By Livia: Easy! You already are!
What?
Yes! All you need to do is look around you and see what you have to be thankful for, and that is enough to take you to Happiness.
How do I be happy and how can I be happy if I do not have the things I want most in the world?
Guess what! What you really want most is to be happy, so why not just be happy to start off with?
Say what?? But how?
So, let me tell you a story. Once I found myself in a far off land. It was the land my parents had been brought up in, and all my life they had told me stories about how wonderful this land was, how beautiful, how gleaming. So, when I was young (relatively) I went there. I had already had 16 years or so experience as an adult, and was at a point in my life where I found myself without a job, without a meaningful relationship, and I was doing a course of study that I was also starting to question.
I did not know if it was really me.
So I took off to the new land, which was not mine, it was my parents’. In my second year there I found myself with a few friends, some of them dubious, no job and certainly no love was looming on the horizon. I intended to stay because I was committed to my decision, but even though I had chosen this, I was still missing my family and friends, and (even though I would never have admitted it back then), I was missing the life I had had back home. In short, I was feeling lonely and miserable.
Then a friend gave me a book. The book was written by an accomplished author, who had worked with the author of ‘Celestine Prophecy’. It was full of stories written about successful people’s lives, and quite frankly it was irritating me! Because my life was far from successful. Then I found a paragraph, maybe it was not even the whole paragraph, but those few lines helped me more than the whole book.
It simply said, to look around you and be grateful for all you have. Be Actively grateful, be Consciously grateful for what you have, and what you are, right here, right now. So I did, and that is where the magic started.
To begin with, simple things, I said thank you for the warm, soft bed I had to sleep in, thankful for the food I had to eat, thankful for all the new things I had every day, and then one thing I was very grateful for was to be surrounded by the language I loved, every day. Everyone, everywhere was speaking it, all the time, this was something I could never have had at home. I reflected that, whenever I considered returning home, I would think about all that I would miss in the new land. When I thought about staying in the new land, I thought about all that I would miss if I went home. I realized I was spending all my time thinking about the lack, about what I did not have, and no time at all thinking about abundance, about what I did have. That was the turning point for me, then the magic began, I was saying thank you for such simple things and feeling so happy – thank you for the bed, thank you for the food, thank you for the kitchen to cook food in, thank you for the clean running water, thank you for the legs to walk with, the mouth to talk with, the eyes to see with, when you really start to list everything you have you wonder how anyone living a life of such luxury could ever be unhappy! What helps to understand the importance of gratitude is to think of a garden. What is in the garden? Beautiful plants, water, air and soil, the ground. Plants begin with the ground: the humble, colorless dirt. Without the ground there would be no base to hold the nutrients, no moisture they need to grow, nowhere for them to fix their roots as they push their heads towards the sky.
So it is with the garden of your life. If it is to flower, it must begin from the Ground, and the Ground is Gratitude.
If you get to see the video called ‘The Secret’, check out the last few minutes of the film. The real secret is revealed there: the main authors interviewed throughout the film come back and say things like;
‘I did not get all these things because I needed them to be happy, I got all these things Because I was already happy.’ Or “I did it all for the joy of it, for the ‘Joy of it’“. So these people, the best selling authors, amongst the most successful people of the world, achieved all their success through the ‘Joy of it’.
So this is the true meaning of the law of attraction. Most people think of it as asking for things, asking for things and getting them, getting more, becoming more. Howeverm that is only part of the story.
Nothing comes that is not already there.
The important thing is to be happy. Be happy now. Being happy is your ground zero.
Gratitude is the vehicle, the limo that takes you there. Happiness is what you have when you have nothing else. Happiness is what you have when you have everything. Happiness is your foundation. You are happy now, and because you are happy, everything else that you want to do, or have, or be, just for fun, just for the ‘joy of it’ will happily and naturally come to you.
Does the following statement make sense to you now?
Guess what, what most people really want most in the world is to be happy, so would it not make sense to be happy first?
Gratitude is the vehicle that will take you there. Try it. A simple exercise. Wake up in the morning and smile and say ‘thank you’. You can start with the little things, material things, the comfortable bed you just slept in, the warmth of the covers, the fresh air you breathe, the clean drinking water you shower in. How many people in the world has that sort of wealth?
Think of five things, and do not just think them, write them down. As you go about the day, keep noticing all the things you have that make your life so easy, a dishwasher, a washing machine, a car, running water in the house, the telephone, smartphone, etc.
It is not necessary to spend a lot of time on this exercise. It is important to do it consistently, and every day you will find more and more things coming to you. You will realise that there is a plethora of things to be grateful for.
You will start to see that even things you thought of as negative can be turned around and made positive through the simple act of gratitude.
The main point of doing this exercise is that you will find yourself just feeling happy.
The sensation will come upon you gradually at first, silently, insidiously install itself in your psyche,
until suddenly, one day you realise that you are actually happy most of the time. Then you can start
your affirmations. Because then you will have your ground.
Another tip for hitting the G (gratitude) spot is the amount of time you need to repeat this exercise. Repeat it 42 times.
Write 5 things to be grateful for 3 times a day for 42 days. If you skip a day, you need to begin again from day 1. This is because we have a physiological time for something to become a habit.
Do this exercise and you will join the ranks of the most successful people in the world.
Do this exercise, and you will understand happiness, as all things, comes from within.
Love and Light,
Livia
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