Creating a Samskara of Gratitude: Transforming Your Yoga Practice and Your Life (Free Video with Judith Hanson Lasater)

How Your Practice Can Cultivate a Richer Emotional Life

We usually think of yoga practice as a means to get stronger, more flexible, and as a means to help retain our youthful vitality as we get older.

But have you ever thought about how your yoga practice can also be a means of cultivating a richer and more content emotional life?

Consider, for example, the feeling of gratitude.

The Science of Gratitude

You may well have heard that regularly feeling gratitude is one of the best anti-aging practices you can have. Scientists have discovered that gratitude rewires the brain in remarkable ways. It reduces stress hormones, improves sleep, strengthens the immune system.

People who regularly experience gratitude also report deeper relationships, greater resilience, and a more profound sense of wellbeing.

The Paradox of Gratitude

So, what are we waiting for? Well, there’s a paradox of gratitude. We may have many, many things to be grateful for…

But what most of us know from lived experience is that you can’t force gratitude…

You can’t pretend or simply tell yourself to be grateful. The mind might agree. It might even list all the reasons you should feel grateful.

But the heart knows the difference between the idea of gratitude and the felt experience of it—that spontaneous upwelling that floods you with appreciation for simply being alive.

Understanding Samskaras: The Grooves of Consciousness

Most of us are familiar with negative samskaras—the habitual worry, the knee-jerk impatience, the familiar loop of self-criticism. But what if we could create a samskara of gratitude?

Samskara is a concept from yogic philosophy that refers to the grooves or patterns we create through repetition. Like a river that carves its path through stone, our repeated thoughts and actions create channels in consciousness that become easier and easier to follow.

Creating New Pathways

What if we could create a samskara of gratitude?

Not by telling ourselves to think grateful thoughts, but by creating the conditions in which gratitude spontaneously arises—and then carving that pathway again and again—until it becomes a new pattern?

This is where yoga practice becomes truly transformative. Through intentional practice, we can cultivate the conditions that allow gratitude to arise naturally. We’re not forcing an emotion or manufacturing a feeling. Instead, we’re creating space for gratitude to emerge organically, strengthening that neural pathway each time it appears.

Over time, this practice doesn’t just change our time on the mat—it transforms the texture of our entire day. Gratitude becomes less of an effort and more of a natural response, a groove worn smooth by patient, consistent practice.

This is the profound gift of working with samskaras: we can consciously choose which patterns we want to deepen, which rivers we want to flow through our consciousness. And in doing so, we don’t just practice yoga—we transform our lived experience from the inside out.

Free Video with Judith Hanson Lasater: Asana Is a Question The Revolutionary Way