Estimated reading time: 2 1/2 minutes
Gratitude, optimism, and kindness are integral in living a life of peace, joy, and happiness. When you express gratitude, optimism, and kindness, it generates a beautiful energy that shines from you. It feels good to share gratitude, optimism, and kindness. Not for reward or from expectation, but because you want to share the joy you feel inside. As well as being able to give love regarding gratitude and kindness, it is equally important to allow yourself to receive love.
Dr’s Harville Hendrix and Helen LaKelly Hunt are internationally renowned relationship therapists. Through their work, they discovered that many people find it easier to give love rather that receive it. Maintaining a natural balance in giving and receiving love is important to feel happy. Softening and opening your heart is the key.
Finding it more difficult to receive love than give love can relate to having had a traumatic experience. Trauma can make you nervous about letting people get too close to you in case you get hurt. By looking at the trauma, making peace with it and forgiving those involved can be helpful in beginning to trust in love again. Forgiveness, compassion, and understanding help to melt away defences and let you feel more open and safe in receiving love.
Happiness researcher, Sonja Lyubormirsky, has found that expressing gratitude just once a week, for ten minutes, over a six-month period, substantially increases happiness levels. You can express gratitude in a journal or on the go as events occur in your life. There are many ways to express gratitude. You can say thank you to people directly, pick up the phone, write a letter, send an email, or give someone a hug, for example—the possibilities are endless. And they make you both feel good. Gratitude and happiness go hand in hand. When you feel loving towards your friend, for example, you automatically feel grateful that they are in your life. It is impossible to feel grateful and unhappy at the same time.
The energy of transformation is one of hope and love. By accepting where we are in our lives, while taking positive steps to achieve our goals with an optimistic view, anything becomes possible. Where focus goes, energy flows.
Gratitude, optimism, and kindness are the greatest gifts you can give to yourself and others. Feeling ungrateful towards life drains your energy and causes pain, as you resist what is already there. When you accept yourself as you are, you can start to relax and focus on reframing situations to support you in the best possible way. For example, you may be unhappy with your height, but this is a predetermined factor that is easier to accept than struggle against. However, you can change the way you think about your height.
Thinking is something you have complete control over.It is possible to find positive aspects about being either tall or short. When you accept the things you can’t change and are grateful for what you have, you keep your energy flowing rather than creating resistance and pain around a situation.
Gratitude can bring a whole new meaning to a situation. Gratitude can turn mistakes into opportunities that create understanding and help you to learn and grow. It can turn sorrow into hope; pain into love. When you look at a situation that previously made you insecure and fearful through the eyes of compassion and kindness, your heart softens—opening and allowing you to flow with life in a more joyful way.
Gratitude, optimism, and kindness are expressions of positive energy and love. Positive energy attracts positive situations into your life, as like attracts like. Expressing love towards others and yourself allows you to embrace the natural joy of life.
Gratitude and happiness go hand in hand.
To find out more about feeling happy see: Bliss Every Day eCourse
