An Attitude of Gratitude (How to Teach Mindfulness for Children)

We all know about the power of gratitude, right? This is nothing new that I'm sharing with you today. What we don't realize is that sometimes during the hardest times, that's when we most need our gratitude practice. It's easy to feel grateful when business is booming and sun is shining and we're out and about, but when we're going through an extensive period of challenge, of lockdown, of quarantine, of fear, anxiety, perhaps sickness, perhaps job loss, et cetera, we all know what's going on, then it's much harder to access those feelings of gratitude but much more potent and important. So your challenge today is to grab your journal, grab a sheet of paper, and exercise a full-blown gratitude list at dinnertime with your kids there, okay? I want you to simply say, hey guys, I wanna make a list of all the things we're most grateful for about this corona experience. And here's what I mean. We could easily say, but Avital, everything is terrible. People are dying. The economy is crashing. You know, it's scary out there. I'm climbing the walls with my kids. It's so easy to sink into cabin fever and fear, anxiety, depression, et cetera. You know the drill. But I wanna tell you my own personal story around this, which is that I have lived through extensive terror attacks in my own hometown. I come from Jerusalem, Israel, and from London. A story for another time, but I used to live there in my teenage years during extensive terror attacks. There were suicide bombers and knife stabbings on the streets where I lived, in the cafes where I hang out with my friends. And it was such a terrible time, and I developed severe PTSD. But one of the things that I learned through overcoming PTSD and through going through this period of funerals and devastating loss was that to build resiliency and inner strength and adaptability, we actually have to find the meaning in the experience. We have to find the lessons in the experience. We have to find what we have possibly gained, how we have learned, how we have grown, and what we're going to take with us moving forward. So you might not be experiencing corona, and I hope you're not, at such a traumatic time as what I'm describing, but you're still experiencing it as a challenge, and you get to choose whether you fixate on how challenging that is, or you actually fixate on all of the ways this is serving you, on all of the ways this is opening your eyes to the family you most wanna be, on all of the ways you might be bouncing forward rather than back when this experience changes and morphs into the next iteration, right? And so you might be grateful for the sunshine, for the food on your plates, for the shelter over your head when we gain a little bit of perspective around everything we have rather than everything we're losing, right? Everything that we have to be grateful for that other people wish they had, right? Or every way that this experience is actually serving us, is actually we're discovering our strengths. We're discovering our adjustments, and our flexibility, and our flexible thinking, and our powerful, strong mindset, and we're discovering all the ways humanity does stand up to help each other, et cetera, then we can feel much stronger and much better about everything. And so you might be asking yourself, how is this gonna help me create more play and create more haven in my home? And the way is this. When we adjust our mindset, when we focus on positivity, on optimism, on resourcefulness, we can show up to our day. When we can show up to our day, we can be creators. We can be the curators of our home, right? We can be the CEOs of our family. CEOs who are overwhelmed, and anxious, and depressed cannot show up and lead their teams. You need to lead your team, and to do that, you need to be focusing optimistically, and that is your challenge today. Bring out the optimism. Show us how corona times are actually serving you, are actually bringing out the best in your family, are teaching you so much, and are perhaps going to give you gifts that will serve you even moving forward, right? Maybe there's so much that you're taking from this time that you're even going to take into the next iteration of our life. Share out your gratitude list. We wanna see the things you're grateful for. Hashtag playpandemic, and share it, and tag any friend you think could use a pick-me-up during these challenging times.