“The roots of all goodness lie in the soil of appreciation for goodness.” — Dalai Lama
Hello beautiful souls! It is all the love I receive from my FB followers that inspired me to write this post. I am so incredibly grateful for all the love and support I receive from everyone on a daily basis. It just makes me want to keep going! This had me thinking about how much being grateful affects the quality of our life…
It was just a few weeks ago I heard Tony Robins tell Oprah in an interview that if we could only make one shift in our lives, that shift should be to move from expectations to appreciation. That is such simple but amazing advice. We so often don’t realize that our expectations are what is actually causing our suffering in so many life instances. We fail to see this time and time again, and continue to point the finger outward and blame others for disappointing us.
Why do we do that? I think it’s because we haven’t yet fully adopted an attitude of gratitude. There’s so much goodness to be appreciated in every moment of our life, yet our tendency is to skip right over this, and spend out mental energy on what’s to come. What’s our next quest. This in itself is not a problem, but not finding a good balance between appreciating what we have and desiring what we dream of can get in the way of never feeling satisfied.
One of my recent post on Facebook was about the importance of working our emotional muscles just as much as our physical muscles. I believe this to be a very important and necessary decision is we desire to life a joyful life. We an exercise our emotional muscles by creating daily spiritual or emotional practices, one of which should be gratitude.
We can practice gratitude in two ways. One is a deliberate practice where we take time out of our day to specifically bring in awareness specific things and people that we are grateful for. A second method for practicing gratitude is a shift in our attitude towards gratitude. What this looks like is that we start using a positive lens through which we see our life events, occurrences and conditions, and we look for the positive aspect of them all. If we search hard enough there’s always something positive to be seen.
To change our attitude means that we have to do work on the way we think & perceive. When practicing gratitude we shift the focus of our thoughts from what our life lacks to the abundance that is already present. Experiencing and expressing gratitude opens the heart and activates positive emotion centers in our brains. Science shows that adopting a regular practice of gratitude actually changes the way our brain neurons fire into more positive automatic patterns. How cool!
The key, however, is for us to be grateful for the fullness of life NOW not some imagined future state. The future is promised to no one and so a habit of delaying gratification may leave us empty and greatly disappointed. Now is all there ever is with certainty.
One way to test the power of gratitude is to imagine losing some of the comforts we have right now…our breath, our health, our connection to our creator, our freedom, our security, our clear mind, our family, our shelter, our close friends, awesome neighbors, etc. Then slowly imagine getting them back. Powerful, right?
With that said, let today be the day to start bringing gratitude to your experiences in increments of moments, instead of waiting for a positive experience in order to feel grateful.
Much Love, Dee!
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