This being the first month of a new year, I feel that it would be good to start listing the most important life lessons I’ve learned that have helped me through this journey I am on so far. These will appear near the end of each and every month with a brief explanation as to how this lesson is important and how it can make your own life better by using it.
The very first thing I will share is what I feel is the absolute most important lesson we all should learn and remember to practice several times a day–especially in times of crisis and trial–is Gratitude!
Gratitude
Being grateful for everything that we have in life is vital to looking past what we feel of as negative and the thought processes of how much we don’t have in life. By looking at what we do have is a great way to interrupt the harmful thought processes of having nothing or little of value in our lives.
A good start is to take the time to sit down and make a list of everything that you are grateful for. At first, this list might be very small. That’s okay! As you practice learning gratitude, you’ll discover that your list grows on a daily basis! For example, your list might look something like this:
- Roof over my head
- food to eat
- clothes to wear
- shoes
- alive
The list doesn’t have to be filled with amazing and expensive things. Just the basics are something to be grateful for! As you explore the things you actually have, your list can grow to include things you once thought of as negative, these things do not need to be overly positive in order for you to be grateful for! Such as:
- Survived car crash
- survived high school
- lived through a war (for our non-American friends/family living abroad and veterans)
- survived verbally abusive family
- survived physically abusive relationship/s
- learned humility
- survived the death of a loved one
- etc
This list can be as detailed or as vague as you feel comfortable, though more detailed helps you to cope and learn to deal with understanding true gratitude. Gratitude doesn’t mean that everything on this list that happened to you was acceptable, just that it did serve a purpose that was helpful to you. While it might be hard to think of a horrible incident in your life as helpful look at it in this one light…how did that event/those events change your life? What did you learn from that/those event/s? Everything we experience in life is a lesson, some are pleasant we are fond of remembering, others are traumatic and leave us scarred, often wishing to never recall or experience again! My point is that everything has a purpose.
Learning to accept what has happened, what we have survived is the first step to true gratitude. Even if it is something as simple and plan as “I survived, because of this, I learned I am stronger than I thought I was.” This simple statement is extremely powerful when it is repeated to yourself over and over again in another even simpler way. “I survived, because I am strong.” Being strong isn’t just about muscles and aggressive behavior. True strength is silent, it is resilient, and it is amazingly powerful! True strength is knowing that one will do what is necessary in order to survive. This might be staying silent when witnessing another being hurt (family domestic abuse) or by allowing the abuse to take place (by not fighting back in an overwhelmingly obvious show of power against an attacker and getting through the attack with as little damage as possible). These do not show weakness, these are strength.
It is easy to think that in order to have anything to be grateful for we must first be worthy of such. I will tell you directly, right now, you are worthy. There is no one and nothing that can tell you your worth! Whatever it is in your life that you want to achieve (within legal reason of course) you are worthy of it! No one has the right to tell you you aren’t worthy of becoming successful! No one has any rights to tell you that you aren’t worthy of the air you breathe! You are worthy of living a life free of pain and hardship.
A wise statement I once heard was this: “When we ask others for advice in how to live our lives, at best, we will live their lives.” When we accept the advice of others and use it to run our own lives, we aren’t living our lives or goals, we are living theirs.
Learning gratitude isn’t easy. For me, it was a very long process, I started down the gratitude path over 10 years ago. My lists were small and very insignificant. My very first list (prior to meeting my husband and having kids) was this:
- Alive
- Roof
- Transportation
- Occasionally Food
- Bed
- loving pets
- feet
- arms
- eyes
Very simple, no? I didn’t always have food…back when this was written, I often went two to three days in between eating…my (then) roommate got her meals at her work, she worked 6 days a week and 12-14 hour shifts. She seldom went hungry. We had no running water (well pump was broken, our landlord refused to fix it), and no heat for winter or cooling for summer. It was a very hard time in my life. I don’t relish looking back. But I now see so much more that I am grateful from that time. Now, I would change that list to reflect this:
- Leak-free roof
- Reliable Transportation
- Still alive and surviving every day
- Warm bed to sleep in
- Food that nourishs me
- Loving pets to keep me sane and company
- Feet to help me move and stay active
- Arms that work and help me to do chores and stay sane
- Eyes that see and allow me to observe my world around me
- Strength in focusing on doing what I must to survive another day
- Endurance to tolerate and survive harsh environments
The list could go on for much longer, but I’m sure you get the point. While it was a horrible thing to endure, I did find the silver lining. Did that make my horrible experience justified? No. During that time I endured horrible physical abuse by my (then) “best-friend” and roommate. Living through all that didn’t justify anything. But I can be grateful for the lessons it taught me.
