With the holiday season in full swing I wanted to take a moment to talk about gratitude.
To really reap the benefits of a gratitude practice, you’ll need to do more than just cultivate an awareness of what all you have to be grateful for.
I’m sure you understand why cultivating gratitude in your life is important.
According to my mentor Joanna Lindenbaum, these are the benefits we get from incorporating gratitude in our life:
When human beings feel gratitude, this is often accompanied with a sense of:
- satisfaction for having enough (at least for the time being)
- inspiration & motivation to be able to create what they want next
- confidence that more wonderful things can happen
- deeper connection to self and others
- regulation and a calmer nervous system
- an overall better mood
- a feeling that life is sacred & a gift
Gratitude also raises your whole vibration. Which can effect not only how you feel overall, but how others relate to you. It shifts how you show up in the world and the actions you take.
And that can have huge impact on your life overall.
Those are all great things but how often do you actually experience these things?
If you’re like most people, the benefits mentioned above are glimpses or are fleeting. It doesn’t tend to stick around. It raises your vibration for a bit but it doesn’t become a permanent change.
That’s because most gratitude practices stop at the thinking level. You just cultivate an awareness of gratitude. It doesn’t necessarily become a permanent part of your day to day operation.
Therefore it doesn’t quite have the affect you had hoped.
In order to make gratitude a larger, more permanent part of your life and to reap the benefits mentioned above, you’ll need to work on really embodying the feeling of gratitude.
Instead of just thinking about gratitude, what if you could find a higher wisdom or deeper purpose for the gratitude?
What if you could make it a permanent part of your vibration?
What if you fully feel gratitude in your body so that you can easily conjure those high-vibe feelings on command?
When you work to embody anything, it activates all the levels of learning. (cognitive, emotional, somatic, spiritual)
When you activate all levels of learning, you learn faster and it tends to stick with you and become part of your new normal.
A solid gratitude practice is like working a muscle. You have to build it up so that it in turn will support you when you need it.
Take It Deeper
If you’d like a deeper, more effective gratitude practice I’ve recorded a couple of meditations that you can try in order to practice embodying gratitude.
