We all know that feeling grateful is a good thing.
So why don’t we feel it more often?
How can we actually feel grateful instead of thinking about feeling it?
What makes it challenging to feel grateful is that it’s rarely a naturally occurring emotion. As humans, we’re designed to feel unsatisfied, so we’ll keep hunting, gathering, and stocking away more resources. Which biologically speaking, is a pretty good system. Otherwise, back in our primal era, we would have gathered food once and been like, “Welp, I’m good.” and then been without food the following day. So, that wiring is helpful in terms of survival. However, on an emotional level, it’s not the most rewarding system.
In modernity, we usually only appreciate our lives when something outside our control happens to us and threatens emotional comfort. Or when we observe someone else in a rough situation, which awakens our ability to look inward and ground ourselves in the present.
Being pushed to feel the richness of gratitude, a divine resonance in our chests that glows with overflowing love for the pure essence of our own existence, is an incredible feeling.
Why would we settle on feeling such a thing so sparingly?
Because we don’t know how to feel it more often. But we can.
Here’s how:
You need to shift your perspective to bring the beautiful, grounding, enriching feeling of gratitude into your life more often. Rather than looking at gratitude as a magic moment gifted to you by the gods of randomness, you need to look at it as something you are capable of creating for yourself.
You have to make gratitude a practice like you would with meditation or mindfulness. That means you have to be conscious of how rewarding feeling grateful is, then consistently use your mindful awareness to pause and take yourself inward to that internal place of glowing love rather than waiting for something outside of you to do it for you.
Practicing gratitude is about consistency. The more regularly you make it a point to realign yourself with that inner feeling of beauty, the more you’ll feel it all the time. You can even set a recurring alert on your phone calendar once a day that says “Gratitude” to help you remember. The practice doesn’t have to be long, complicated, or lofty. You simply have to put everything down for five minutes, let yourself feel, and absorb the love and appreciation for the unbelievably rare gift we have that’s called life.
Here are five benefits of practicing gratitude:
Gratitude shifts your perspective. It brings you closer to the richness of the present moment and helps you release your attachments to how you feel things should be so that you can deeply embrace the profound beauty of what already is.
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