Reverse Engineering Your Gratitude

As we enter this season of heightened gratitude, try on new lenses to actively appreciate all the blessings in your life. Most of us routinely overlook all the effort and collaboration that goes into the wonderful blessings we enjoy. So we invite you to try a practice that is new to most by reverse-engineering your gratitude. 

What does reverse - engineering gratitude look like? Let's use an example to illustrate this principle: say you have gone to lunch with a friend, and you are enjoying a delectable salmon salad and scrumptious roll. What had to happen for that meal and experience to take place? First of all, a whole crew most likely had to sail in treacherous waters, leaving behind family for several days at a time to participate in commercial fishing. Then someone had to process and pack the fish,  someone had to transport it, someone arrange for purchase, and finally someone had to prepare it, and serve it. Wow! And we can be grateful for the effort that goes into each step. In most scenarios, we can easily identify 10-20 or more individual components that we can reverse engineer. 

When it comes to yoga poses, we can notice the intricacies and synchronicity of the myriad of actions within each pose, and the overall comprehensive cultivation of strength, stretch, balance and dedication required to perform it.  In tree pose, Vrksasana, we must use our eyes for a focal point, to help the brain in how our nervous system is designed to help us balance, we need the foundation of our body, our legs and pelvis for stabilization, we need the mobility of our spine for the constant readjusting to anything that affects where we are are in space, and the way our nerves work for quick reaction time to help maintain us upright against gravity.  We can take this a step further and think about the oxygen we breathe to help all the cells involved in this kinetic chain and the heart that beats to send it around the body, and so on. We can consider a hand mudra like anjali (prayer position), for the energy it taps into and invokes.  

If you have children, this is a fun "game" to introduce that helps create heightened awareness and gratitude. 

While you are walking yourself through this exercise, diffuse frankincense and peppermint to help heighten your cognitive processes and focus. 

We'd love to hear about some of the results of your reverse - engineering processes, so we are going to do a few giveaways… We appreciate you all, and we love hearing your responses, as your voices join ours in this movement to share yoga and aromatherapy!   In every month, we enter the name of each person who is commenting and sharing and tagging friends from our social media posts, into our monthly giveaway.  During this gratitude series, we look forward to giving away a roller bottle duo:  1. Peppermint to help you “come present” and enjoy the many blessings of the season, and 2.  a blend we called “Joy," a combination of Wild Orange, Bergamot, White Fir and Geranium.  We are eager to hear from you! Namaste EYP friends!