A Practice to Appreciate Life

Hi, welcome back to your Daily Mindfulness. In today's session, I'm going to share a simple practice you can apply to your life to appreciate your life more. It's a practice called watching your own movie. And what it involves is imagining that you're observing a movie, but this movie is your life. It's whatever you're experiencing right now.

But you have to observe it with the perspective of needing to describe it to another person, which not only helps you take a more objective stance, but also really requires that you pay attention to details that you weren't aware of. And so you can do it right now. Whatever you're seeing, me anything else around you, whatever you're hearing, which can include my voice, but may be other sounds, maybe even sensations that you're experiencing. What if this were a movie and you were watching the movie. What would you be paying attention to? What would you notice? And if you had to describe this to another person, how would you be paying attention? Now, this is a simple practice that you can do right now as we're doing, but it's also something you can take into other moments of your life as you're going throughout the day.

I sometimes like to do this while I'm walking, where I imagine everything that I'm experiencing is all the movie of this moment. For some reason it helps me change my perspective to it. It not only gives me more spaciousness, as if I'm an observer to the experience, but I actually noticed more vividness to the experience. I notice things that I wouldn't be paying attention to otherwise. I hear different sounds, I see different sights, I feel different things in my body, especially when I take that orientation of, Oh, I'm going to try and describe this to another person.

It really asks me to drop in a little bit more deeply. So as with all of these things, some of these practices might work with, work for you that you might enjoy. Others, maybe not so much. But this one's worth trying out. Try it on a walk.

Try it once this is over after your meditation practice and see how it, it helps you maybe appreciate your life a little bit more deeply and intimately. Thank you for your practice. Let's settle in for today's meditation.