How to feel amazing using gratitude...
I will be honest when people talked about gratitude and feeling gratitude, I was like oh here we go... Let's all dress up like fairies, dip a carrot in some humus and sniff our hairy armpits... Yep, that was what went on my head. With all this 'new age' stuff, I feel that there has to be an air of cynicism because otherwise we would all buy into every bit of crap that was fed to us. The next thing we know is that we would launch ourselves off cliffs like lemmings...
So then came gratitude... You are having a rubbish day and then you need to be grateful for it... Hmm. I read a fantastic book on Spiritual Bypassing which discusses the psychology of spirituality. It certainly put a few things in perspective for me. Yet gratitude has constantly caught my attention. I also read about the water http://www.masaru-emoto.net/english/water-crystal.html
Take a look at how water crystals are affected by the feeling put into them.
Look how beautiful the crystal becomes when someone feels gratitude by it. So considering this I thought well, eighty percent of my body is made up of water, so if I feel gratitude for an amount of time then the water crystals will shift because the energy of my thoughts is moving through them. Having a logical background, and a definite capacity at full scepticism, I thought I would try it. So I dedicated ten whole minutes to laying down and focusing on saying thank you and breathing into my heart and feeling gratitude. So, and yes I am sharing this, I would usually be quite embarrassed about admitting such an experiment; however, I did say that I would share my findings on finding inner calm, bliss and all that lovely stuff. So.... I laid down, set my mobile for a gentle alarm call for fifteen minutes. I knew my mind would have a bit of a rebellion before going completely into it. So I laid and I counted my breaths until I was calm and focused on saying thank you and feeling the word gratitude to see what happened in my body... Oh I descended into a lovely place and.... I laid an egg.... No I didn't really. I felt like my body was illuminating. After a minute of focusing on feeling thank you I felt as though light filled my body. I kept going and my body felt light and relaxed. Then something even lovelier happened, I felt my heart open... I felt so alive and grateful about being grateful. I considered all the things I felt grateful for and it was as if a dam burst. I really felt lovely. I kept going and going and could have gone on feeling that way for hours. Eventually my alarm went off and pulled me back to reality, yet I felt so positively charged. It really was the most amazing feeling and it was achieved just a couple of minutes after I decided to give it a go. It then occurred to me that to feel absolutely amazing I simply needed to take myself off for ten minutes, do a few breaths to become calm and then focus on saying thank you in my mind and feeling gratitude. Honestly... It was beautiful and I highly recommend it.
So.... Me being 'the happiness experimenter' that I am... Thought well, it is all very good when you are feeling relatively good, but what about when you are feeling stressed. So... I had a stressful day at work, came home, took a few breaths and focused on 'Thank You,' and gratitude. In all honesty the first few minutes were like facing a mind storm and then in settled. It is like I passed through the storm and arrived at that same beautiful place where life flooded my veins and rather than feel closed, I felt open. It was amazing. So then the question popped into my mind. What if I dedicated ten minutes per day to feeling that way... And then something even better happened. WHAT IF I DO IT BEFORE GOING TO SLEEP OR WHEN I WAKE UP!!! Oh try it... see what happens because for me, it changed my whole approach to the day. Where grumpiness had been the default state, well, it was replaced with calm and loveliness. So I admit it... I have taken to dipping carrots in humus and developing a real sense of gratitude because I tell you - gratitude brings joy and magnetises great things to you... You can thank gratitude for this blog too. It was while feeling gratitude I felt the desire to share my calm and peaceful findings with others because I was grateful for feeling such a nice feeling I wanted to be able to share it with others!
Have a lovely day!
Enjoy audio books at the following link:
