Gratitude means being thankful for everything around you, counting your blessings, noticing and appreciating the simple pleasures in life, such as the freshness in the air, the colour of the sky, a smile from a stranger, the coffee your loved one made you this morning. Gratitude means appreciating everything you have and everything that you receive.
Those of us who have consciously been practicing the act of gratitude know that it is the key to a happier and more fulfilling life. Behavioural and psychological research has shown that practicing gratitude can create significant improvements in our life through increasing our happiness, strengthening our relationships, improving our health and reducing stress to name a few. Think of gratitude as an emotional muscle and like any other muscle in the body, it will grow and strengthen with intentional use.
One great and effective way of practicing gratitude is to keep a Love and Life-filled Gratitude List. I like to call it “Love and Life-filled” because I don’t simply mean “listing words on a page” (as this would quite honestly be a totally inauthentic and pointless attempt at a gratitude list and neither would it invoke the desired feelings to radiate from within you). Your gratitude list should evoke authentic feelings of gratefulness, abundance and joy. The primary purpose of keeping a gratitude list is to feel blessed and deeply appreciative for everything that we have. When we step-up our approach to our gratitude list, viewing it as a tool that evokes genuine feelings of gratitude (as opposed to a list we robotically write to “tick the boxes” of our self-development to-do list) that is when we know that we are on the path to a wondrous, abundance filled life.
Shifting our perspective to a more feeling-oriented gratitude list, infuses not only our list, but our entire being. Our heart and souls become nurtured and nourished (and with practice over-filled) with feelings of abundance, excitement, joy and a deep appreciation for everything that we have. When this takes place, we naturally radiate positivity, love and peace from within, attracting back exactly what we project. The quality of your Love and Life-filled Gratitude List will make this gratitude come alive within you, and we all know that radiating such wonderful energy can only attract more abundance in to our lives.
Here are my 5 tips on how to make your gratitude list love and life-filled:
1. Add love: Write from the heart. Fill your gratitude list with emotion and an abundance of it!
2. Add details: This will fill your gratitude list with life. Perhaps it was a colour, a small gesture, a fragrance or a feeling that overcame you. Write it down!
3. Add reasons: List why you appreciated, loved, enjoyed, were overcome by something.
4. Add your personal touch: This is your gratitude list, so write in your own personal style. No-one else will be reading this but you, so make sure your writing speaks volumes to you! Let it touch you to the very depths of your heart’s core.
5. Add life: Add colour, glitter, draw pictures, add memorabilia; tickets from a show, a receipt from a meal, a flower petal from the bouquet a loved one gave to you, or even a blade of grass from a beautiful walk you might have been on. Make your writing come to life and recapture those moments of gratitude.
These listed moments of gratitude do not serve you in a momentary, time-specific way; they are timeless, infinite and unbounded. They can re-ignite all those moments of abundance, joy and gratitude even years later. Try reading through your Love and Life-filled Gratitude List when you’re not feeling your usual chirpy self, it’s the best pick-me-up for the heart, mind and soul.
When you follow these five simple tips, your gratitude journal shifts from an activity of the mind to an activity of the heart. This daily practice doesn’t just infuse your list with vibrancy, love and colour, it infuses your life. Your appreciation for everything gains a new depth. As you radiate these feelings of abundance, love, positivity and joy you will notice the incredible shifts that begin to take place in all aspects of your life. You will experience the universe orchestrating abundance in to your life in ways that you could never have imagined. From experience I can say that through your practice of gratitude, wonderful energy vibrations will be created deep within you and you will see the law of attraction playing out in front of your eyes in a magical, spellbinding way.
Click here to view this Blog Post on The Huffington Post Website!