Practice/Experience of Gratitude for Children

Gratitude has a lot to do with appreciation

● Brief arrival: let’s make a circle and acknowledge each person here: how much do we
know about them? And how much (sooo many things!) we don’t know about them..

● Now, let’s feel our feet on the ground and just breathe a little bit.. What do you feel
there? Can you feel how solid the ground is under your feet?

● Now let’s consider how many things are working for us in our lives, right here and
now:

❖ Look at what the eyes are doing for you: you can see colors, shapes, what is over
here and what is way over there on the back… and we just have to open our eyes
and all of this is already working for us. How wonderful is that? We can see!

❖ Let’s put our attention on our ears now, and how the sounds are arriving, staying a bit
and passing, and we hear them clearly.. are they happening inside or outside of
yourself? (just feel it, you don’t have to answer it out loud) And do you have to do
anything for the ears to be listening, or it happens naturally? Consider what a gift it is
to be able to listen, loud sounds, soft sounds… we wake up in the morning, and there
it is, our ears start working, just because it does. It’s a gift.!
❖ And how about our feet? Carrying us from one place to another, feel them now: how
small and soft they are, but how perfectly strong, and how wonderfully they carry our
weight and move us forward where we want to go, our whole lives, and we didn’t
have to buy them or anything: they’re just available to us. Once again, it’s a gift!
❖ (you can stop here or bring the hands, the back, the nose allowing us to breathe,
whatever time and group allows, enjoy exploring)
❖ Finally, let’s make contact with our hearts at this moment. How nicely it’s beating, and
everyday, no exceptions, our hearts don’t take a vacation, they are always there for
us, ever since we were still in our mom’s belly, it’s been beating regularly, softly, non
stop, day and night, allowing the body to be alive, and allowing us to have feelings.
Feel your hearts, right now..

● Now let’s invite the feeling of gratitude, of appreciation for what the body gives us,
this good friend we have our whole lives. If we cut, it heals and closes the wound, if
we get sick it makes us get better eventually, if something hurts, eventually it
passes..making us feel better.
● so, appreciating our bodies now and feeling as much gratitude as you can for it:
● “Breathing in, I feel my body alive and well” Breathing out, I feel gratitude for my
body.” (3 times, if appropriate)
● We can share this gratitude with the whole group imagining (you can add here: “and
in the imagination everything is possible!”) that this feeling of gratefulness is now in
your hands (they make a ‘recipient’ with their hands), which you offer in the middle of
the circle, for everybody else.
 ● (They all come to the middle of the circle and open their hands/’drop’ their gratitude
there, for everybody to benefit from it.)
● End of practice.

*This practice can be adapted to other areas of their lives, like family members, teachers,
friends, plants, oceans, animals in the world, the ability to feel/feelings and emotions, the
food we have available to eat and where it came from, etc.

*Bring a specific area to life, appreciating it in the initial part of the practice, inviting them to
feel gratitude for this area. Finally, invite them to offer this gratitude to the rest of the circle,
or: to everybody in the school, to everybody in Rio de Janeiro, to everybody who needs to
feel gratitude in this moment, to every being in the world.. and so on (The imagination is
vast!)