Gratitude – How to be thankful in trying times

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It is easy to be grateful, to have that attitude of gratitude on a sunny day when the sky is blue and all is well with your world. It is much harder to count your blessing when you are sad or when life is not going well for you.

Today I noticed that the subject of the personal development campfire over at Eden Journal was “giving thanks” to acknowledge that it is fast approaching Thanksgiving in the US.

The nearest we have in the UK to Thanksgiving is a harvest festival which is a religious celebration mainly still kept in the countryside during September to celebrate the farm harvests. History is not a strong point for me but I believe that the first American Thanksgiving was celebrated to give thanks to God for helping the Pilgrim Fathers survive great hardship during their first winter in New England.

If there had been no hard winter for the Pilgrim Fathers would Thanksgiving exist?

Over the years I have become very grateful for the lessons that adversity has taught me personally and also through the bad times that other have experienced and shared with me. It is the hard times that have taught me how to be grateful.

It is during the trying times that expressing gratitude can make the biggest difference to how you feel. Being grateful can raise your spirits. When you can appreciate something and be grateful for it even the darkest parts of your life become lighter. Counting your blessings is a mood enhancer of the first order.

So when you are feeling that your back is against the wall, when life feels hopeless and you feel that you have nothing to be grateful here is an emergency gratitude list of things you might want to consider.

Be Grateful for:-

Health –

When you have your health you have a thousand wishes – when you don’t have good health you only have one wish.

Perhaps if we could remember to be thankful for our health we would take better care of it. We would not push ourselves to the limits of our mental and physical health working long hours and worrying about the “what ifs”. Perhaps we stop trying to please everyone and realise that looking after ourselves is the greatest gift we can give to the people we love and who love us.

You fit your own oxygen mask first, on an aeroplane so that you can save the life of others.

Adversity – Be thankful for the times when “life dealt you a rotten hand”. No I am not saying that you should be grateful for the bad events themselves but be grateful for how those events shaped your life and for the understanding that they brought you.

“Adversity has the effect of eliciting talents that would otherwise have lain dormant” Horace

My mother died when I was 7 and that did shape and colour my views on life. It made me realise how fragile life is and how life can turn on a sixpence. It taught me to live for today and for that I am grateful.

Every time you experience adversity and come through it you may have the battle scars but you survived and this gives you the proof that you can go on.

The teachers- Be thankful for the people in your life who have taught you something. I don’t necessary mean a teacher at school. I mean the people who affected you who made an impact in your life. Those people who showed you what true courage looks like, who taught you what it is to give and receive love; the people who inspire you.

Be grateful for those who were a completely bad example because they have shown you how not to live your life.

Beauty – Be grateful for anything around you that is beautiful. Beauty exists even in the darkest of places. It is all around you if you open your eyes and look. What can you see when you look around- when you really look?

So when life has been really hard for you what have you been grateful for?

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Tagged as: adversity, attitude of gratitude, emergency, emotion, grateful, gratitude, harvest festival, human interest, life, personal development, positive mental attitude, positive psychology, thankful