The Gratitude Jump
(#10 of 10, for now anyway)
What are you grateful for? There are so many things in your life that you could be grateful for, if you decided to be. Sometimes it might be hard to see in the moment, because we get so caught up in the milieu of life that we lose perspective on all the things that we have, and instead we focus on all that we want, but don’t yet have.
And then we lose our happiness.
Because gratitude is a central component of happiness, one so deeply intertwined within that emotion that if you took gratitude out of happiness, all you would be left with would be momentary pleasure to brighten your days, and you would be at the mercy of your surroundings and environment every moment of your life.
And your days would be hollow, and eventually become bitter.
The beauty and power of gratitude is that if you can feel gratitude, it changes your entire perception of the world. Try being grateful and angry at the same time – it’s not possible if you are truly feeling grateful. The same goes for fear.
True gratitude will change how you feel, and allow you to control your emotional state just when you need to.
And it all starts with a choice.
The fact that Gratitude is a choice was a hard lesson for me to learn, partially because being grateful for something required me to power down my own pity party, and instead shift my focus to something other than my own needs and wants.
Gratitude is a giving emotion, encouraging me to focus on what I do have, and to find peace within that focus.
And what we focus on is always a choice.
For some people, shifting to a gratitude focus is very hard, but these are the very people who need it the most. I have a very good friend who managed to change her whole perspective of life based on what she could be grateful for.
After going through a difficult divorce and a terrible legal battle, she was incredibly angry and was losing her sense of self and her place in the universe. It was a difficult process to see.
Yet she found her way back to herself through an exercise in gratitude. Each day she would find things to be grateful for, and she would write them in a journal. Over a relatively short period of time, she began to change her focus, seeing all that she had in her life, and how rich and vibrant her life could be.
As she changed her focus to an attitude of gratitude, everything around her changed for the better.
Not that the world changed, you understand, but how she saw it changed, and that made all the difference.
So today, at the end of these two weeks of ‘jumps’, I invite you to spend some time thinking of all the things you have to be grateful for.
As you grow in your ability to see the world in a way that makes you happy, you will discover that you can lift yourself higher than you ever thought possible.
And you can carry others with you on your journey.
— Dr. Alan Barnes
@maddrbmusings