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Mental Health

Gratitude Motivation: 6 Ways to Be Cheerful

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I was armed at all points. It was a pleasure to be so completely equipped for the life battle with my gratitude weapons being polished steel. – Olya Aman

Introduction

T. was a generous spirit. He had all the illumination of wisdom, and yet he was distressfully dying. There seemed to be a happy symmetry in this unhappy depiction of his life. I was touched with wonder at the depths of perception of which this person was capable. His unselfish belief in the idea that gratitude is a way to make the most of life was something I could set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to…

T. had a taint of death, a flavor of mortality in him – which is exactly what I needed to shake my world to the bottom and have a chance to find myself in the thrashed around pieces of it. I hung on every syllable he uttered in his diary, and received, as oracles, all he wrote.

With gratitude, your mind is never cold. It enjoys the pleasure of sincere appreciation of what you have. The positivity behind this feeling is always present. It gives food for pleasurable emotions and breaks the monotony of life. You become intolerable to negative thoughts, odious to your soul, they are smashed by every supreme moment of complete kindness and compassion.

In a grateful state you live as thirsty men drink – sleep with spirit, eat with joy, communicate with virtue, and, to crown the whole, your health becomes void of all those sicknesses that originate from harmful emotions. They have no power over you, your cheerful temper and uplifted spirit keep your bodily health unstained.

1) Gratitude Is a Way to a Far-Reaching and Infinite Happiness

“Of parents extremely poor and extremely honest, it was next to impossible that I could paint my life other than in grateful colors. Our family seemed to be possessed with a kind of intellectual gaiety at the times of the most troublesome hardships. We were able to starve any thoughts of misery and lack of appreciation entirely away by just a mere force of heartfelt love to each other and to the life itself.”

“I often was bruised and felt scant of breath but never ungrateful. Every misfortune walked me away from despair and gave me the key to patience. I was a sick-nurse to my father (my mother died when I was 28 and my father and I never fully recovered after that loss). I was seriously out of health. I caught a violent cold right after the saddest day of our life, which fixed itself on my lungs and threw them into dire confusion.”

No day can go without a speck of some misfortune. However, if you spend at least a moment a day recollecting it with humor and praise with gratitude the opportunity to learn from it – it becomes impossible to let uneasy thoughts hunt you for long.

Be ready to undertake 5 minutes each morning portraying yourself reading a poem about a coming day, composing a piece of wonderful music that will accompany you throughout it, or drawing a beautiful picture that will depict a culminating point of it. While doing it, keep in mind that the principal business of life is to enjoy it.

Every now and then put your thin forefinger on your lips and remind yourself of many blessings in your life that you are sincerely thankful for. Kiss it with a smile on your lips and imagine embracing yourself tenderly. This mode of actions will set every nerve in your body quivering with happy vibes.

2) Gratitude Makes You Light and Incapable of Stupidity

“I had good winters and poor winters. I basked in the sun and went to bed when it rained. And I never forgot to spend a few moments a day reflecting on the things in my life I was blessed with.”

“I was always so odd a mixture of quick parts, sarcastic humor, reserve, and caprice that the experience of knowing me for a short while had been insufficient to satisfy my acquaintances, and those people lingered about me longer to build friendly ties with me stronger. This way I had a daily meeting with someone to be thankful for, an old friend reminding of himself to be grateful for, and a promise of a future pleasant contact to be longing for…”

There is more in the bond with other people in your life that you can put a name to. The real fact is that the knowledge of being respected and loved raises a presumption against unhealthy relationships. It is as if you put a protecting charm on the arm you use to stretch to shake hands with other people.

If you train yourself to care only for truth and kindness, and believing that two intelligent and friendly people ought to look for healthy relationships together, you will feel a great desire to be social, to share your grateful spirit with others.

3) Gratitude Drains the Cup of Health to Your Benefit

“I was determined to live longer, although the doctors professed the limit till just two-and-thirty. Imputing it to nothing but grateful feelings, which for ought I knew, prolonged my life extremely, I was able to make it to these days, waaay past forty.”

“When I was in pain I more often smiled than scowled. That was the foundation of my beauty despite of my many limitations. I had love enough but not too much, I had loss a lot but not unbearable. Had I lived my life again in every detail of desire, temptation, pain and surrender, I would have chosen the exact life I lived to the very aspect of sickness and every element of loss.”

Every day is a blank page, a pure white surface, and you are the only one able to paint it successfully in bright colors. Use art and guile, talent and temper, recognizing friendship, avoiding a mistake and taking care of the state of your body and mind.

