How to harness the potent force of gratitude during the spare moments of your day.
You can use spare moments during your day to build a powerful attitude of gratitude that will leave you immune to circumstances that would normally stress you out and ruin your day. At the end of this short article you will also find a powerful exercise and set of reflections that will build your gratitude muscles and enhance your body image.
If you have been following this blog series on gratitude and thankfulness and doing the gratitude exercises you will probably have a sense of how being grateful for stuff has the power to dramatically alter your sense of well-being. However, to create an enduring sense of gratitude takes a little bit of practice.
Spend 5 minutes a day giving thanks is all you need to do.
The good thing is that you don’t have to spend a lot of time doing it. Just jotting down 10 things per day to be thankful for and asserting that you feel thankful for them will do the trick and takes no longer than 5 minutes. In this context be aware that writing things down does have a greater impact than just mentally listing things because more of your neurology is involved in the process.
Use spare moments during the day building your gratitude muscle.
However, you can mentally list things to be thankful for and assert your gratitude anytime and anywhere you have spare moments during your day to day life. For example, when you are waiting in a queue, while riding on public transport, when stuck in tedious traffic, while walking to work or doing household chores to name but a few. The fact is that there is a lot of time during the day when your brain does not have to be engaged in an activity that that requires your full mental awareness.
When you adopt this practice, you will become immune to circumstances that would normally stress you out such as heavy traffic, waiting in queues or the bad behaviour of others.
Gratitude exercise # 5
Thanking your body
The best way to do this exercise is to memorize the steps and do it in your own time. The steps are as follows:
- Sit with a comfortable erect posture and close your eyes
- Picture your feet and breath into them with a slow comfortable breath
- As you breathe out say a heart-felt thanks to your feet and all the work they do for you.
- Now work your way up your body breathing into and saying thank you to as many parts as come to mind (you might like to have a simple diagram of your body that details the major bones and organs)
- When you have reached the top of your head – say a big thank you to your body and all the work it does in your service.
If you found the exercises helpful, then share the love.
Daily focus
As you go about your day notice the various parts of your body in action. Sink into your body and be aware of what it they are doing. Each time you do something with your body focus on the parts involved and say a silent thankyou to them.
Contemplate that your body is a miraculous entity of over 100 000 billion cells cooperating together to do a whole range of highly complex tasks to keep you alive. For example, in our brain alone there are over 100,000 different tightly controlled chemical reactions occurring ever second. Your body deserves an awful lot of gratitude.
Post Series: The gratitude blogs
- 1.Gratitude: how thankfulness can turbo-charge your life.
- 2.Gratitude: the scientifically proven benefits of being thankful.
- 3.30 transformational quotes about thankfulness and gratitude that will transform you day.
- 4.How to turn everyday items into a source of joy by being thankful.
- 5.How to harness the potent force of gratitude during the spare moments of your day.
- 6.Turbocharge your gratitude attitude by harnessing the power of a talisman.
- 7.Radically change how you relate to people by saying “thank you” with sincerity.
