Meditation : Building Gratitude

5 years ago I had a mental breakdown. It was something that had been building since birth, but as we all know, you don’t know what you don’t know until you know. I didn’t know I needed to fall apart and be put back together again, but that’s exactly what I needed. Today I can say I am grateful, but being in the middle of it didn’t render me very grateful.

Gratitude is like a muscle, and mine atrophied during my mental health crisis. I felt completely overwhelmed by my failures, my struggles, my fears and the darkness I perceived to be enveloping my world. Seeing only the black and white nature of my life brought me to my knees.

I’ve found when you’re in places like I was you go back to the few things that brought you some peace. One of those things for me was yoga. I took my first yoga class in college for ‘an easy credit.’ First off, it wasn’t easy. Second, it was amazing. I didn’t blow it off once.

During the class we spent 5 minutes in silent meditation. 5 minutes of focusing on each breath in, each breath out and something you’re grateful for. Just one thing was all it took for the 5 minutes to be a mental focus exercise that required you to identify some goodness. It was good. Very good. Good for an absent minded college kid who came to a class intending to not take it seriously and years later I came back to the exercise in a moment when I needed it most.

Meditation became a daily part of life during my crisis. Every morning I’d wake up early, go upstairs to our guest bedroom and sit on a $10 yoga mat. At first it was a lot of crying, and a lot of frustration. Then those college class mental exercises came back to me and I chose to sit down to think of one thing to be grateful for. Some days it was just being a live. ‘I am grateful I am not dead.’ Then it expanded. Through that expansion I was also able to expand my outlook. That’s the power of meditation. It expands us and deepens what we are grateful for. We can appreciate, see, breathe and feel with gratitude.

“The roots of all goodness lie in the soil of appreciation for goodness.”
—Dalai Lama