{"id":198,"date":"2009-10-09T19:53:30","date_gmt":"2009-10-10T03:53:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zenjones.bravoecho.net\/?p=198"},"modified":"2009-10-09T19:53:30","modified_gmt":"2009-10-10T03:53:30","slug":"in-gratitude","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zenjones.bravoecho.net\/?p=198","title":{"rendered":"In gratitude"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft size-thumbnail wp-image-201\" title=\"gratitude\" src=\"\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/10\/gratitude-150x150.jpg\" alt=\"gratitude\" width=\"150\" height=\"150\" \/>One of my practice period intensifiers was a short meditation period in the evening. I think I&#8217;ve committed to this for five years running and never made it through the first week.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve changed it to the Daily Review, which Ezra talks about in his book <em>Being Zen<\/em>. At the end of the day, I\u00c2\u00a0get in bed, and I go over my day in my mind. It&#8217;s a little tricky to stay on track&#8211;my mind wants to examine things in more depth, judge, blame, all the usual stuff. But I catch myself and soldier on to the end of the day. Then I think of the things I was grateful for, and the things I feel remorse for.<\/p>\n<p>And just like the book says, the more I do this, the more I notice things I&#8217;m grateful for during the day. And I also notice things I feel remorse for right away.<\/p>\n<p>Last night I noticed that I&#8217;m grateful\u00c2\u00a0for the situation I was born into&#8211;this period in time, this social class, this place. I&#8217;m grateful for my healthy genes, and for my husband&#8217;s sense of humor, for Annie&#8217;s haikus and Susan&#8217;s story about the birds on the lake. I&#8217;m grateful for this practice and all the people who sit with me in the group, and talk about their experience, so I can be aware of my reactions.<\/p>\n<p>I feel remorse that I didn&#8217;t talk to my neighbors as they moved out, and now I&#8217;ll never have a chance.<\/p>\n<p>Today, my menu item was &#8220;Be aware of attachment to outcome.&#8221; Every time the message popped up on my computer or lit up my phone, I was attached to an outcome. But the reminder made me aware, and once I was aware, it was pretty easy to give up the attachment. Much easier than giving up judging or blaming.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>One of my practice period intensifiers was a short meditation period in the evening. I think I&#8217;ve committed to this for five years running and never made it through the first week. I&#8217;ve changed it to the Daily Review, which Ezra talks about in his book Being Zen. At the end of the day, I\u00c2\u00a0get [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,11,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-198","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-practice-period","category-tools","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenjones.bravoecho.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenjones.bravoecho.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenjones.bravoecho.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenjones.bravoecho.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenjones.bravoecho.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=198"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/zenjones.bravoecho.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenjones.bravoecho.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=198"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenjones.bravoecho.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=198"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenjones.bravoecho.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=198"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}