This is how I realized that gratitude is something you feel and not something you do like just writing your gratitude list.
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Date 2010 I was exposed to “The Secret”. It transformed my life and I owe to all the teachers from that documentary for positively affecting my life. One even became my mentor; Jack Canfield whose certification I’ve received to be a Success Principles trainer.
After visualization the biggest thing that The Secret taught me was the “G” word. GRATITUDE.
I was then at a very bad place at my work place. I had to keep up with the negative clubbing of others at my work place to make me feel left out as I was small in age (but not in qualifications, that’s how it might have started)than most of them there . I lived alone at a rented room so had no one to even share my thoughts to disperse the tension I had build up through out the day. My refuse was this documentary and HIMYM (How I met your mother; I have watched the season 4 episode 22 “Right place, Right time” more than 500 times).
So I started writing my gratitude list and I also started keeping a gratitude rock in my pocket. It was a small rock I had found on the road when I was walking to my job. Just any simple rock. Every time I touched the rock; while taking out something from my pocket, I remembered my gratitude list and remembered how I felt while writing that in the journal. I still have the same rock from 2011 with me
Here it is
Long story short, that person who was the problem was relieved from his duty with the whole place coming under my control. I associated this change to my new found practice of gratitude.
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Date 2012 I visualized my way to manifest the biggest thing I had ever asked form The Universe; I was ranked top 3 in the entrance examinations for Masters at BPKIHS and I got to realize my dream of doing my masters. I literally use to visualize my name on the top half of the result; how it would look like on the notice board i’d visualize that. I visualized getting a phone call from someone letting me know I was selected and to my wonderful surprise that’s what happened actually. I was shaking for almost 30 minutes when I got the news. Two other friends were staying at my place and I still remember hugging them and still feel how they were trying to calm me down. Thanks Anil and Bidur for that.
But once there, I started reading for my course and wanted to do good in that and as a result all my practices went right out of the window. The hardship during those years, I subjected them to the system there. Heck, I didn’t had to do any gratitude because I had my wife (girlfriend then) as a living example of why I was so lucky. I had enough strength to face the hardship head on.
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Date 2015 I completed my studies and went to a bigger town for new opportunities and find work. The 3 year of inertia had its hold I did nothing; no visualization, no gratitude. So you can imagine how hard my life might have been. It was a drag and mostly sucked. Only difficulties one after the other. In all area of my life.
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Date 2018 I lived a difficult life for these 4 years. I got married and that got me more serious into getting more things and I now realized I was just after stuffs. I had no gratitude to any of those.
The clothes I wore were to cover my insecurities as a child. I had fancy dinners and posted photos in Facebook and Instagram for validation. I was all doing to make people like me because I thought I was not like-able (the one who could be liked). But never gave thought of being thankful of these opportunity I had. It was for the first time I had my own money to spend and I went wild with it. I was happily giving my money to BRANDS just to feel good about myself, to feel significant.
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Date 2019 March 27th (today) It’s been 4 days since I started doing gratitude practice regularly and I mean fucking seriously. It was Jay Shetty’s video on Ellen show that Ellen DeGeneres had posted. He said about a techniques of thinking of things the first thing in the morning even getting out of bed and last thing you do as you sleep was to think of things you are grateful to have in your life. That was in my head when something magical happened.
I was listening to Mindvalley’s videos on YouTube when Sri Kumar Rao video was playing as I was cooking dinner. He also talked about gratitude. He said: “We must not think of gratitude but feel gratitude”.
After the talk there was a Q and A where he was asked to clarify the above statement. He said we can just think of things in our head and we will have done a good job of ticking it off our to-do list. But that is just thinking gratitude and it has no effect. He asked the audience to think of one moment in life in their past where they were grateful to have something. He then explained that in “feeling gratitude” practice we were to think of things until we feel that same feeling we had when remembering our past grateful moment.
The next day I resolved to combine those two method Jay’s morning and night and Sri‘s method of feeling gratitude. Today is the 4th day and I know this might be too early to make a statement in a blog post but I have to. In the last 2 days itself one of my major monetary issue was solved and something that I had almost given up on just gave me a second chance. It relate it to MY NEW GRATITUDE PRACTICE.
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I now understand why my listing of gratitude mentally after I touched my gratitude stone did not work this time around; I did gratitude rock practice when it got tough but didn’t work. Because I used the same rock, I thought it working in 2011 was an one-off and may be the rock has lost its power (How silly of me, that’s what stress does to you folks). I forgot that it was just a random rock form the street (may be this is how rocks become Gods). I know realize I was thinking gratitude and not feeling it.
Once I stated feeling it I see that my life is changing right before my eyes magically. Gratitude can indeed change your life magically.
Till next time this is Your Awesomeness Coach Ojesh, I love you.
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Your Journey to AWESOMENESS task for Today: Share with me your gratitude practice and if you don’t have one use this and share with me the changes it has resulted in your life. I would love to hear them.