By Emilia Bruckner
I believe that we are here to create, experience, to imagine an amazing life for ourselves and others. We all want love, acceptance, and joyful experiences, but most of us do not know how to achieve them. We search for the answers in books, taking time to listen to our intuition, watching others who seem to have it or persisting in actions to obtain it to some degree. I came to believe that the answer to how to have it and enjoy it lies in a simple act of gratitude.
That word seems to be passed around a lot but not many get to understand and feel what it means to be grateful. To most, it is a positive emotion that involves being thankful and appreciative, but I believe there is more to it. Gratitude significantly reduces symptoms of depression and anxiety. True gratitude is to be thankful for an event just as it is. For the so-called positive and negative aspects of it. Gratitude allows us to see what has happened and how has it served us. It is easy to be grateful for something that we find pleasing, but not so if the event is perceived as negative or challenging.
Taking time to find gratitude for something that we perceive as not as positive will open our hearts and relieve the mental stress that is caused by the perceived negative. The best way to achieve this is to take a few minutes to find and write down the benefits of that event. The more benefits we write down the quicker the mind will relax, and the emotion of gratitude will enter our hearts. Our body will feel light, and the brain noise will stop. The mind and the body will always try to bring us back to balance. Symptoms of pain in the body or mental uneasiness are showing us that we are too far off from the state of gratitude, of seeing life as a balanced event of equal positives and negatives. The habit of writing every day or when possible, and listing what we are grateful for, changes our daily lives from trying to get through the day to enjoy it
Gratitude heals our minds and bodies. The more we practice being grateful, the more we get to be grateful for. Gratefulness does not only relate to positive experiences. It is a state of poise and presence. A state when we pause and take time to appreciate what we are experiencing. The appreciation of something pleasant is easy to be focused on and felt. The appreciation of something that we find painful is not. It takes more me to redirect our thoughts from anger and blame to finding the balancing benefits to perceived negatives. Those benefits, blessings, and positives are always there. Every event can be seen by our minds as only negative, only positive or as just an event, neither positive nor negative. Our logical mind will find justification for either side, depending on our beliefs and hierarchy of values at the time. Mastery of life can be achieved when we take time to look deeper at all past and present events of our lives and find the balancing site. Our intuition will try to guide us to a balanced, grateful state by giving us emotions of anger, sadness, confusion, and helplessness. Those emotions are our hearts calling to come back to the centre, to love, to appreciate. Every time we pause and listen, take time to ask quality questions, and switch from blaming to appreciating, gratitude is felt. Being in a state of gratitude brings more experiences to our lives that match that state.
