Gratitude!

Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow.~Melody Beattie

We all put a lot of effort into making sure our children learn to express their gratitude by saying thank you. We recognize that saying thank you is not only polite, but if you say it, you have a greater chance of receiving more reasons to say thank you. It works the same way now that we are adults.

By telling God, or the Universe, that you are grateful for what you have, not only are you being polite, but you are also increasing your chances of receiving more to be grateful for.

Make a Gratitude Journal!

So how exactly do you go about all of this? Keeping a gratitude journal is a super easy way to track your blessings and send a big thank you to the guy upstairs. You can keep a log in a simple a notebook or in a bound journal. While I have used both, I really like to use a bound journal with an angel on the cover, or maybe an inspirational quote. My current journal has a chinese proverb on the cover that says:

Just when the caterpillar thought the world was over, it became a butterfly.

Perfect inspiration at the end of a long hard day.

Finding peace...

Once you have your book, write down five things you are thankful for each day. Simple. Simple unless you are really down in the dumps and struggling, and I have certainly been there! If that is where you are, then that is where you are. Take a deep breath and write what you can.

If all you can say is, "Nothing horrible happened today." Then say it. Write it down five times and you are done. I promise that just writing this down will increase your sense of peace. Try it. Write in your gratitude journal everyday for two months and I promise that you will move from seeing very few blessings in your life, to seeing blessings around every corner.

You will actually look for stuff throughout your day just so you can write it down at night. And when you begin to look for the blessings in your life, you will begin to feel greater joy each day. I promise. Soon...you will feel so overwhelmed with blessings, that you will struggle to write down just five.

Don't struggle...write them all down! There are days I that I fill the whole page because I just have so much to be thankful for! Maybe there isn't a lot of money in the checkbook, but I certainly feel quite wealthy at the end of those days!

There is this grand media perception that single moms have empty and downtrodden lives...that we live in a constant state of desperation. This is simply not true. We have the power to create our lives of abundance, and that power begins with the simple act of expressing our gratefulness for the blessings we have right here, on this very day.

Your vision for tomorrow...

When you feel abundantly blessed and full of thankfulness each day, you can't help but feel excited about tomorrow! After I write in my journal and I am lying in bed, I feel so warm and full of goodness. I think, "Wow...what fabulous blessings will tomorrow bring?" I can hardly wait to see what is in store!

Because I felt so thankful for things that had not yet even happened, I began to record those items my journal too.

Thank you for our abundance beyond measure.
Thank you for my Mr. Right.
Thank you for fulfilling my heart's desire.
Thank you for giving me healthy wonderful children who are taking care of me in my old age.

Thanking God for these things that aren't here yet, allows me to feel gratitude for their arrival as if they were here. Dr. Wayne Dyer tells us this is the key to manifestation. This ability to feel as if your desires are already here.

The only trick is that you must keep the phrase in the present tense. If you say, "Thank you that you will someday send my Mr. Right", Mr. Right will not arrive until "someday" comes...which is quite a ways away! It's the concept that "tomorrow" never comes. Keeping your thank yous in the present tense helps assure your future desires arrive in the present!

When you focus on your blessings you will experience increased peace in your day to day life, and you will create the vision of a brighter future for yourself and your family.

Want more?

Simple Abundance, A Day Book of Comfort and Joy, by Sarah Ban Breathnach provides an exercise a day for an entire year to help to appreciate the joys of the present and create a future of abundance.

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