Gratitude is Your Gravity
by Laura Interval
I’ve been hearing a lot about being grateful lately. I’ve read that gratitude will bring abundance and will make your life better. It is a big component of the law of attraction and the power of now. With gratitude, you can manifest wealth and live each moment more consciously. Well, that’s good news for me. I mean, if being grateful is all I have to do, I’m going to get everything I want. Being grateful is easy, right? Well, I’ve learned that it is and it isn’t. As I’ve turned my attention more to gratitude and what it means to me in my life, I’ve realized that I’m not always as grateful as I’d like to think. Sure, I’m grateful when it’s easy. But, when times are tough, when I’m stressed and trying to solve five problems at once, I’ll admit that I’m not overflowing with thanks. Yet this is exactly the time when I need it the most. I’m learning that when I feel lost in frustration, when I’m losing my ground and spinning out of control, gratitude can put me back on my feet. Gratitude is my gravity. We all have times when we feel grounded. We feel sure about our lives and ourselves, we feel calm and confident and we feel grateful. That’s what we want, right? That’s when we feel like we can achieve anything. These are the times when gratitude comes easy. Our job is going well, we have a roof over our head, and we have food and a great family. We have all the tangibles to make us happy and we are grateful. But, why wouldn’t we be? If you win the lotto, gratitude just pours out… but, what about when you don’t? What happens on the day that something goes wrong with your job, or you get in a fight with your family and stress begins to wreck your equilibrium? Suddenly, you don’t feel so calm and you feel your confidence slipping. It can happen so quickly. You have a bad day at work and all of a sudden your life doesn’t look so great. Ok, I’m being dramatic, but it’s happened to me before. When one aspect of my world got shaky it used to affect every aspect of my life. If I had a bad day at work, I’d be pretty sure I’d have a bad evening as well. That residue would just follow me home like a whirlwind of frustration. I wasn’t feeling thankful; I was feeling tense and insecure. So where was my gratitude then? And why couldn’t I access it to ground me and bring my focus back to what's good in my life? The secret to gratitude is practice. I think there’s a big difference between HAVING gratitude, and PRACTICING gratitude. Simply having it is a good positive start but is a more passive way of appreciating what is in your life. It tends to be more reactive and therefore inconsistent. You’re going along in your daily life, some external influence makes you feel good, and bam, you feel grateful. That’s very nice and all, but it’s not a powerful conscious choice. Practicing gratitude is consistently choosing to be grateful every moment for the tremendous abundance you have in your life. Practicing gratitude means focusing on the positive no matter what’s going on and as we know from the rules of the law of attraction, focusing on what’s good in your life will get you more of what’s good in your life. But as I’ve said, it can be harder to practice it when times are tough. If you haven’t established a gratitude practice for yourself, do it right now. Make a list of what you are grateful for. Start with YOU, then what is immediately around you and work your way out. For example: Now, these are all tangible things. I want you to push yourself to practice gratitude for the universe, its power, the wealth that’s on it’s way to you, the success you are going to have, the abundance in your life…etc… Remember that you are always getting results. You are always in the process of getting more or less of what you want. It’s a constantly moving spiral that can only move up or down. The direction is controlled entirely by you, your focus, and your ability to practice gratitude. So the trick is to start to practice it when things are good. When you least feel like it, practice it! Write this list down, and challenge yourself to read it out loud when you are lost in stress. You won’t want to do it. Make yourself. Read this list every time you feel angry or depressed or disconnected from the universe. Your practice will become second nature, your focus will stay positive and your gratitude will become your gravity.
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