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CONTRIBUTED BY MILA 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 answers 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 also 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, not so if the event is perceived as negative or challenging.
Taking time to find gratitude for something that we perceive as not 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 enjoying 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.
