Week One: Gratitude for Self and Body

This week focuses on cultivating awareness of yourself as you are, through the body, breath, reflections, and direct experience.

Here’s how to engage with the theme this week:

• Daily Journaling. Set aside 3–5 minutes each day for your gratitude journal (we've supplied some prompts for inspiration).

• Reflections on the Gratitude for Self. What if gratitude didn’t have to begin as a thought, but could arise from direct experience, from awareness itself? This week, we’ll explore prereflective awareness that happens before the mind labels and reflects. It reconnects us to what’s immediate, intimate, and true. Through yoga and meditation, we can train this capacity... read more!

• Guided Meditation and Breathing. A 10-minute practice to help deepen awareness and presence.

• An Intentional Act of Gratitude. Plan one act this week that expresses care and appreciation for yourself, that is outside of your regular routine (sorry... your regular yoga practice doesn't count). You deserve this!

• Yoga Nidra and the Nervous System with Alissa. A deeply restorative practice to calm the nervous system and nurture self-connection.

• Embodying Grace with Silvana. Gentle, yoga-based movement and meditation designed to evoke a felt sense of gratitude and ease. You’ll be invited to move with intuition and curiosity, letting the body lead rather than the mind.

• Miss the Kick-Off Class? Watch the recording, including an introduction to the challenge, Day 0 Journalling prompts, a chakra-balancing mantra, gentle postures, breath awareness and a body-scan meditation.

Daily Journaling Prompts

Here are some prompts for inspiration. You can follow them, adapt them, or use your own. The theme this week is gratitude for self and body, but if your reflections take you elsewhere, let them. Gratitude grows wherever attention is placed.

• Have you done something recently that surprised you? Reflect on how it felt to learn something new about yourself: a strength, a challenge, or a response you didn’t expect.
   
• What part of yourself or your body are you learning to appreciate differently? This could be something functional, emotional, or subtle. Perhaps a way your body communicates, recovers, or holds you up.
   
• When you catch yourself being critical or dismissive of yourself or your body, what truth or perspective could you bring instead that feels more appreciative or compassionate?
   

Guided Meditation and Breathing

Gratitude for Self: It Ain’t Easy (But So Worthwhile!)

The theme of our first week, “Gratitude for Self and Body,” may be the hardest way to begin this three-week process. We can be our strongest critics, leaving little room for compassion, acceptance, and appreciation. To navigate this challenge, we’ll explore gratitude in several ways.

Gratitude can be practiced through expression (such as an act of gratitude), reflection (like journaling), or non-conceptually. This third approach is the focus here, as yoga and meditation are uniquely suited to cultivating this form of gratitude.

As a somatically oriented contemplative practice, yoga offers tools to develop prereflective awareness, the immediate, first-person experience that exists before reflection, before concepts, and before inner commentary arises.

On the mat, we begin to sense that bodily sensations and mental activity are not separate but exist along a continuum within awareness. You might notice the stretch in the side waist, a grounded steadiness at the base of the pelvis, or a tightening flutter around the solar plexus. The heart may feel more open, or energy may lift through the spine. Imagery, memories, or emotions may arise. Through practice, we learn to observe these experiences without judgment or immediate interpretation. Instead of objectifying our experiences, we rest with direct sensations before thought narrows or distorts them.

This kind of practice is inherently non-dual. When we are thinking, we often treat ourselves as objects in an internal dialogue, speaking to and about ourselves as if from a distance. Prereflective awareness invites us to rest in implicit knowing, where “self” and what is experienced are not two separate things but aspects of a single unfolding presence.

There are several modalities within this introspective, prereflective awareness. First, we cultivate interoception, the awareness of visceral sensations such as the breath, heartbeat, or gut feelings. We also develop proprioception, the innate sense of where we are in space and how we move. Finally, we deepen neuroception, the subtle awareness of our inner atmosphere, including mood, attitude, thoughts, and emotional tone. These modalities offer a map for exploration, but they are not meant as rigid categories.

A central skill in this practice is noticing when awareness becomes conceptual, when inner commentary arises to evaluate what we’re experiencing. Rather than elaborating with more thinking, we return attention to body, breath, and inner space. Thoughts lose their momentum without attention and eventually dissolve. This takes practice. We are used to relating to ourselves through conceptual filters: judging what we see in the mirror, categorizing what we feel, and overlaying assumptions on our direct experience. These habits help us function in daily life, but they also obscure the living truth of what is happening within us, and they can limit what we learn from new experiences.

How does prereflective awareness relate to gratitude? Gratitude is implicit in the receptive attitude of true listening. When we meet our inner experience with curiosity, patience, and compassion, a quiet appreciation begins to arise, not as an idea, but as a felt recognition of being alive. Have you noticed that you treat yourself more kindly when yoga becomes a regular part of your life?

By quietening self-objectification and inner commentary, we allow a deeper intimacy with experience itself. We are delicate yet resilient, and this becomes impossible to take for granted. Gratitude manifests as reverence for being alive, an appreciation for the extraordinary, or the beautifully ordinary, reality of our lives.

Although this practice is deeply personal, it is also universal. It is like looking at the stars at night to know ourselves more fundamentally. Let’s embark on this together.