Filling Your Cup Meditation

Airtime is a community that includes podcasts and other features. There are paid membership tiers that give access to discussion forums, book and movie reviews, and chats. Today's meditation focuses on gratitude. Close your eyes, relax, and visualize a lush garden. Walk along a path and find a stone fountain. Drink from the fountain and feel grateful. Imagine the water nourishing everything in the garden. Fill your cup of gratitude and pour it into all areas of your life. You can always return to this garden for gratitude. Next week, the focus will be on compassion. Engage in community chats and discussions on the Airtime page. There is also a discussion forum called Deconstructing Faith. Keep building the Airtime community. Hey there, friends. Welcome to Airtime. As you know, podcasts are just part of the Airtime community. To help fight food insecurity on Madison's east side and continue building this community, there are paid membership tiers that give access to discussion forums, book and movie reviews, chats, and more. So however you choose to engage in this community, we work to listen more deeply to the divine always around us, divine within us, divine within others, and seeing the divine throughout creation. Today's meditation is all about filling our cup of gratitude. We're going to practice a visualization that will help us find peace and gratitude in our daily living. Close your eyes and begin to relax. As you allow your breath to flow freely now, do your best to clear your mind. The idea isn't to rid your mind of all thoughts, but to encourage a smooth flow of breathing in, setting an intention of being at peace in your mind. And breathing out, let go of overthinking, letting go of stress, letting go of anxiety, releasing anything that distracts you from this experience. Now with one more nice, deep inhale and slow exhale, bring all of your attention within. Notice your breath. Notice how your body feels. Begin going deeper and deeper inside. Allow your breath to help you. The outside world is disappearing, and a new scene slowly appearing around you. Different shapes and colors come into view, slowly brightening and sharpening as you look around. You find yourself in a lush garden, surrounded by bright green bushes. There are beautiful statues, vibrant plants and flowers. Take a few moments to look around, taking in your new surroundings. You are the co-creator here, so dig deeply into your imagination. Paint the scene, letting your creative juices flow. Feel the soft grass beneath your feet. Hear the birds flutter and sing in the trees. Breathe in the fresh, crisp air. Make it real. Walking slowly forward now. You notice there is a path before you. Its stones are smooth, and it glistens in the sunlight. Step on this path and continue to walk forward. Be curious about where it leads. With each step, you notice that you are becoming more and more relaxed. Peacefully following this gently winding path. Soon you hear trickling water and find yourself before a great stone fountain. Take a few moments to visualize this fountain. Notice the subtle details, the curves, the color of the streaming, splashing water. You know that the water in this fountain is here to refresh you, and you eagerly cup your hands and dip them into the flow. Bringing your hands to your lips, you sip the water. Drinking every last drop, you feel overwhelmingly grateful for this water. A deep appreciation that you have never experienced prior to this. You are so thankful for this healing and rejuvenation. Thankful for the opportunity to give your body what it needs. Once more, cup your hands and gather more water. Drinking more slowly now as you continue to express gratitude for this experience. This fountain inspires you to appreciate the gifts in your life. This fountain never goes dry so long as you keep gratitude alive in your heart. Feel the water flowing through your body, inspiring even more gratitude to arise within you. Imagine the water that flows from this fountain touching everything in the garden, nourishing it, seeping down into the soil, traveling up the roots of every plant, every flower, providing water for the birds and small animals that call this garden home. Notice the way the water invigorates these living things, the way it invigorates your body. The grass beneath your feet is supple, the trees above you are strong, and the leaves are glistening in the sun. Filling your hands, you fill your own cup of gratitude, expressing thanks along with all of the living things around you. There is enough for everyone, and you always are welcome to come here to this special sanctuary to fill your cup. Anytime you have forgotten to appreciate the very essence of life, you are called here to bask in the divine experience of receiving and expressing gratitude. Bring to mind all the areas of your life that can use a sprinkle of gratitude. Hold them in your mind's eye as you breathe easily and hold the water in your cupped palms once more, gratefully pouring this sacred water in all the areas of life. Any stagnancies in your home or at work, your relationships, allow the water to heal and rejuvenate these areas too. Envision your life perking up, blossoming with renewed energy. Appreciation flows effortlessly from you as effortlessly as the gentle water flowing from the fountain. Breathing easily, simply enjoy your time in this garden for the next few moments, peaceful and relaxed. Now it's time to bid the garden goodbye. Once more expressing thanks for this experience, and then slowly following the pebble path back to the beginning. Allow the garden to fade from view with your next exhale, and your current surroundings to materialize as you inhale deeply, opening your eyes. Always remember that you can return to this garden whenever you feel that you need to fill your cup with gratitude. Friends, thanks for the continued work on Gratitude in Daily Living. Next week, our focus changes a bit to Compassion, and we'll be doing that for a number of weeks. As a reminder, if you would like to take a deeper dive into the Airtime page, you can engage in community chats, posts, discussions, comment on a movie or a book review. You can always add your own. I'm also working on this new discussion forum still of Deconstructing Faith, a time where I go back into my youth and young adulthood and check out the proverbial Kool-Aid that I was more than happy to consume, and then work through what has pushed many of us to be spiritual but not religious. So reach out with a post or a chat. Let's keep building this Airtime community. Hey, much love to you all.