Everybody knows that making a daily gratitude list is very helpful in achieving a positive mindset, but I’m going to go into a little more detail on using gratitude to improve your level of joy and happiness. Gratitude as a mindset is a practice. We get better at it and reap more rewards from it the more we practice using gratitude.
What is gratitude anyway?
What causes that feeling inside your chest or inside your stomach of this glowing feeling of utter bliss and thankfulness for your experience? There need to be two things in place for you to feel gratitude.
- The first one is that what you are receiving is of value to you. If someone comes up and gives you a piece of garbage, you’re not going to feel gratitude about that because you don’t value it.
- The second thing that needs to be in place for gratitude to be felt is you have to feel that you did not necessarily do anything to earn it or deserve it. It just came out of the goodness of your higher power or the universe or another human being and you didn’t earn it.
I’ll give you an example. So say at work, part of your compensation is a bonus. But to get that bonus, you have to work your tail off for a year like crazy. You put in all the extra hours, you take all the crap and everything that goes with that job that is required because you want that bonus. And so then finally when that time rolls around and you get that bonus, why does it feel less wonderful than you anticipated? Part of the reason is that you feel you earned it. It didn’t just drop from the sky as a blessing.
When these two things are in place, that’s an opportunity for you to have the energetic feeling of gratitude. So for example, that bonus example I gave you might not feel as much gratitude as you would think you would for your large bonus at the end of the year, but you might actually feel more gratitude for a cup of coffee that someone just bought you randomly in the Starbucks line because it’s something of value and it was completely unexpected and you didn’t deserve it or earn it.
Why gratitude?
I want you to think for a minute about all the people that you know in your life, and I want you to single out the person who seems to have the best circumstances. They might have the best relationship, the healthiest, most well-mannered children. They might have the greatest job or business, the most beautiful home. They might go on vacations. Somebody who seems to have it all. I want you to single out that person in your mind.
Now, I want you to go back to all of your friends and family and evaluate again through all of those people. Now I want you to pick out the person who is the happiest, the most, consistently happy and joyful.
I’m going to venture to guess that the two people that you picked out are not the same person.
Why is that? Because our circumstances do not create happiness. We’ve been trained by society that if we accumulate all the circumstances, we get the house, the job, the family, the car, everything that we ever set out to want, we should, therefore, feel happy.
Circumstances are not what make us happy. Gratitude and gratefulness will make you happier when you notice more of what you already have as desirable and find gratitude in your heart for that. That will increase your happiness level more than your circumstance as well.
How to Deepen The Power of Gratitude
We all kind of think we know how to write our gratitudes. We just write down what we’re grateful for it, right? But there’s a couple of tweaks that you can put into it to make it even more powerful. The first thing I want you to do is just think for a second about something that you’re grateful for and just write it down the way that you normally would if you were writing a list of gratitudes. So go ahead and do that now.
So you may have written down something like, I’m grateful for my family, or I’m grateful for my health and those are great things, but what we can do to expand the energy feeling behind the gratitude is to actually add a lot of detail to it. Instead of writing down, for example, I am grateful for books, I want you to write it in a detailed manner. So I would write, I am grateful for books that are so powerful, I can literally meditate on a single sentence and ponder my purpose within that one sentence. So can you feel the difference between just writing “I’m grateful for books” versus this more expansive way? So I’d like you to go back to what you wrote before and then just rewrite that in a more detailed way so that you could get that energetic feeling going.
Another example would be, instead of writing, I’m grateful for walks with my dog. I would write something like I’m grateful for walks around the pond with Grace. I love how the bullfrog croaks “Good Morning” to us. I’m remembering that moment that I felt such gratefulness within.
How to Do a Gratitude Rampage
Most of us have been taught something like write three things you’re grateful for every night before you go to bed, which is great, but another way to do it if you really want to ramp it up is to do what’s called a Gratitude Rampage.
To do this, what you want to do is sit down and you’re going to try to just pour out of you everything you are grateful for and fill as much as three to even five entire pages. This will be a real challenge, but you will find things that you are grateful for that you never thought of before when you do this. So you sit down and you just write and write and write and write and write in the most detailed, expansive way, everything that you have to be grateful for. What I would recommend when you sit down to do a gratitude rampage instead of trying to do it from a cold start, get yourself into the best alignment possible first. So I wouldn’t do it right when I roll out of bed in the morning, I would do something first that gets me into what I call alignment first.
