This time of year, it’s easy to end up with large, handwritten letters spelling out G-r-a-t-i-t-u-d-e on your To Do list like any number of other items to complete in your day. Get the turkey, pick up your parents, take in the dry cleaning, clean up the house, put extra towels out for the guests, and oh yes, don’t forget to be grateful! It can seem like a chore, something else to be remembered.
What if, in your life, feeling grateful was more like breathing and blinking than another thing to cross off your seemingly never-ending lists of things to accomplish? Do you think your life would change? Would you, as a person, feel differently within yourself? Absolutely!
Gratitude really is a verb. While you can experience gratitude easily, developing a program for yourself to experience and truly feel gratitude each day has not only numerous health benefits, but it also can help you shift your life completely from one tinged with negativity and disappointment or weariness to one that is full of joy, excitement, and an overwhelming sense of well-being.
Gratitude has actually been studied. Those who practice daily gratitude sleep better, are more active, more likely to exercise and take better care of themselves, and are less anxious and depressed. They also are more likely to extend themselves more freely, more often with individuals who are not as active in practicing gratitude, and report fewer health problems..
For those of you who are interested in the science of gratitude and the research studies, Robert Emmons and his colleagues at UC Davis are pioneers in this research and Emmons’ book called Thanks!: How the New Science of Gratitude Can Make You Happier details several of the completed studies. Among the highlights are that individuals keeping daily gratitude journals are generally more optimistic, are more successful in attaining personal goals, have more determination, energy, and altruistic behaviors.
For years we have heard about the positive impact of keeping a daily gratitude journal. Many have also discovered the powerful work of Dr. Masaru Emoto, which focuses on the impact of words through the study of crystals. (If you haven’t yet seen that incredible work, please visit www.masaru-emoto.net.) Love and gratitude are two of the words that Dr. Emoto recommends using the most because of their transformative impact on water, which makes up a large part of our bodies.
Gratitude involves becoming aware. Part of the human condition simply includes not being truly conscious within our own lives all of the time. It takes effort and practice to become more aware. It often also takes a lifetime to come to the realization that you hold within you the capacity to determine how to perceive your life experiences. If you incorporate a daily practice of gratitude you will soon see that practice changes your perceptions, and your life.
Through the process of directing your awareness and opening yourself up to experiencing gratitude for the experiences and moments as they come, you become more fully present, more fully open to all that life offers. Actively engaging in gratitude is grace in full form and is much more than just noticing things around you, it is the active process of being grateful for and appreciative of those things as well. As you align your inner vision and intention with the idea that you are seeking to find all for which you can be grateful and send it along out into the universe you will be amazed at the transformative effects within your life.
Gratitude is an action, a process of allowing yourself to notice the blessings in your life, big and small, and using that awareness to allow those blessings to expand within your life out to those around you.
Imagine that you have been tasked to create and give a presentation to management. You do your research, put together your presentation, and get ready for the meeting. The overhead projector isn’t working and the copier breaks down in the middle of copying your materials. During the presentation one of the management executives spends the majority of the meeting on his blackberry instead of paying attention to the materials.
It would be easy to feel disgruntled by the stress of preparing for the meeting only to have seemingly so many things not go as you planned. However, it is just as easy, once you get in the practice of daily gratitude, to feel gratitude that you had been selected, that you had done such a good job in your research, that so many of the participants had truly appreciated your work, or even in the realization that you didn’t need the technology to effectively get across your message.
Gratitude is a practice, a daily activity we can choose to participate in. Through gratitude we have the capacity to turn disasters into triumphs, hard lessons into lessons in grace, it is our choice. Our lives can be lived on automatic or we can take action and choose to perceive the events and experiences of our lives with gratitude. The choice is ours.
How do you begin? The most important first step is to start keeping a daily gratitude journal. Individuals who practice daily gratitude journals begin to experience the miracles of life as more important than the material items we so often think will bring us true happiness. As you enter into that sacred space of gratitude and become more and more aware of all of the things you have been given, you will begin to receive even more.
Practicing gratitude powerfully impacts our sense of well-being. Give yourself 30 days with a daily gratitude journal and within a week you’ll begin to notice a considerable change in your perspectives. As you begin to notice all of the gifts that are around you each and every day, you’ll be less inclined to feel out of balance and downtrodden and begin to feel more alive, and more excited about your life and yourself as a powerful co-creator in your life than ever before. As we enter November, the month in which we celebrate Thanks-giving, give yourself the gift of setting aside time each day to be grateful for the many blessings that fill your life, even if you start small. Before long, you’ll realize that there are more blessings around you, filling more moments of your day than you ever thought possible.
