Five great reasons to cultivate gratitude as a habitual response.
by Margaret Ruth
Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos into order, confusion into clarity. It turns problems into gifts, failures into successes, the unexpected into perfect timing and mistakes into important events. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today and creates a vision for tomorrow.
—Melodie Beattie
Sitting down to turkey, dressing and gravy earlier in October, I attended a thanks-giving dinner marking the final in-person gathering for an Internet group of Seth readers, with whom I have interacted for nearly a decade. This group of highly developed intuitives and psychics from around the country knew that giving thanks for the blessings stemming from past meetings, using the comfortable American dinner tradition, would be the most powerful ritual for alleviating the bittersweet sadness of this final meeting—by turning our round-table expressions of thank-you into healing inspirations.
For centuries, spiritual teachers have known that thankfulness, gratitude and appreciation are some of the most effective ways to increase life’s blessings; and it’s wonderful that American culture has even set aside a holiday that encourages us to take advantage of this. Focusing on giving thanks as often as possible this and every month will help us to open to inner wisdom and the spontaneous flow of our multifaceted lives. By doing this as often as we can, appreciation and thanks-giving become ingrained habits. Here are five great reasons to cultivate gratitude as a habitual response.
1. Taking time to be thankful reminds us of the good things in our lives. This helps improve our mood and our confidence. When we give thanks we literally raise our vibration.
2. Turning our attention toward things we like means we turn attention away from those we dislike. What we give attention to in our lives tends to increase because we are spending mental, emotional, physical or psychic energy on it. If you like to read the Seth books, channeled by Jane Roberts, or the contemporary writings of Esther Hicks channeling Abraham, such as “Ask And It Is Given,” then you understand focusing on things that make us happy brings more happiness into our lives because of this energetic focus.
3. Our beliefs about ourselves and our lives shape much of our daily experience. Believing good things always surround us increases that experience, resulting in a perpetual positive cycle.
4. The practice of appreciating what we have increases our attention on our experiences and feelings and expands self-awareness, an important goal for those interested in great mental, emotional physical and psychic well being. We acquire the habit of noticing beliefs, assumptions, feelings and experiences when we constantly look for things to be thankful for.
5. Expressing thanks to others is not only polite, but also encourages others to want to give their gifts again. Most people enjoy the thought that we appreciate their time and efforts. Our thanking them bestows this higher vibrational energy upon them. They feel good, and we do, too.
Happy Thanksgiving to us and, oh, yes: Thank you for reading this and CATALYST!
If the only prayer you said in your whole life was, “Thank you,” that would suffice.
—Meister Eckhart
Margaret Ruth is a longtime popular psychic living in Salt Lake City. She develops and teaches transformational classes for Lifelong Learning at the University of Utah, is the author of “Superconscious Connections: The Simple Psychic Truths of Perfectly Satisfying Relationships” (Sept 2010) and blogs at Huffington Post and Intent.com. Find her at www.margaretruth.com.