90-Day A Better Me Series

Part III: Living the Journey

Making the Now Count: Rebuilding our Lives

Day 71: Living Gratitude

“Happiness cannot be traveled to, owned, earned, worn, or consumed. Happiness is the spiritual experience of living EVERY minute with love, grace, and gratitude.”

-Denis Waitley

Living gratitude is it! It is the way we’ve dreamed of living without ever knowing it. Living gratitude is about taking anything we are given, any challenge, any illness, any trauma, any joy, and any relationship, and any material item and finding the blessings and appreciation for the experience, person and/or thing. When we live gratitude our energy shifts and creates more room for receiving and giving. The blessings are countless when we live gratitude on a daily basis.

I’ve spoken a lot about gratitude throughout this 90-Day A Better Me Series. If you’ve been keeping up with the series and started the gratitude journal that was brought up in Part II, you are already seeing shifts in your life. If you have started being grateful for your body like was mentioned on Day 69, just connecting to the material is you planting the seed, however much you nurture that seed is an indicator of how it will grow. I see gratitude like the sprawling banyan tree. If you want the tree to drop roots and spread, you make sure the energy isn’t getting going to areas that will make the treetop heavy and not sprawl. You clean up some of the heavy weight up top so the tree will drop down roots and spread.  Soon the tree will be so big that is will take over. You have to MAKE space!

Each day since writing the gratitude section in Part II, I’ve been adding 5 things to be grateful for in the 90-Day A Better Letters Series. I know the power of gratitude! Once we learn to start focusing on gratitude on a regular basis it becomes easier and easier. I can sometimes write pages of gratitude in just one day. The more I live gratitude, the happier I AM. Writing it down helps us to keep our minds focusing on putting our energy into the right place, but living gratitude is what happens after we can write pages of things to be grateful for daily.

Living gratitude is making the choice in each moment to see gratitude. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gotten angry about something, then I thank God for showing me the areas of myself that I need to give attention to. I’m grateful for my mistakes. I’m grateful for others who show me their dark side, because it shows me where mine is. I’m grateful for the person who cut me off, because not hitting him meant that I was paying attention. I’m grateful for the person going slow in front of me, because it shows me where my head is. This doesn’t mean I 100% of the time react perfectly, it means I learn from my reactions and I’m grateful for the learning experience.

The beauty of living gratitude is what happens to those things in our lives that bring us joy—They EXPAND! The joy in our hearts fills us to the brim with AWE! Tears pour out of our eyes we are so full. We’ve made space for magic, abundance, blessings, learning, and Divine Energy to work in our lives.

It is not my business how anyone practices their spirituality as I’ve said before, but nothing makes me feel more connected to the Divine as living gratitude does. I feel like I’m connecting on a level of energy that is extremely pure and authentic. I feel God’s love running through me and I can feel my light shining out into the world.

Living gratitude lights our paths for us. We can see clearly when our energy is functioning on a higher level. We aren’t blinded by our own darkness. We are grateful for our dark and our ability to shine light in any dark corner we still have.

How Start Living Gratitude

1. Start by writing in a gratitude journal daily. No, it’s not enough to just think it. Write as much as you can think of each day. Some days may have five things and other days you may find a hundred things, just take the time and really put your energy behind what you are writing.
2. Practice living gratitude with whatever is challenging you. This is fun. It can be in traffic, in your relationships, in your job, etc. Just practice gratitude until you are literally laughing out loud at what you are coming up with.
3. Share your gratitude with others. Make sure you are letting anyone who touches your life know how grateful you are. This can be fun to do with wait staff, cashiers, customer service reps, family, friends, and romantic partners. Just watching how your gratitude affects others is a truly amazing thing. Remember some people who work at toll booths, subways, trains, airlines, customer service, etc., may not hear that people are grateful for their service all-day long. Your gratitude can make a huge difference.
4. Write down your experiences of showing gratitude. How did showing gratitude affect you and the people you showed it to? Did you notice if that person’s attitude shifted and affected the next person they dealt with? The more details, feelings, and passion you can add, the better! Connecting to the experience helps our brains to put more focus on that area.

Following these steps will help you start living gratitude, but if you don’t do the work, don’t expect the results. I hear people tell me time and time again that they want their lives to be different, but then they don’t do the work so they end up falling into the same unhealthy patterns. The only way to break the old unhealthy patterns is to create new ones to fill the space. That means we have to decide where we want to put our energy and commit to the life we want. Gratitude is the path to a life filled with abundance. There is no lack in gratitude. We always have everything we need right in this moment. Living gratitude is about embracing that.

Challenges are still going to happen and often it’s what knocks people off of the gratitude path. We get a taste of how good it gets, then a challenge comes up and we say, living gratitude obviously doesn’t work for me. The good stuff is practice for the challenges. If we stay the course, and stay open to learning from our challenges, we find the blessings. The chaos and drama periods of our lives become shorter and shorter, not always because the circumstances change— We change!

With Love and Gratitude,

Rachael Wolff ©2019

Don’t forget to read today’s companion piece: 90-Day A Better Me Letters Series: Day 71 -Living Gratitude In My Daily Life