Gratitude, when practiced regularly, has many benefits including better physical and psychological health, increased happiness and life satisfaction, and decreased materialism. Gratitude also is a positive “social glue.” It is the fuel for people to be more generous, kind and helpful, with a pro-social orientation. It tends to strengthen all kinds of relationships—including romantic relationships!

Think of intention setting as the ability to constantly choose—grounded in your life aim—among goals, resources, types of behaviors, habits, relationships, and other aspects of your life, such that you are in a continual state of curating and optimizing your life for what will drive the greatest degree of engagement and satisfaction.

Research reveals that purpose offers direction to a life, just as a compass offers direction to a person trying to choose the right path. Some researchers have described it as a “central self-organizing life aim” that helps to guide you to make certain choices over others when faced with multiple options or limited resources. It creates powerful motivation to consistently dedicate resources and time to achieve your goals when they are consistent with this life aim, or purpose. And, when you are living in your purpose, your resilience is astonishingly high, even in difficult circumstances. 

Every person has something unique to contribute. And when you are centered in what your unique potential is—or can be—you will find it easier to attain states of flow, make decisions that help you grow, and act in alignment with what gives you meaning.

Setting healthy boundaries is a way of caring for yourself. When set properly boundaries create the environment and conditions in which you can experience greater well-being, and signal to others how best to work and communicate with you.

Why is the ability to embrace diverse perspectives important to well-being? Learning, an integral part of well-being, involves stretching and growing, and being challenged by new ideas and perspectives. In other words, as we’ve explored in a previous session, curiosity and openness are paramount to well-being.

Choosing to embrace and understand diverse perspectives expands our consciousness, and fuels the breadth of compassion that we can exercise. It enables us to receive insights that we might otherwise be immune to, and expands our ability to develop meaningful relationships. Ultimately, it is the basis for creating a just and rich society where differences are the strength rather than the divide.

Compassion is a pathway to well-being, both for you and others. Compassion is grounded in perspective—our ability to view things in their true nature, to recognize the suffering involved, and be moved to take action.

Awareness is the magical key to well-being. In Forum you’ll develop an Awareness practice that provides and essential set of foundation skills for achieving greater well-being. With each meeting of the community you’ll utilize, hone and adopt these life-changing Awareness skills, so that you can powerfully integrate them into your daily life. When practiced properly, these skills can fundamentally shift your state of mind, your emotions, how you feel physically, and spiritually.

What beliefs do you hold? How are they influencing your thinking, actions, and emotions? The beliefs we hold are something we self-construct. They shape how we think about the world. They can be empowering or limiting. In Forum you’ll learn how to become aware of your beliefs, examine how they were constructed, and change them, if necessary to experience greater well-being.

In order to create the most fertile ground for developing relationships that fuel well-being, learn to notice, listen, and ask questions along six important dimensions. By doing so, you’ll ensure you come closest to truly understanding and connecting with other people in your life. These six dimensions of inquiry can help to build richer, better relationships. Find out how to use them.

Emotions spring from how you interpret and event in your mind. You assign a narrative, your body responds in kind, and a feeling emerges. Depending on the emotion, you may feel an urgent need to act on the emotion, which triggers a reflex choice about what to do. Sometimes, this can trigger yet another emotion.

In Forum, you’ll learn to get acquainted with your emotions and name them so that you have a greater awareness of what it is that is happening to you, and so that you can better respond in productive, powerful ways to your emotions. Emotions are not, inherently bad; but, rather, they are information, a guidance system for navigating your world.