those things that you observe: the still, observing presence itself behind the content of your mind, the silent watcher.”