Is your life moving toward your vision, your goals, your dreams, or are you stuck, feeling that no matter what you do you can’t get out of that place you’re in and don’t want to be? On the surface it seems a paradox to say that gratitude is vital to moving forward, so let’s examine our premise that gratitude - for everything in our lives, both “good” and “bad” - is essential to moving forward.

We attract exactly what we think about. If we are in the space of being unhappy with what we have and constantly think about what it is that we don’t want, the Universe will be certain to give us more of it. However, if we can find something – anything - positive about what we are interpreting as “bad,” and then be genuinely grateful for that, we will create space for ourselves to move forward. One way to do that is to analyze what lessons we can learn from where we are and what we have experienced. Every experience in our lives has a lesson to offer and every lesson, even the very difficult ones, are deserving of our gratitude.

What we resist pushes back with equal force. If we are in a place where we don’t want to be and we continually resist being there, we have no space to go anywhere else. We must know that we are exactly where we are supposed to be at any given time in our lives (if we’re not where we are supposed to be, we would be somewhere else!) and be grateful. Again, look at the lessons to be learned. One lesson to be learned from this Universal law is that by wishing for what we don’t have, rather than being grateful for what we have, we make what isn’t more important than what is. How much sense does that make? Create gratitude for what is because it’s all you have. Once we do that – you guessed it – there’s space to move forward.

All our life experiences are intrinsically valuable. My mentor has taught me that everything we experience in our lives, even pain and abuse and illness and poverty and war, contribute to what we need to learn in order to fulfill our lives’ purpose. That realization turned a childhood filled with abuse around for me and allowed me to accept what happened to me as a gift. From that gift, I was able to first learn about love and compassion and forgiveness so that I can now teach love and compassion and forgiveness in the world. How grateful I am for those experiences!

Awareness is the first step. Start becoming aware of what you are thinking. Most of us are thinking all the time and are rarely aware of those thoughts. Are your thoughts (the chatter that goes on in your head all the time) positive or negative, constructive or destructive? Start to be aware of your thoughts. Be grateful for the positive ones and start to recreate the negative ones into something you can be grateful for. In the beginning this exercise requires constant vigilance. Keep reminding yourself to check out what you are thinking. Post notes to yourself on the walls and mirrors, if necessary, but do this. It is essential to creating gratitude in your life and gratitude is essential to creating your vision, your goals and your dreams.

The Universe likes harmony and rewards it. What better way to create harmony than to be grateful for who we are, where we are and what we have in our lives? Remember: whatever it is, our gratitude for it will make it valuable to us.

Rachelle Stern
http://braveheartwomen.com/gratitude