Do not let yourself to be easily crushed by negativity. Evoke a multitude of grateful pictures in your mind and thirstily drain the cup of a happy and healthy life.

4) Gratitude Brakes the Monotony of Your Daily Life and Boosts Your Career

“My business affairs never were a dull round of searching a way to follow money, but a charming mode of meeting my expectations. I had a right mixture of the detached and the involved when doing a job which made every day in the office a splendid harmony of classic, calculated activity of the mind, and graceful, whining movement of the body.”

“Gratitude gave me that easy confidence of manner. Always quite up to everything, I was a sort of person you could depend on, and that made me splendidly respectable by my partners and coworkers.”

To build a successful career is to cut clean out of your life scorching pessimistic thinking. Do not let anyone or anything to throw you off an equilibrium which gratitude creates. Networking is gaining in strength by the contented approach. Above all, decision making improves more from good-humor than from gloomy concentration.

Gratitude, when truly genuine, makes you eager to listen, and this skill is essential for managing people and organizations.

5) Gratitude Feeds You by a Spring of Inexhaustible Positive Emotions

“I took no notice of negative people and very little of pessimistic acquaintances. The wealth of positive emotion awakened pleasure and added loveliness and virtue to my life. My heart being overcharged with grateful feelings, made me exposed to the goodness of the world around me. I was able to describe delight, peace of mind, and soft tranquility on paper, voice it to my friends, charge with it my family, and radiate it to the objects, and atmosphere around.”

Wrap yourself in happy memories, grateful emotions, and generous hopes. An open-hearted life is a possible perfection and must be treated with passion and love. Clear, bright, radiant emotional state certainly depends on what you feel toward yourself and others. The actual amount of pleasure you receive from life is exactly proportional to the expanse of compassion and gratitude in the air you are breathing in.

6) Gratitude Resides in Glad and Flourishing Personalities

“The fervency of my personality trembled from sunlight and fragrance. Gratitude created a barrier that was guarding me against cold and cheerless. Like any freezing temperature, those kinds of feelings could preserve but never let life to be developed. Any progress was stopped when in an atmosphere of a pessimistic refrigerator.”

“I looked on nature and my fellow-men and didn’t see the dark and gloomy. The cheerful colors prevailed, and those were reflections from my own grateful eyes. A clear vision was developed in the balmy atmosphere of positive vibrations. My mind rambled at its pleasure and every valuable information was deeply curved in it. My personality flourished with every grateful feeling and every glad emotion.”

Gratitude is the first warm ray of sunshine that, as the story tells us, makes the traveler throw the cloak from his shoulders, when the storm blows as it will, cannot tear it from him. You do not cringe away from the winds of life. Being ready to show appreciation to every obstacle on your way, you supplement them by profitable lessons that make you even stronger.

It does you a good turn when you appear less materialistic, self-centered and more optimistic, and spiritual. Gratitude makes this change possible. It compels you to achieve your goals without any anguish of uncertainty because success does not matter as much as the opportunity to test yourself.

Conclusion

T. died at forty-eight. When I saw him last, he evidently found great difficulty speaking. He waited long to collect himself, and then he murmured simply: “Take this,” and he handed me his diary. That book had a voice that dropped deep into my soul.

The last page contained a message: “Pain passes, but love remains. We suffer so much sometimes. I’m very old when I think about it, but I grow young again when I believe in generous mistakes that hurt, happy tears that burn, and deep adoration that squeezes the heart till every drop of love is revealed. And the only way to see the beauty in life is to be able to open your eyes every morning with extraordinary grateful gladness. Only this feeling will make you beyond the reach of pain.”

Let gratitude to excel every other quality. It would be a relief to cherish people over material things. If you recognize the need to build a habit of practicing appreciation, it will have an exhilarating effect on your nervous system. You will feel calmness and composure in difficult situations when dealing with people, philosophic equanimity facing cataclysms of nature far beyond all human power, and happy in your own quiet way when giving love and returning kindness.

Stay tuned…

Personal Growth

In a Field of Battle With Regret, You Must Either Slay or Be Slain

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My boss fell in love with me and laid me off

Regret made me goofy. Sorrow gave me an enigmatic flavor. – Olya Aman

I was out of heart

The existence of conscience makes the claws of regret sharp. And the stronger one, the deeper the other can penetrate a sensitive flesh. The depressing influence of this feeling creates the sensation of a jail in a living body. This emotion casts a grim look on life. The damp atmosphere that regret creates is suffocating. We need to learn how to dispel the smog from the past and at the same time to keep our hearts from being dried-up.

