As many of you know, I have recently chosen to do an experiment with focusing my thoughts on things that I am grateful for in my life as soon as I notice a negative thought come up. I have two things to say about this experiment at this point:
1. Gratitude seems to put you in an emotional space of abundance which allows your desires to be more easily experienced and
2. Maintaining focus on gratitude is freaking challenging!
I went a full 7 days of consciously focusing on gratitude and I had a blast. After the first really challenging time, things got easier and I went to work and had a record-breaking number of sessions that day. I was amazed (and yes, grateful, LOL).
The seventh day seemed to go by very quickly and every time I checking in with myself, I noticed that my thoughts were really positive…gratitude was easy! So of course, my focus went on to other things. The eighth day I completely forgot about focusing on gratitude…likely because I spent most of the day feeling like I had an intestinal bug and was in the bathroom more times than I care to recall.
As a side-note, whenever I feel “off” or like I am getting sick, my tendency is to immediately explore if there is something going on with me emotionally, mentally or otherwise that would cause me to feel less than great. And when I looked into this latest “ick”, I discovered and concluded that forcing my thoughts to be positive pushed a lot of lower (negative) emotional energy out of my body to be released. (And I sure did that). After about 5 hours, everything shifted! My energy shot back up, my insides felt normal again and I went about the rest of my day very grateful that the bout had passed.
And then focusing on gratitude became a distant thought. My days got busy, I became frustrated and I decided that it might take a little more conscious effort on my part to retrain my habitual thoughts to be more positive. I mean, think about it…positive people are happier!
I am currently looking into some of the nuts and bolts behind gratitude and why it seems to work with manifestation and will post my findings when I’m done. You know me, always looking into the “how and why” of things.. And until them, I am recommitting to my gratitude experiment as of right now!