Getting Into Alignment First
Alignment is different for everyone. It might be getting your favorite cup of coffee or it might be taking your morning walk first. Experience something that raises your enjoyment and energy level. It could be a quiet moment outside or meditation. Whatever makes you feel balanced and increases your feelings of good energy within. Think of it as something you desire at the moment that makes your soul happy. It could even be a couple pieces of chocolate or an extra 10 minutes in bed. It’s you listening to and taking care of you.
Law of Attraction and Gratitude
Law of attraction says that like energy attracts like energy. So everything that we have in our life was attracted to us based on our energy level. I want you to think about everything that we see physically being only part of what exists in reality. The research estimates that humans through their five senses can register within their brains just a portion of the entire reality and that portion is .0000006%! Isn’t that drastically small?
Think about all of the things that as you look around the room, you can register. I can see the pictures, the books, the paper, the lamps, the closet and the light. I can hear what is going on in the background. All of that is such a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of what is actually going on around me. My brain can’t handle anymore. We are not equipped to take it all in, so we only take in certain things. But what I want you to realize is that everything that you think of as physical and matter is actually energy. So even the chair that I’m sitting on, the table that my computer is on, although it is matter, when you break it down on a molecular level, it is actually energy moving at a very slow state with a ton of blank space in between the molecules.
So there’s lots of air, lots of empty space in between these molecules that create the matter. But it’s all still energy. We are energy. Everything around us is energy. So everything we take into our senses is energy and everything that we can’t physically sense is also energy. The things that you have in your life that you’ve already identified as here physically through your senses, that’s only one aspect of what has been set up for you. And that’s what law of attraction is about. It’s saying that your energy level is pulling into your physical existence. Everything that you are calling in that has an energy level to it. You create what you want in your mind with your thoughts. You are already creating that on a vibrational level and energy level before your five senses can sense it. The reason that you might not have everything physically that you desire in your life is that you are not ready for it yet. You are not an energy match to it yet. Your job as a human is to get your energy up to that level of readiness, and gratitude does that. When we are grateful and appreciative of everything that we do have that gets us ready for more.
If I look around my life and I only see the negative things, only see what I don’t want, then I’m changing my energy level to be existing within the law of lack. If I’m looking at my bank account and saying, “I wish I had more money” or I’m looking at my car and saying, “I wish I had a better car.” While you’re operating at an energy level that is matching only what you currently physically have, you’re not raising your energy to the next level. But, when you feel abundance, feel gratefulness, feel gratitude, and then it opens up everything that is not yet physical to be available to you. It will manifest physically once you’re energetically ready.
What we Focus on Expands
So for those of you that wished you had more money in your bank, so how many times has that thought crossed your mind in the last week? “I’m feeling like I just need more money. I feel like I need more. If only I had a little bit more than I could pay this bill. If only I had a little bit more college would be more comfortable”.
And how many thoughts are you sending out then that are at the energy vibration level of lack? You’re focusing on the lack within your bank account. Now compare that with how many moments did you spend this week thanking the universe, thanking God, thanking your higher power for everything that you do have in your bank account? So instead of looking at what you lack, how many times did I look at what I have with gratitude?.
How much time did you spend being thankful for what you have? Being appreciative saying, thank God I have something in my bank account. Thank God I can pay for dinner tonight. I’m so grateful I do have this money to pay the important bills. That is what’s going to raise your energy level up to the next level. It’s not that what you desire isn’t here for you yet, its that you’re not ready for it to be received, or even more accurately perceived. Once you get yourself in that higher energy state, that’s when you will be ready for that. And that’s when the next wave of abundance will come to you.
I hope you found this deep dive into Gratitude helpful for your mindset work. On my website, I have a free Gratitude Workbook that is about 18 pages going over this material with places for you to do your journaling work in the workbook.
If you know you could benefit from a better mindset in your life, let’s talk about how I can help. Click the below link to fill out an application for a free Discovery Call with me. At the bottom left of the form is a small button to schedule a call on my calendar.
https://livetrainingnow.com/dawn-hafner/schedule-a-breakthrough-session/
Below is also the YouTube video on this topic from my Friday Live Lunch.