5 Tips to Feeling Grateful

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This week we are off due to Thanksgiving here in the US, and have decided to drive up the coast and take a road trip! This is something I have been wanting to do since I moved to California seven years ago:-) I am so excited to do the famous drive along the Big Sur Highway, which is supposed to be one of the most magnificent drives in the world! We will be staying in Paso Robles at a beautiful beautiful winery first, and then will be making our way up to Monterey. It has been a dream of mine to travel with the kids and provide them with these experiences, and I am grateful this Thanksgiving to be doing just that.

This year I have been invited to participate in a special Thanksgiving giveaway amongst other leaders in this industry, whom I am proud to stand alongside. We are doing a series of giveaways that is going to directly benefit the charity of a little girl of one of my colleagues. It’s her mission to help women feel loved and to see their value. Please stay tuned for more details coming via email on this, and there will be many opportunities to further your own growth and development through these generous giveaways.In today’s article, I share some tips I have found to be useful in creating a gratitude practice.Have a wonderful Thanksgiving to those of you in the US who are celebrating!

I have struggled over the years to create a meaningful gratitude practice if I’m being really honest. The thought of writing out every single thing that I am grateful for every day felt daunting and overwhelming, and therefore defeated the entire purpose. Here are my top gratitude practices that I have found to be the most effective in elevating my energy, and helping me feel more connected and grateful.

Tip number one: connect with nature. I haven’t found anything to be as powerful then being out in nature. I was reminded earlier this week when I went on my first jog on the beach since having to say goodbye to Roxy, how much time I’ve spent over the last 10 years in nature. We’ve always lived somewhere near nature – whether it be near the Botanical Gardens and trails in Canada, to the mountains and ocean in California. We walked and jogged many miles together. This was and is a necessity for me. Being in nature helps me feel very connected to this guiding force that is so much bigger than all of us. It’s during this time that I am able to fully stand in a place of gratitude. I definitely feel grateful for the things I have in life – including an amazing family, living where we want to live, and doing the things we want to do – but it expands to being thankful for so much more. I am thankful for the connection and the love I feel in my heart when I am out in nature. It’s kind of a hard thing to explain until you’ve experienced it for yourself, but all I can say is that when I’m out in nature I can truly appreciate the beauty of life.

Tip number two: creating a morning gratitude practice. I believe it was Oprah who shared her gratitude practice, where she write down five things she’s grateful for every morning. This practice really resonated for me because it did not have to be such a daunting and overwhelming task. Even though it’s short, it activates and invokes the feelings of gratitude in a very powerful way. I have adopted this practice and have been doing this for quite a while now, and it helps me to realize I’m thankful for the smallest things in life. Our practice doesn’t have to be about grandiose things, it can just be about noticing what is meaningful to us even if they seem small. I’ll often write down that I’m thankful for hearing the birds chirp, for our dog Roxy, and even just sitting outside and taking the time to meditate. We can be thankful for the seemingly smallest of things, but it’s the feeling that it invokes that is going to be the most impactful. It’s not so much what we’re thankful for, it’s more about being thankful at all. I like to include this practice after my morning meditation and visualization, over coffee.

Tip number three: I love to include in my gratitude practice something I’m thankful for that hasn’t happened yet. This sets the tone for creating a strong intention for the day. Sometimes this looks like receiving miracles, other times it looks like having strong connections with others, and often having a an amazing an unexpected day. Low and behold this always takes place, often in the most unexpected ways.

Tip number four: it can be hard sometimes for us to receive. I was chatting about this with the client the other day, and basically the law of attraction is about receiving. It’s about doing what makes us feel good and receiving more of just that. Doing what makes us feel good needs to start with us making the decision to allow ourselves to do that. So one thing I also write down in my gratitude practice is a sixth thing that I am thankful for receiving in my life. This could be as simple as a taking the time to have a hot bath, going to a yoga class, receiving the love and generosity that went into my husband making a meal for the family, to receiving great clients connections and business opportunities. This balances out giving with receiving.

Tip number five: Re-frame. Even in our darkest of hours and heaviest of feelings, we can always find something to be grateful and thankful for. Having a simple reframe and being able to catch this in the moment is super powerful. I have found if we stop and take a breath and remember to do this in the moment, we can flip the situation and find what we are thankful for instead. This provides an instant shift in energy and we can come back to feeling grateful for whatever is happening in our lives. Stop and take a second, breathe, and then re-frame., This works every time, and the trick is remembering to do it in the moment:-) Let’s all practice this together and watch our energy shift and be elevated to much more love and kindness. Powerful for all right??!!

Namaste friends

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