Gratitude

Gratitude is one of the most underrated emotions and yet it is among the most important. It can literally change your life.

How many of us wake up and immediately feel grateful for our lives? Waking up with a smile on our faces, thanking for the day ahead would be ideal, and yet there will be some of you thinking right now, ‘What the heck am I to be grateful for’?

If it is you, please take some time out of your busy life and look at yourself and your life, honestly, without any judgment. Simply be an observer. Is there really nothing there to be grateful for? Look at yourself. Can you see, can you hear, can you walk? We take these simple and yet so important and amazing abilities for granted. How often do you marvel at the complexity of our bodies, how often are you grateful for being able to listen to your favourite music, talk to others, hear birds singing, watch movies, read books, gaze at the night sky filled with stars, go for a walk or run? What happens when you do any of the above? Do you just perform them routinely or do you actively enjoy them, appreciate them and are grateful for them? What about your room? Is there nothing there that you like or love? What about your pillow, your bed, your lamp or your window? To be completely honest we have to try really hard not to be able to see anything good in our lives, anything that we can be grateful for.

The truth is that we have got used to complaining, blaming and criticising. We rarely look at our lives and intentionally search for things, people or situations to be grateful for. 

How often do we pause and look at our lives, how often do we take responsibility for our choices, the way we think, feel and act?

It is very important to get to know ourselves, to realise what it is that we really want, what we would like to change and work on the change. However, if gratitude is not part of the process, if we only focus on shortcomings, on problems, on expectations and on what is missing, than the journey and the change might feel overwhelming, we might feel disappointed, which can result in us giving up too soon, before the real change can take place.

Gratitude changes the way we look at our lives, the way we think and feel, what we say and how we behave.

Are you a person for whom the glass is half full or half empty? It might seem like a banal question, but your answer here is actually extremely important. We create our lives all the time with our thoughts, feelings, actions and choices and so the way you look at your life has a direct impact on it. When you work on appreciation every day purposefully noticing more and more things, people and situations to be grateful for, you will begin to fill your own glass and it will be full before you know it. If you were to start the same day twice, once as you are now and the other time feeling genuinely grateful and all throughout the day finding more and more reasons to love your life, that one day would have two entirely different versions. With gratitude, you would wake up genuinely happy, you would look forward to your day, you would know that your day would be great and even if there was something there that in the past would trigger your unwanted responses, thanks to practicing appreciation, you would be looking at the situation with a new set of eyes. Before you would mainly/only see the negatives, you would start blaming, judging, criticizing, you would get irritated, angry and stressed, but with gratitude, you would stay calm and look for the positives. And the best thing is that you could always find them, either in yourself, others or a situation. Instead of seeing challenges, you would see opportunities. Your changed outlook would transform your day. Your thoughts, feelings and actions would be different, you would be happier, kinder, you would feel lighter and healthier, everything would be easier as you would attract to yourself people and situations that would match the higher frequency of your vibration.

Please remember that working on gratitude is a gradual process. You are not going to be an expert in just a day and similarly nothing is going to change if you give up. It helps to start with finding little things to be grateful for and gradually going bigger. There are going to be easier and more difficult days and sometimes, especially at the beginning, gratitude might feel fake, but if you persevere and practice every day, you will notice that being grateful will become increasingly easier and more natural for you.

Check it out for yourself. Every day write down a few things to be grateful for and throughout the day practice feeling gratitude with your eyes closed and also with your eyes open. It doesn’t cost anything to learn to be grateful, all is needed is your willingness, time, effort, patience and perseverance. If you want to be happy, if you want your life to change, if you want to connect to your Truth, if you want to fall in love with your life and in return your life to love you back, then practising gratitude in your daily life is the key 💜