Feeling Grateful Even When You Don't

 “Despite my extreme skepticism, practicing gratitude changed my life. It didn’t turn me into some happy-go-lucky person I was never meant to be (or, frankly, wanted to be). But I developed a fundamentally different way of thinking and moving through life, one in which I stopped taking for granted all the tiny good moments that were already part of it. I stopped looking for happiness out there and learned to find it right here.”
— Nataly Kogan
 
In this season of Thanksgiving how do you feel grateful when things in your life are going wrong? What if the people you love are suffering? What if you are upset about the environmental situation? What if things are not going well in your life? Your world? How then do you feel grateful?

The answer is in the understanding that how you feel is not about what is happening in your outside world. Though we are conditioned to believe that it is. Rather gratitude comes from the inside. It is a matter of where you choose to focus your attention.
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“Gratitude should not be just a reaction to getting what you want, but an all-the-time gratitude, the kind where you notice the little things and where you constantly look for the good even in unpleasant situations.”
— Marelisa Fabrega

Sometimes the best way to attain that state of gratitude is to focus not on what you are worried about but upon what is right in your world. You can feel grateful for the commonplace things, the things you usually take for granted. You can look for the silver lining within the clouds. As you do so you create alignment. There is nothing that is going on in your outside world that is not supported by your inner alignment.  

That is why gratitude is such a powerful spiritual tool.

Your Higher Self and Spirit know what you are worried about. Your Higher Self and Spirit know what are the best actions you can take to create healing, improvement, betterment of whatever the situation is. Your Higher Self and Spirit need your permission given through prayer, to intervene and set the spiritual ball of healing rolling.

As you release worry and focus upon what you are grateful for, you move back into alignment. As you do that you will be inspired into what will truly support the situations you are concerned about. From that centered place you will be able to connect with, hear and feel inspiration.

Gratitude is the tool that can move you from worried wheel spinning to inspired action. 


Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Your Spiritual Toolbox

If your mind is filled with worries and gratitude feels far away, get out pen and paper, get down to basics and start to list whatever you can come up with that you do feel grateful for.

It may be the air you breathe, the fact that you are able to put words on paper, the eyes that let you see what you are writing, the roof over your head, the breakfast that filled your stomach, the bed that supported your sleep last night, the trees, the birds, the sky.

​Wherever you need to start to feel even a twinge of gratitude, start there. Even if it feels stilted or uncomfortable at first, keep at it.

In time, as you continue this exercise you will find yourself relaxing and your gratitude list flowing more easily.

Now read back over your list, breathing in that feeling of gratitude for each item on your list.

Feel that sense of expansion and alignment that gratitude gives you.

Now ask your Higher Self and Spirit to support you to take inspired action today.