I was out of humor and out of heart. It has been almost two years now, but my grief grew fast and furious with every succeeding year. My best friend, the one I was secretly in love with, died from heart failure. Miraculously, we were at the stop sign when it happened, the horn of a car announced the death. His innocent and pathetic face was radiant with new happiness. I couldn’t help wondering how he could be so glad to leave me alone. Sitting on a front passenger seat, I unconsciously called to mind a portrait I saw in a gallery some years ago. The painter neglected the background, reserving all the magic of his brush for the quiet, happy face of a man. My friend at that moment looked just like him, as if he had caught the golden glory of heaven on his countenance.

Arm-wrestling with the past

The catastrophes of previous days can darken with a shade of remorse the future ones. Some deeds are done impetuously, others are out of our control. To weather those storms of life and not to be worn out is the actual purpose of their existence. There is no way to change what’s done, so no need to stamp life with the print of past adversities.

He felt discomfort in his chest for a few weeks before the terrible culmination on that day. I mentioned to him several times that he needed to see a doctor. I blamed myself for lack of persistence. And the regret I felt had a sensation of almost maternal protection. Its watchful eye never left my side. It didn’t let my mind wander elsewhere. Some days I could feel the throbbing of his heart as if he was pressed in an affectionate embrace close to my chest. Those days were worse than others.

I would do impossibilities to bring him back. I owed my happiness to him. It felt like an explosion now when he was gone. And I could not pick up the fragments with all the care of an antiquary I applied. I became stifle. My mind and soul were on fire, and that blaze seemed to gleam from hell. There was no space left for new emotions.

That dark, evening power that dominated in my life had some magnetic energy that attracted empathetic people. There are some ways of looking at you that seem to penetrate your soul. I looked at people and made them feel as though they had nothing on. That irritated a lot and captivated many. After all, that sorrow I endured gave me that Renaissance’s ‘Juliet’ flavor. And my gloomy voice could talk the language of enigmatic gallantry of that time.

I often was behind handed with my work, but my senior manager closed his eyes on every mismatch in my schedule. The tension was growing. I could not see the outpouring lava of affection that I excited. My handsome boss was on fire, like a human volcano he loved me with the fierce of unchained nature.

But I was a different person after 2 years of mourning. I gazed about me with a saddened eye, paying attention to the dim side of life. That desire to expand every misfortune in daily life and minimize the impact of many little jolly things was roasting me alive. I needed thunder and lightning to wake me up and transform that death-like, sepulchral look into my regular prior-to-the-fatal-day features.

My heart finally spoke to me, and I happened to take to it. The blow of losing a job served as a curing disaster that shook my essence. When enough time was given to self-wandering, I realized that there were still pages in my life book that I had not read.

Let me tell you what I’ve found on those pages

Arm-wrestling with the past is an exhausting and worthless process. A positive view on days-by-gone creates a profusion of loving energy that motivates a person in his life. Occurrence in the past, bad or good, is a wonderful lesson that builds personality. Everyone is unique because every experience is individual. The way one interprets it determines his success or failure in life. There is no way to change the past, but altering your attitude towards it is magical.

Give a new turn to your thoughts

To be more ardent, more eloquent, more entrancing is a process of growth that often goes hand in hand with ill luck and pain. For the sake of my future happy life, I’ve decided to respect my past. That experience was a tombstone that kept the castle of my unique personality firm and steady. In the enormous mileage of the past, everything is a blessing. Tears poured over some broken expectations should teach a lesson of breathing through the pain and moving with a renewed and re-skilled hope.

Revert the importance

Life is cooler when sometimes less weight is given to the important and more value devoted to the trifling little jolly things. So, in other words, performing a blah with sarcastic importance and taking important for a mumbo-jumbo is quite a good key to a lighter step in life. Various pieces of information assemble the personality and it just happens so that misfortunes give a more positive outcome in terms of helpful life tools than merry experiences could have done.

Let the past be your capital

Trudging timidly through life was a punishment that I inflicted on myself when consciously dwelled on the past with disappointment in my mind. I decided to consider my past experience as a capital that can help me to take the right turn in the right moment in the future.

The result proved to be magnificent

I do not have greedy teeth for blessings, but always remember to be grateful for every little merry moment. That is why life is good-natured to me now. Happiness is the poetry spoken in a woman’s voice. I had my second chance to hear the poem of my life.

Now I and my ex-boss listen to those delicious sounds together.

Stay tuned…