Hello, lovelies! I want to take a few minutes to share with you how I added gratitude to my daily routine and how it became the default in my brain.
For the past few months, I’ve been doing a lot of work on myself and making self-care a priority. As a result, gratitude has become a very important piece of my self-care. When life gets shitty, as it sometimes does, my default used to be allowing whatever had happened to discolour my entire day, month, year, lifetime! I’d beat up on myself mentally and then get mad at myself for giving into the negativity. After joining a 30-day journey of self-discovery, I learned how to create a daily ritual of taking care of myself. I set aside time for gratitude, made a point of journaling about what I was grateful for.
What changed for me was my default, instead of being swept up in a vortex of negativity, I now look for and hold on to the light of every dark situation. For example, when my 20-year-old cat suffered a stroke that led to the end of his life, I could have allowed my grief to swallow me. Twenty years is a long time, half my life and yes the decision to let him go hurt, but it wasn’t a hard decision because I had the knowledge that I’d done everything I could. How it all played out was the best possible way it could play out, there was plenty to be grateful for. I was grateful that I switched vets after he started to go downhill. I was grateful that he had the stroke in the car with me, minutes from the vet, instead of while he was alone. I will be forever grateful that he was lovingly cared for right up to the end. I am grateful that I had 20 years with a healthy asshole of a cat.
I will never compare my grief to that of another, but my situation showed me how my internal world has been changed by adopting the practice of gratitude.
I will leave you with this quote, which came to me just before I started my journey.
“You’ll never change your life until you change something you do daily. The secret to success is found in your daily routine. – Author Unknown