Gratitude

As I lay here propped up in my hospital bed with stitches through my belly, gratitude shines through as by far the word of the day.

Yesterday I started meditating at 9am (yes it’s great to work from home and do what I like on a Tuesday morning).

After about 5 minutes of sitting in posture I started to feel a sharp pain in my lower stomach area. I won’t go into how the day evolved but I will happily say that yesterday was by far the most painful and horrifying day of my life. I withered and cried and screamed in agony for hours on end and to me it felt as though I had been shot point blank in the stomach.

After the longest 14 hours of my life they discovered it was a twisted bowel and I was rushed into surgery.

I awoke an hour or two later to find my world back to normal, plus a few stitches and a pile of red dye all over my abdomen.

And I started to cry, to sob in fact, in gratitude of my incredible life.

There is a practice you can do that will change your life forever.

More so, this practice will change the way you see and experience the world in every single way there is.

It is a simple and delicate practice and it can be done wherever and whenever you like. It will cost you nothing and take no energy to do – yet at the same time, it will save you a fortune and give you access to more energy than you can ever need.

What is the practice?

Well, as you have guessed, it is to be grateful.

Proactively grateful.
Consciously grateful.
Abundantly grateful and outwardly grateful.

It is to express to the people and things around you how much you appreciate them; be it your car, house, plants, friends or parents.

Express it out loud and express it often and your world and those within it will shine brightly and illuminate your life. This habit alone is the most powerful and beautiful habit any person can develop.

“If you look at what you have in life, you’ll always have more. If you look at what you don’t have in life, you’ll never have enough”

In the short breaks between excruciating pains yesterday, I was overwhelmed with gratitude and praise for the health system that cared for me; the nurses, the doctors and the abundance of strong painkillers they had on hand for me at such a serious time of need.

So what’s in it for you?

What’s the payoff of being grateful?

Well today it is glaringly clear what the payoff has been for me: yesterday as I went through the hardest day of my life, I had the pleasure of the best habit in the world being built solidly into my personality:

I was constantly happy – as mad and inconceivable as that may be to you, it is totally normal to me.

Life is just events, events, events.

And I know it is up to me to choose how I react to them. I choose gratitude every hour of every day, and thanks to that solid habit in my life, I made it through yesterday with a smile on the inside. With love and appreciation in my heart and even when I awoke at 1am and it was all over, the first thing I did was to seek the lesson and be grateful that I can now relate to those who have suffered like this before.

It is the lack of gratitude that makes the billionaire frown and scowl. It is the lack of gratitude that makes your children miserable and spoiled. It is the lack of gratitude that makes even you buy more shit you don’t need simply because you don’t appreciate what you already have.

The modern media world we live in perpetuates this and feeds off this:

” You are not okay the way you are. Buy this and you will be better”

That is the basic makeup of today’s advertisements. They count on you being ungrateful of what you already have and that you will want more.

You don’t need more.

By the simple fact that you have the ability to read this message, indicates to me that you already have more than most people in the world… You can read and you have money for food. You probably have a fridge, an oven and a toilet and most of the world does not.

Are you grateful of that? Are you conscious of that?

Write a list of 100 things you are grateful for and read it to yourself in the mirror – while making eye contact with your soul.

Nothing around you will change – and your world will never be the same again. Do it once or do it daily.

Count your blessings not your woes and they will grow beyond your wildest dreams!