More studies than ever reveal the actual health benefits of channeling and expressing gratitude on a daily basis, but it remains a difficult task to achieve for many. Learn how you can tap into this vital resource to regain happiness and love in your life.
It begins with Positive Self-Talk
This is actually extremely difficult for people to adapt to. For those in a negative mindset, positive self-talk feels like the most ridiculous exercise on the planet, which is all the more reason why channeling gratitude for the rest of the world begins here. If you don’t have the capacity to feel gratitude, love, compassion, or forgiveness towards yourself, you will be unable to adequately offer those gifts to others.
Guided meditations and chakra healing can help you navigate your emotions around gratitude, love, compassion, and forgiveness, and help you to establish a shift in mindset towards positive self-talk. Crystals can help clear and energize your chakras to accept positive self-talk, allowing you to feel grateful for yourself and others. Gratitude can be charged through the sacrum, heart, throat, and crown chakras, so look there for different meditation exercises you can do to channel a deeper sense of gratitude.
Keep a Gratitude Journal
A Gratitude Journal can be just a simple check list to serve as a daily reminder of all there is to feel grateful for in the world. It may be an awkward exercise at first, but it can become essential to help you fall asleep at night with some sense of peace, and to wake up in the morning with something to look forward to.
It can be as simple as writing down the things you felt grateful for that day, or in your life. It doesn’t take much stretch of the imagination to come up with at least 5 things to feel grateful for, even if its just a roof over your head, or socks on your feet. If you feel like it, you can expand your Gratitude Journal to include your deeper thoughts and feelings of gratitude for the things on your list. By taking the exercise further in this way, it may eventually become easier for you to verbally and physically express your gratitude moving forward.
Small Gestures Matter
Have you ever believed a muttered ‘thank you’ if it didn’t at least come with a smile? Expressing gratitude doesn’t have to come with extreme showmanship; it can be as simple an act as a smile. Practicing smiling, even when you are upset or distracted, can generate more authentic smiles moving forward, and will eventually become a natural response to even the most basic and benign interactions with others.
Other small gestures make an even bigger impression— sending a text, or email, or *gasp* making a phone call to express outright your gratitude for a person or action can move mountains for your relationships. Sending a card in the mail makes a big impression too, as it may become a token that person can hold onto to remind them that they are appreciated by someone.
Sending a tiny gift of appreciation to someone who is meaningful in your life can often be enough to soothe our any rough patches in your relationship, or draw a deeper sense of love and appreciation back to you.
Because remember, gratitude isn’t about you so as much as it is about the person you are grateful for. They too may experience down periods where they don’t feel connected to or appreciated by others, and so when you go out of your way to express gratitude for them, it can uplift their spirits in a time of need.
Recognize the Value in Others
Despite whatever social norms we grew up believing, ‘entitlement’ is a nasty concept that plagues many egos, including our own. Learning to crush our personal sense of entitlement by seeing the value in others is essential to cultivating gratitude. Think of all of the people in your life who aren’t perfect themselves, but are still present in your life despite how you may have treated them— once you give value to their mere presence, you are cultivating gratitude. No one has to do anything for you, no one has to be nice to you, no one owes you anything… recognizing that every day people are instead acting kindly towards you is cultivating gratitude. Genuinely expressing gratitude for their kindness will generate greater appreciation all around: gratitude is a contagious expression.
One way to help you recognize the value in others is through volunteering yourself to a cause. By helping others in a socially impactful way, you can gain a greater sense of community and see how the kind actions of others, and yourself, can make a huge difference to those in need. In fact, when you are surrounded by others who are in a place of need, and they are expressing their gratitude to you for your presence in their lives, you will begin to understand how the exchange of gratitude can be so important and valuable to everyone in this world. At that point, it may be easier than ever for you to find the ability to feel and express gratitude for everyone in your life.
Do you have other ways of cultivating gratitude?
I'd love to hear about different ways you cultivate gratitude in your heart, and express it to those in your life!
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