Author: Ramona Crabtree-Falkner
Have you ever woken up and thought, “Here we go again.” Each day feels like it’s just the same thing day in and day out. Maybe you think there isn’t any joy or excitement to be found.
As we move through each day, we can find it feeling repetitive & tedious. This approach to life can cause great sorrow and suffering in our lives. How do we shift this and open our eyes to the opportunities for joy and excitement?
There are many approaches to help one shift their mindset and actively seek out joy in life. In November, as a society, we focus on being thankful. It’s promoted in our mainstream advertisements and on practically every corner we turn.
I think about this often: if we can offer a month to this concept of being grateful, we can open up to gratitude even more often in our lives – every day of the year!
Choosing gratitude can shift you from lack to abundance and can be life-changing when applied with focus and intention.
Gratitude for the small things is something I have found over my life to be the easiest to forget. It is also the first place to start if you want to live a life with more joy and gratitude.
The practice of actively pursuing gratitude is the key to opening the heart and seeing the world and all you experience through a lens that is softer, kinder, and ultimately more easeful.
If you spend every day looking for things to be grateful for, you will find more gratitude in all things, even the unsavory experiences.
If you want to find more ease and gratefulness in your life, start with one simple practice: waking up and offering gratitude for your life. No matter what is going on in life, you have a gift every day you wake up and begin your day.
The practice of waking up to gratitude can be experienced with the simple awareness in the morning that you are awake and can rise from your rest to take in another day. Upon waking, take a deep breath and say in your mind or out loud: “Thank you for this day of life.”
To take it even further: upon waking, move your body with intention, and with each movement, say “Thank you” for that movement, for breathing, for thinking, or whatever is activated in your awareness.
Beginning your day by choosing to invite gratitude to your life experiences will ultimately offer you the awareness that gratitude can be experienced at any time throughout your day.
The practice of gratitude can be infectious once you invite an audience, and November, with its hyper-focus on the attitude of gratitude, is a great time to create practices to carry with you – beyond this month – into your everyday life.
I offer you this invitation to join in creating a daily connection and practice of gratitude and see where it takes you!
Live Authentically,
Ramona
