Hello, everyone. This course is going to focus on gratitude with the aim to build resilience, so we want to refresh the spirit. Gratitude is something that has become a very popular part of wellness and there are a lot of scientific proven benefits of gratitude, which I will touch on briefly. We're going to begin with a gratitude reflection. But the focus here is to help us maintain optimism and build resilience. We're going to engage in gratitude practices. You're going to learn a bit about BRITE journaling with gratitude and how you can reach out to others expressing gratitude. Here, I'm going to start off with a gratitude wall, and I want to give a special thank you to Monica Tingling, who is a librarian at University Health Network and helped to put together this beautiful gratitude wall. This is very popular now around you and you'll find them on the patient care units. You'll find them in all our respite centers as well as in the corporate offices, because gratitude is really something that we want to encourage us to cultivate as it builds our resilience and as I speak, the resilience is for us. It means that we can bounce back from difficult situation or experience and we all experience challenges in our life, but know that we are all resilient. It's just important for us to optimize and keep cultivating it by doing different activities. For today, we are going to begin with a gratitude reflection, meditation to get in the right mindset and cultivate a deeper sense of self awareness. Unlike some traditional meditation that our focus on breathing, the gratitude meditation will use our full concentration to visualize all the things that we're grateful for. It is so important for us to give each area the attention that it deserves. Let's first talk about the benefits of gratitude. We are looking at Emmons and Stern's research and here they found that gratitude can reduce the lifetime risk of depression, anxiety and substance abuse disorder, it creates situations where happiness thrive and tangible benefits, of course, because we feel grateful and it encourages sharing. I also want to shed light on the work from Robert Emotion as he's the leading gratitude researcher and his work is linked to how gratitude, improve positive emotion and overall well-being. This study was done in 2014 and it was published in the journal Emotion and this study was saying how when you think someone, it gives you new acquaintances as well as it make people more likely to have ongoing relationship or seek it out and it creates new opportunities. So it is really something that a lot of studies have shown to be beneficial for us. As we get into the gratitude reflection meditation, I want to invite you to take a moment to relax, and as you settle yourself in a relaxed posture, take a few deep, nourishing breaths. Hopefully this will help you to relax and feel centered, and as you do so, let your awareness move to your immediate environment and all the things that you can smell, taste, touch, see and hear and say to yourself for this, I am grateful. Next bring to mind those who put in your life to whom you are close, your friends, family, partner, and say to yourself for this, I am grateful. Next, turn your attention onto yourself. You are a unique individual with imagination, the ability to communicate, to learn from the past and to plan for the future, to overcome obstacles you may be experiencing, say to yourself, for this I am grateful. Finally rest into the realization that life is a precious gift. Say to yourself, for this, I am grateful and if you try to practice this on your own, you can take the time to go through all the people you're grateful for, all the physical objects you're grateful for. Sometimes it's nice to simply just show gratitude for the things we often take for granted, like the ability to breathe, touching our hands, the eyes that we have to see, the legs we have to walk and run and I also want to share that we can magnify this even more and target different reasons and choose high level things that we're grateful for and we could start off by looking at three things we can hear. Sorry, we could choose high level things like our jobs and stuff and family in our country, and then we get more specific so if you make this a nightly practice, you can look at the things you hear, see, smell around you touch and feel and taste things that are blue, animals, friends, teachers, professors and so on. There's many ways that you can approach this. If we go on to the next exercise, we have here, the BRITE practice. BRITE means building resilience within institutions together with everyone and with this, we are using this framework at University Health Network, and this is one of 12 practices that we have and with the gratitude practice, we want to encourage people to notice, feel and share appreciation and develop daily practice and start to bring in three things in mind in your workplace or in your home or school and be appreciative and lucky for those items and know them. You can strengthen this practice by writing down the three things. Notice how your expression of gratitude make you feel and notice spontaneous moment of gratitude throughout the day. I know you feel when people express their gratitude to you so you could reach out and thank someone by mail. As we get breaking down here, you see where you can write them in calendar or get a journal or you can go and show others you care by making notes to classmates, friends, neighbors, coworkers, and act on it, email them, let them know it. As you saw from the gratitude wall, it's so beautiful when you can display these notes and just really savor the moments when you receive this gratitude. There are many tools and proven benefits of gratitude, I've highlighted some, but it's worth it to look into these. Thank you so much.