Learning how to be grateful is so vitally important, and is a very long lesson to learn. One thing I learned while studying Reiki was this one simple Principle: “Just for today, I will be grateful for everything in my life, both good and bad and for everyone and thing in it.”
Being grateful and having gratitude for everything in our lives is essential. Most people actually do this without conscious thought, others of us need to be more focused and mindful of these things. Getting started–as I’ve said before–isn’t always easy. It took me over a decade to really understand and learn how exactly to be grateful for the things I had in my life and over all, close to twenty years to fully appreciate everything that my life has taught me and how all of this has lead me to the path I am on today.
My life has by no means been the absolute worst lived out there, but it also has not been the best. I have had more than my lions share of bad events in life, but I have also learned that while I have always focused on the bad, I have had an equal share of good in my life as well.
Everyone comes to this point in different ways. My husband looks at his life and events through a flow chart, since that’s how his mind works. I have been taught to use a pro/con layout to outline the good/bad ratio in my life to see that everything works out equally, to match every bad thing with a good thing. But honestly the best way to find what you are grateful for and to make your gratitude list is to simply do just that.
Make a list. Fill this list EVERY SINGLE DAY. Make it a priority. Today I am grateful for_______. If you do nothing else, than just write that one sentence and fill in a different answer each day. At the end of the week, look at all your answers. At the end of every month, you’ll have at least 28 different things. When the new month starts, continue it on, with a new item you are grateful for every single day. Don’t worry, you’ll never actually run out of things you’re grateful for! Even if you get so simple as to write “cable tv” and “Bon Jovi ______album”! There is always something to be grateful for! “Cookies”, “brownies”, and you get the idea.
As you slowly go through your life, seeing everything that you have that you’re grateful for, you’ll start to see a pattern. The thoughts of being worthless, having nothing, and nothing good ever happening for you will start to fall away. Of course this only works if you put actual conscious effort into it! When I first start, I put no effort into it, I didn’t see anything good and my lists actually made me more depressed…If this happens, tighten your resolve, and force yourself to be more conscious of the world around you as well as within you!
While it is extremely important to keep yourself firmly grounded when you are very depressed and emotionally distraught, it is also equally important to keep an eye on your internal world within you. Too many people lose connection with that world and instead depend upon medications to tell them how to feel. If you are continuously depressed and no matter what you do can’t figure out why…there is a high chance that there is something in your internal world that is not being addressed that only you have access to!
Not many of us actually want to look inside ourselves and admit that we are our problem. Its a hard thing to know that we’re the one causing harm to our own well being. It was extremely hard for me to stop pointing the finger at all the bad events in my own life and to admit that it was only my own fault for allowing myself to let those events rule my life. When we start looking at the positive in our lives, even if it feels like we have none, we start to see other areas of light in our life as well.
No matter who you are, where you’re life has taken you, please know, you are worth every effort it takes to make you whole and well again! However, that first step is yours and yours alone to take, once you’re ready, the universe will happily do everything it can to make your journey easier with each additional step. All you have to do is take that first step and remember ask for help!
An easy thing to do is just this: “Please Jesus, I can’t do this alone. Send me help, in the form of both Divine and mundane to assist me on this journey.” You don’t need to be a baptized Christian in order to call upon Jesus. After all, Jesus said to call upon him, not the Christian faith, when we need help or guidance. Jesus is love, not to be mistaken for the hatred that has muddled the Christian faith and marred it with evil acts of physical and verbal cruelty.
To wrap up this post, I’m reminding everyone, that we don’t need tons of pills and high-paid therapists to help us to achieve mental and emotional stability. We need only a strong faith in God, Jesus and to call upon the endless source of angels He created to assist us in ever aspect of our lives. Faith is a powerful tool, and it truly requires no religious obligation to believe and to have faith.
I hope my life’s experiences and my journey can help ease someone else’s journey. May I be a light to guide you through your darkness.
In love and light,
Tricia
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