Living Gratefully

Aug 21

Gratitude is more than counting your blessings. Incorporating gratitude into your life, or practicing grateful living, leads to a sense of well being and improved health. When we practice both meditation and grateful living, we become aware of the abundance in our lives. Focusing our attention away from negative and stressful thoughts, increases heart health and triggers positive changes in your brain.

I am not making this up, there is a lot of scientific evidence of these physiological benefits. I am providing a link to a blog on Grateful living practices, that asks us to notice all that is already fully present and abundant in our lives – from the tiniest things of beauty to the grandest of our blessings. In this essay Brother David Steindl-Rast, OSB, urges us to be awake to the surprising world we live in, be aware of the opportunities offered us to simply enjoy our life and lastly to respond to these opportunities alertly.

Incorporating these practices in our life, makes us aware of and available to all of life’s opportunities. We all have opportunities and good things in our life, even in the most challenging of times. If we develop a habit of noting the good in everyday life it will be so much easier to find the good when difficulties arise.

Many people advise you to keep a gratefulness journal, reflect on your day and find three to five things to be grateful for.

I will add to this it is important to be specific. If you fall back on the same generic "I am grateful for my family" every day you will only succeed in boring yourself. Develop the habit of noticing the person who holds a door for you when you have your hands full, the person who always greets you with a smile and a hello, the person who refills your water glass when it is nearly empty.

By noticing the things for which we are grateful every day our spirits will be lifted, this will lead us to be a positive influence for others, and help to change the world.

RitaMarie Cimini

RM Cimini is a painter based in Delaware, working in oil glazing over acrylic on canvas. Trained as a formalist, she now turns that structural discipline toward a different aim: paintings that invite viewers into a moment of interior stillness. Most works begin with an underpainting, built up through repeated layering, scraping, and re-layering, sometimes with raw pigment worked into the surface for texture. That process of addition and subtraction stays visible in the finished painting, inviting the eye to travel through the paint and find forms that are partly hidden.

Drawn to water and celestial skies, Cimini uses light as a visual metaphor for the fragility of form and our shared transitory state of being. A meditation practice spanning more than four decades informs both the paintings and how she hopes they're experienced. She also facilitates meditation groups and writes about art and spirituality for Huffington Post, Sivana Spirit, and her website, rmcimini.com.

Cimini's work has been featured in solo exhibitions at the McNichol Gallery at Neumann University in Aston, PA, and at baby grand Gallery at the Grand Opera House in Wilmington, DE, and in group exhibitions at The Delaware Contemporary, the Delaware Art Museum, the Belskie Museum in Closter, NJ, and the Monmouth Museum in Lincroft, NJ. She served on the board of Studio Montclair, a nonprofit visual arts organization, from 2013 to 2022, including as President from 2016 to 2019. She holds an MFA in painting and sculpture from Bennington College and is an inducted member of the National Association of Women Artists. Her work is held in private collections in the United States and abroad, and in the public collections of Atlantic Health System, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and the MC Hotel.

https://www.rmcimini.com

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