The practice of gratitude. Blog #18

Sometime the only one thing we need to do in order to find happiness and balance is to remind ourselves we already own happiness and balance. The practice of gratitude is the single most overlooked habit that allows so.

Always look at the bright side of life...

Things can always either be better or worse. What we focus our mind on we get more of, so when we look at how better things could be we are essentially creating unhappiness, anger, frustration and self pity. When we look at how worse things could be on the other hand we do just the opposite. We remind ourselves that we already own loads of goodness, and although it is nice and healthy to want more of the good things in life, if we don't stop to appreciate what we already have we can never fully embrace the value of whatever we have and we will never have enough... and this is how we create suffering. Solely down to one action. The action of looking in the wrong direction.

Some might say that some situations are just too bad to offer any positive sides to them. We project and compare other people's lives with ours, and that is why we can't imagine a better perspective to let's say for example: being born orphan in a shanty town, in a country at war or with a terminal disease.

An innocent child in any of those dire context could learn to survive and make the most of whatever they have a day or a moment at a time. Fighting is still better than giving up because it is a purpose. We fight for something. Many children in documentaries suffering from terrible and painful conditions prove us how they still apply the awareness of better versus worse. They teach us to remember and respect how the slightest and ephemeral glimmer of hope in an ocean of darkness and pain is still worth everything...

I of course never experienced any of those ordeals so it is important to highlight how I am using extreme examples not to arrogantly prove a point but to highlight how things could always be worse. We could be dead. In the Universe everything changes all the time, which means that after a moment is always another moment, and each and every moment holds the same value and potential. Put it simply: as long as there is life there is hope and anything can happen...

Gratitude creates an empowering feeling in the body

The first reason we want to practice gratitude is to feel better. Gratitude is a very special and unique quality and state that triggers a host of feel good, happy and healthy hormones in our body, such as oxytocin, the love and trust hormone. It means that practicing gratitude leads to love and trust. Love and trust creates the ultimate connection, the connection with our full potential as human being, our connection to the Universe, our connection to happiness and balance. Remember my previous blog, Fear (mistrust) is the opposite of Love. Fear is a survival energy. Love is the energy of creation. So practicing gratitude is the start of moving away from a survival to a thriving state.

Be grateful from the get go

Because we want to feel great all the time it is wise to trigger those happy feel good hormones within the first 20 minutes we are awake. A good way to do it is to start the day with a gratitude meditation. We all have in our life at least of 3 persons we love unconditionally. We want to think about them and wish them health, love, happiness and success. We want to wish them a fantastic day. We want to wish them whatever we know they would wish us... and feel those waves of oxytocin lifting up our mood, our state, our potential.

Another alternative is to practice gratitude affirmations in front of the mirror. We can also actively and simply remind ourselves with post notes, screen savers, pictures on our phones or in our wallets... Or we can just switch on the TV or the Radio and realise the state of the world and our immense privilege and luck. There are just as many ways to trigger gratitude than there are to cause anger, fear, self entitlement, judgement or sadness. We only forget that any and all habit can be changed with patience, discipline and perseverance.

Be the king, the queen or the hero of your life every day

We want to remind ourselves of all the success we have created in our life. Each and every moment of happiness is a success. All the things we have, as opposed to the things we don't have. All the things we believe we can have as opposed to all the things we believe we can't have. All those wonderful moments, souvenirs and experiences we shared with our loved ones instead of their absence.

And then we want to be grateful for them...

Get involved !!!

Gratitude is one of the many tool I use as a therapist and coach to redirect people towards a better life. I am starting an interactive gratitude calendar this week end and for the rest of the year on my open Facebook group: We are all made of stars:

where I and whoever would like to get involved will share 3 things we are grateful for every single day of the month of December, one day at a time... Repetition and accountability support change. On the top of that we end up inspiring more people in our social media circle, so why not join us and heal that broken world, one person at a time...?