Thankful Tuesday - Reframing 'positivity'.

Photographer credit - Saskia Albers

Learning about gratitude and cultivating gratitude has helped me in my most challenging times. Because let's face it...it is fairly easy to be grateful when things go well! No one "feels" grateful when they have lost a job, or been refused a mortgage deal or maybe having a difficult time in their relationship. I understand it, deeply.

For about five years, I have been keeping a gratitude/wellbeing journal and I try to write on it on a daily basis, or to the most, every two days. It can be a sentence or two, or some days, a paragraph about what I am thankful for. It never takes me more than ten minutes (I promise).

Today, I am grateful for my family. They have been a great support, and source of inspiration in my life.

Trials and suffering can actually refine and deepen gratefulness if we allow them to show us not to take things for granted. At times, I took prosperity for granted and I begin to believe that I was "invulnerable". But there is only so much we can do to control our own destiny.

Life will always be this way; up and down, we constantly navigate between our joys and sorrows, our losses and victories —and then I remember that here I am; able to recall all my personal stories (the good, the bad and the ugly) and making my way out of the dark, always.

Gratitude and meditation have both been positive, enlightening practices for my mental health and wellbeing. Now, it is my turn to share and teach my son, and other children about gratitude; because it is part of my emotional tool box.

Have a beautiful month of October, and the more you plant the seeds of gratitude, the more benefits you will reap.

P