2: The Magic of Gratitude & Cultivating a Daily Practice
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Jo: Hey. Hey, friend. I hope you're having an amazing morning or afternoon or evening or night, whatever time it is that you're listening to this podcast. Today's topic is, in my personal opinion, highly underrated, and that's the power and magic[00:01:00] of gratitude and how to cultivate a daily practice growing up in a lower middle class family in the States, there were many times that money was super tight. We always had what we needed, but going to school, I'd see some of the other kids who always seemed to have more. the name brand, shoes and clothes. And even though in middle school we were wearing uniforms, they were the kids who had Ambercrombie and Fitch and the Dooney and Burke bags. And in high school it was the kids who were always on point with their style. they were all best friends with each other. They were considered the popular kids, it was easy back then to get caught up in that lack mentality of feeling. You're left out and you don't have what you need or what you want. And now I'm so grateful to have had that experience. But back then, and when I think about those times, I had a few really good friends and the contrast between their lifestyles was very, very different.
We all hung out together. We were all part of the same friend group, and [00:02:00] two of these friends in particular, one came from a wealthy family and lived in a prestigious neighborhood, and the other lived in a rundown house, essentially taking care of his two younger siblings on his own because his father was in prison and his mom was rarely ever home. So I was able to see and experience both sides. As an outsider, I always knew that things could always be worse, and that things could always be better. this time period created a lot of interesting perspectives and beliefs, and while I was grateful for everything I had at the time, I hadn't yet experienced the true depth and power of gratitude. It was still very surface level until about 12 years ago.
So what you can expect in today's episode is the benefits of gratitude and why it's so important in manifestation and in your life in general. to have a gratitude practice. So what is gratitude in the first place? Gratitude is acknowledging and appreciating the good things that we have in our lives.
And research has even shown that practicing gratitude has a myriad [00:03:00] of benefits and can have a positive impact on not only our mental health, but our resilience relationships, and even our sleep. , it can reduce stress and anxiety and improve your overall mood. It can help combat feelings of depression and increase overall happiness. It can help us better cope with difficult situations and challenges, it can help us strengthen our relationships by fostering better communication. , and it's even been shown to improve sleep quality and help you fall asleep faster. Now, all of that's amazing, right? And this is where I say, but wait, there's more. Because there really is more. And when we explore how gratitude is linked to manifestation, there's so much we could talk about. There's a reason there are hundreds of books written on this subject.
Gratitude plays a huge role in manifestation, probably a lot bigger than anybody has ever told you before. There's this common saying in the personal development and manifestation world that what you focus on expands, and let me explain a little bit of the science behind what I just said. We have this part of our brain called [00:04:00] the reticular activating system, and what this reticular activating system or RAS does for us is it helps us filter out information based on what we find important.
At any given moment throughout our day, we're being bombarded with 2.3 million bits. of information per second. now, that's a lot more information than our conscious mind can handle. So we've learned and adapted how to filter this information.
Now, in order to filter this information, our minds either generalize, delete, or distort the information, puts them into those three buckets first, then it's further filtered by our values, our beliefs, programs, and meta programs. All of our conditioning that we've picked up as we've gone through life. and that 2.3 million bits of information is filtered down to 126 bits. That's a lot of information that's left out, but that's also all the information that our conscious mind can handle. So what our reticular activating system does is it picks up on the information that we feed it, that we [00:05:00] say is important, and that applies to us, and then it seeks out supporting evidence to reinforce what we believe. So have you ever noticed that when you go out and buy a new car, let's say it's a Mercedes, all of a sudden you're driving around town and you see so many Mercedes on the road. Now, is it because everybody else in your town finally decided to get a Mercedes? No. It's because your reticular activating system picked up on the fact that this car, this Mercedes, is now important to you and it's gonna find more evidence in your external environment to support that. . So by focusing on what you want, you're signaling to your reticular activating system to start picking up on evidence in your external environment that supports what you now deem as important to you. But the energy. behind what you're focusing on is more important than the actual thing you're focusing on itself.
If you're focusing on money, but the energy that you have behind it is an energy of like you just don't have enough money [00:06:00] or you can't seem to make ends meet, or you don't know how you're gonna make rent. , you're going to attract more of that lack because you're focusing on the lack of money. You're focusing on money not being there. However, if you're focusing on money, but the energy behind it now is that of gratitude. being grateful for having money, being grateful be able to pay your bills, being grateful to be able to buy that Starbucks latte or whatever that is. You will attract more reasons to be grateful for having money, and that goes with anything in your life. If you're grateful for having that thing or that experience, you will attract more reasons and more things to be grateful.
So gratitude can help us shift our focus from lack to abundance. And I know that there will be times in your life where you might find it hard to be grateful for things or to find things to be grateful for, but I promise you there's always something there. Always something, no matter how small it is. When you find the little things in your life to be grateful for and you start [00:07:00] practicing gratitude, simply the activity of practicing gratitude will open up the floodgates and attract more things for you to be grateful for. You'll find more and more things in your external environment for you to be grateful for.
