Gratitude

When it comes to maintaining an attitude of GRATITUDE 24/7 let’s face it, it’s bloody challenging to do when problems arise.

Problems encourage us to create solutions and grow.

I started my daily ritual of practicing deliberate GRATITUDE each morning back in 1995.

I’d become a single mother on a pension when I decided to become clean and sober.

My marriage and my relationships with biological family and my drinking and drugging best friends all dissolved away.

I was hospitalised with chronic post traumatic stress.

The sewerage of my violent and abusive childhood began flooding back as the anaesthetic of booze I’d been so efficiently using for almost two decades was removed.

It was in that hospital wedged between a wardrobe and a wall, shaking like a wounded animal that I first started to practice daily GRATITUDE.

A divine bunch of roses had been given to me by gorgeous woman, Beautiful Barb (I still call her that today, she still brings me flowers).

I was consumed with worry that I might lose custody of my two beautiful little boys being so fragile now clean and sober, and emotionally immobilised in a hospital.

The roses were the only beauty I could see this morning so I started giving thanks for her and for them. Then I started to remember my beautiful boys faces and was GRATEFUL to be their mother no matter what the outcome of my hospital stay.

I wrote down that morning more of what I was GRATEFUL for and read it every morning from that day onward adding to it with each passing month and year.

Fast forward almost 19 years now, I still read a much bigger list each morning, yes, every single day.

This ritual of GRATITUDE has saved my sanity and massages daily the habit of remembering my blessings, for what we focus on most definitely grows.

Remaining GRATEFUL helps us identify “luxury” problems that arise only because of our abundant personal and work life.

A better quality of problems showing up in our lives is what we notice when we remember to be GRATEFUL!

So let’s remember today to not only work on our awareness of what we have to be GRATEFUL for, but also on expressing our appreciation by not just feeling but by speaking and acting with GRATITUDE? Feeling GRATITUDE and not expressing it is like wrapping a gift beautifully and not giving it.

I’m not sure whose wise words they are but after I heard it my heart imprinted them as a mantra so they’ve stayed with me throughout the years, especially in dark times of despair …

“It’s not happiness that brings us GRATITUDE, it’s GRATITUDE that brings us happiness.”

I’m genuinely so very GRATEFUL you show up here with to digest our Daily Word Vitamins together.

Lotsa love Cynthia xxx

This Word Vitamin is an excerpt from my latest bookset “The Four Seasons of the Heart”. If you would like to order your own full set of Daily Word Vitamins one for each day of the year, in book form for yourself or as a gift for someone you care about just click on the SHOP tab and place your order.

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