These 5 steps will help you feel gratitude even if you don’t feel anything to be grateful about.
What if you feel neither blessed nor grateful? It is the time of forgiveness and gratitude, time of counting blessings. Here’s how.
1. Connect with your feelings
Feel whatever it is that you feel without the guilt or pressure. Don’t suppress your emotions just so you could be in line with the expectations of world. It is your own skin that you have to live in so don’t let anyone tell you how to feel. But put a time limit to this “blues” or otherwise, it could become your state of being.
2. Remember that you’re not lacking anything
Be aware that you’re not lacking anything. Most likely, it is just that you want more or something different from what you already have.
3. Be happy to receive
Pay attention to the way you feel and act when you are on the receiving end. Accept gifts with joy and gratitude. Feel it. Express it. Once you pay attention to the feelings of gratitude you will be able to evoke them again.
4. Start small
Think of the little things that make you genuinely grateful and be present with them – engage all your senses: the smell of the morning coffee, that feeling when your tired body touches the bed in the evening, the taste of your favourite food or hearing the voice of someone dear to your heart. Once you start noticing those little things you will be more open to paying attention to other blessings in your life.
5. Shift your perspective
Shift your perspective from what you want to what you already have. For a moment imagine losing what you already have and then look closely once again at those things. You sure will feel grateful.
Turn your gaze into the circle of your life, look closely at what you have and appreciate it. If your focus is always outside of your life searching for what you don’t have, you will diminish the significance of your blessings. The more you look at what you are missing, the more discontent you will become, but if you focus on what you have, the happier for sure you will be.
“When you realize there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you.” -Lao Tzu