ONE of the greatest gifts we can bring to our lives is, without doubt, the ‘Power of Gratitude’.
You might well ask why is this so? The answer is because it is a ‘truth’ and the truth works. We can play with this and say it works because it is a truth or it is a truth because it works.
The next obvious question is ‘why does it work’.
In the life of a normal human being there are two parts to our existence. There is the thinking mind (the ego) and there is the body (self).
In our everyday unaware lives we treat these as two separate entities. An example of this is when we say things like “I(ego) love myself (body) or I hate myself when I do that. We must thus ask who is the ‘I’ and who is the ‘self’ in both of the fore mentioned statements.
The answer is the I is the ego thinking mind which always has an opinion and doesn’t actually exist as thoughts don’t exist and the self is our physical body (a conglomeration of cells) which does exist. There is a strong school of thought which says that these cells don’t exist either and that we are each just a ball of vibrating energy but that is for another discussion.
I align myself with the concept that we are a conglomeration of cells which in reality is a ball of energy vibrating at a particular frequency.
This is what is known as the ‘inner self’ or the inner child which is present in each one of us. I find it a very useful tool to give this inner child a name, in my case I call it ‘Martin’ as that is my middle name.
It is important to appreciate the concept of the inner child in order to appreciate why gratitude works.
In my routine everyday life if I am regularly unhappy and complaining about my situation and even though I might be completely unaware of it, I am sending subliminal messages (Ego) to ‘Martin’ that all is not well.
My thought process (Ego) – and remember we have over 60,000 thoughts in a day – is sending messages to Martin that I am unhappy.
When I came into the world I was absolutely and completely born happy and ‘Martin ‘was happy but now I am sending strong messages of unhappiness and eventually and inevitably I will wear ‘Martin’ down and he will feel totally dejected.
This is often played out in the field of the subconscious and we are often completely unaware that we are doing it to ourselves. If you scolded a child on a regular basis it is obvious that that child would be unhappy too.
The good news here is if we change our thought process and increase the positive thoughts and reduce our negative thoughts we can send different energetic subliminal messages to Martin and we can effectively make Martin happy (the practice of meditation and mindfulness is vital here as it teaches us to observe our thoughts and not get caught up in them).
To do this we must show gratitude as regularly as we can during each day for as many situations as we can. Even when life appears difficult we can show gratitude for the moment as often difficult situations are great teachers in life.
Rather than judging the situation we could ask the question ‘what is life teaching me now?’. Being ‘grateful for the moment’ on a regular basis will cause the cells of our body (Martin) to vibrate at a different and happier frequency.
Like many things in life this change in inner happiness does not happen overnight but with constant vigilance, awareness and non-judgemental practice of meditation it is guaranteed to work. Why? Because it is a truth! If ‘Martin’ is happy, I’m happy!
More on gratitude next week.
• Roger Harty is a life coach and can be contacted on 087-6128336, on twitter at @Innerjoyz1 or by email rogharty@gmail.com
