Empower Newsletter – March 2018
Welcome to the March 2018 edition of the Empower Newsletter. This month the focus is on the power of gratitude and how you can use it to create more happiness in your life. |
Did you know?
|
‘gratitude unlocks the fullness of life’
It was at Yoga that I was reminded how powerful it is to be grateful! Grateful for everything big and small that we have in our lives and the shift it can have on our emotions. It has the power to not only pull us out of our heads and back into the now, but also to leave us feeling more content.
The class started with this beautiful quote by Medody Beattie: -
Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today and creates a vision for tomorrow.
I have written about ‘gratitude’ before and how, I believe, it is the secret to happiness. And although most of us know this, it can be so easy to lose sight of what we have in our lives and instead get caught up in what we don’t have or with things that are happening with us and around us.
This stops us living in the ‘now’ and enjoying the present moment!
There are so many things to be thankful for. If you have trouble thinking of some things in your life to be grateful for, start with some basics like having a roof over your head, enough food to eat, a hot shower every day, clean water, a bed to sleep in, etc. Then move onto bigger reasons. For example, your health, your eye sight and hearing, people in your life you love, being loved, having a job, a car, enough money to buy things you want and having a choice. Gratitude doesn’t stop there. What about the feelings we have about ourselves that can include feeling safe, secure, connected, and the sense of contribution and significance.
There is only one way to see what a difference being grateful will make to your inner happiness, and that is to ‘just do it.’ Whether it is a ritual each morning when you wake up or something you do throughout the day, it doesn’t matter. It will soon become a way of being because the feelings created by it will become addictive and you will continually reap the benefits.
Definition |
Gratitude
Thankfulness, gratefulness, or appreciation is a feeling or attitude in acknowledgment of a benefit that one has received or will receive.
Something to Ponder |
Experiencing and expressing gratitude is an important part of any spiritual practice. It opens the heart and activates positive emotion centres in the brain. Regular practice of gratitude can change the way our brain neurons fire into more positive automatic patterns. The positive emotions we evoke can soothe distress and broaden our thinking patterns so we develop a larger and more expansive view of our lives. Gratitude is an emotion of connectedness, which reminds us we are part of a larger universe with all living things.
~ Psychologytoday.com ~
Quote of the Month |
“Be thankful for what you have; you’ll end up having more. If you concentrate on what you don’t have, you will never, ever have enough.”
~ Oprah Windrey ~
Affirmation Corner |
‘I am so grateful for everything in my life.’
Newsletters | Di | 
February 28, 2018 2:00 pm
Subscribe