When you express gratitude your happiness goes up. Join me to express gratitude for something at the beginning of your day.
I once met a woman on the island of Roatan where I owned and ran a boutique hotel. She told me she was an alcoholic by the age of 13 because she had to work in her parent’s restaurant. She told me thatto release herself from her addiction she woke up every morning to wrote down one thing she was grateful for and after a year she turned her life around.
Gratitude is that powerful it can heal addictions.
What are the barriers between your and happiness in this moment?
Between you and mindfulness in this moment?
We are not our thoughts; they are real but they are not the truth.
We as humans have a negativity bias. We are more focused on the problem. Then we think that we are not ok. This brings feelings of depression and fear. We have fear of failure because we think we are flawed.
We enter a trance of unworthiness. To find happiness we must free ourselves from this but we don’t trust ourselves because we think we are flawed and it becomes a vicious circle. We live how we think we should be and we don’t live true to ourselves.
Fear, anger and shame are all a part of our shadow side.
Awareness of this pattern can help free us from these feelings of unworthiness. When we can understand this negativity bias and that we are simply wired to protect ourselves from danger and that not everything we think is true we can start to understand what is happening inside us.
This is mindfulness.
Accept these feelings and love yourself for who you are as you are.
Look your demons in the eyes and invite them to tea. They are just another part of you and by having tea you can start to integrate these parts into your psyche instead of living fragmented.
Attend and befriend, name what is happening and say yes to it.
These are the two wings of awareness.
This article was inspired from a talk given by Tara Brach