Now on the flip side of that coin, if all you can see are things that are going wrong with your life, your reticular activating system is going to pick up more and more things that are wrong with your life. Now, I'm not saying to ignore the things that you don't like in your life because they can be a very good teacher on your journey. It's important for us to have this duality where we can see what we don't want and experience what we don't want so that we know that we don't want it, and then we can create and understand what we do actually want. So if there are things that you don't like in your life, congratulations, you're normal. and you can use those things that you don't like in your life to create something that you do truly want.
The purpose of gratitude isn't about bypassing what you're feeling or completely [00:08:00] ignoring what's going on with your life, and I firmly believe that there's a lot of toxic positivity and spiritual bypassing going on in the manifestation and spirituality community, and I don't agree with it, but that's a whole episode for another time. The purpose of gratitude and having a gratitude practice is to change your perspective. Wayne Dyer said, when you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change, and that's what we're doing when we start our gratitude practice. We're changing the things that we're paying attention to and that changes our perspective, which changes our reality. So how do we get started cultivating a gratitude practice in the first place? I personally like to start and end my days with a gratitude practice, and I've noticed that the longer that I practice gratitude, the more things throughout my day that I find to be grateful for naturally.
And what I recommend to anybody who's starting a gratitude practice is to get the book The Magic by Rhonda Byrne. It's a 21 day gratitude [00:09:00] practice, and each day you have a different assignment. The assignments are super easy. It's a super quick read. You do one a day. and this book will absolutely change your life. It was recommended to me by one of my very dear friends, Mary Rose, and I honestly can't say enough good things about it. I'll leave the link to it down in my show notes, but if you don't want to get that book, no worries. You can simply start practicing gratitude daily by writing down five to 10 things that you're grateful for every morning. Number them out one through five, I like to write them in this format so you start.
Number one. I am so thankful and grateful for blank fill in the blank. It can be anything. And then I move on to number two, same format. I am so thankful and grateful. Fill in the blank all the way down to five or 10. After that, I read them again, either out loud or in my head, and I really feel into the gratitude, really feel into being thankful for whatever it is that I wrote down. And then I say, thank you, thank you, thank you. After each one.
And at night before I go to bed, I [00:10:00] like to out loud, like I am dictating a letter to the universe, say, Dear Universe, thank you so much for, and then I just go on a gratitude rant. Thank you for waking me up this morning. Thank you for my health. Thank you for my family's health. Thank you so much for the beautiful home that we live in.
Thank you so, so much for my toothbrush and the workers that had to make my toothbrush and the manufacturers and the warehouses and all of the things that it took to get that toothbrush to me, and then I start to throw in things that haven't yet happened in my life. Thank you so much for the successful launch of my upcoming program. Thank you so much for my husband's new Tesla. Thank you so much that he now has this amazing car that is reliable and will get [00:11:00] him to work and around town safely. And I just go on and on and on until there's nothing left in my brain. And at that point, it's like a big brain dump and falling asleep is easy.
The reason that I add in things that I'm manifesting or haven't yet come into my physical reality is because your subconscious mind can't tell the difference between what's real and what's imagined. For all it knows, you're grateful for these things because they've actually happened, that normalizes it. To your subconscious mind and what your subconscious mind sees as normal, feels safe, one of the prime directives of your subconscious mind is keep you safe at all costs. And what your subconscious mind deems safe what it sees as normal, whether or not that is actually safe for you or healthy for you, whatever is normal is what your subconscious mind tries to maintain. So by throwing in these things that you're grateful for that haven't yet happened, it starts the normalization process in your subconscious mind, and that [00:12:00] makes it so much easier for all of these things to come.
So my advice to you if you want to start a gratitude practice is to make it a habit. Start every morning with gratitude and end every day with gratitude. you miss a day for whatever reason, don't beat yourself up. Be gracious with yourself and start again the next day or as soon as you remember.
Now, let's talk about some of the challenges that you might face when cultivating a gratitude practice. There's a possibility that you might find this practice extremely hard when you're first starting, and that's okay. You might feel like there's absolutely nothing in your life to be grateful for. Meet yourself where you are. Give yourself some grace and find that one thing. It doesn't have to be big or grandiose. It can be the smallest thing. It can be finding a penny on the ground. , it can be seeing a cloud in the sky that reminds you of something. It can honestly be anything, and it doesn't have to be now. It can be something from your past that you're grateful for. Just find that one thing. and feel gratitude for it, and [00:13:00] the next day, find one more thing or maybe two things just keep going. And as you build this gratitude muscle, you'll find that it becomes easier to find more and more things to be grateful for.
Because remember, we are training our reticular activating system to pick up on things that it might not have been picking up on before. and just like when we're working out, you wouldn't go into the gym and expect to be able to deadlift 300 pounds. If you've never been to the gym or deadlifted anything before, you have to build up that strength and work up to that 300 pounds.
It's the same thing with gratitude. So I challenge you to build up this gratitude muscle. and see how things change in your life in just 21 days. Either do the practices that I described earlier in the episode or pick up the book the Magic, I'd love to know how your gratitude journey is going. So send me a DM on social media or join the Free Rise Empire community. You can find all of the links in the show notes.
I'm so grateful that you're on this journey with me, and I can't wait to [00:14:00] see your transformation. So that's all for today. I love you and I'll see you in the next one.
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