Count Your Blessings!

Count Your Blessings

and experience some authentic happiness

Want to travel the super-highway to your heart? Try the attitude of gratitude and count your blessings. This is a sure-fire method to experience some authentic happiness in your life.

Let’s get clear about what kind of happiness we’re aiming for first. Happiness is experienced on three levels: pleasure, contentment and joy.

On the first level pleasure causes you to feel happiness. Pleasure can come from the next pay cheque, a satisfying holiday, an enjoyable meal and a box of chocolates. They’re great but they only have one problem: the feelings never last. Many people make the mistake of going for pleasures instead of happiness and in doing so they’re on a quest with no ending.

Contentment will provide you with a little more solid happiness and is longer term as such. You’ll find happiness from being satisfied with your home, your job, your partner. But you’re still dependant on factors outside you to maintain your feelings of happiness.

What you really want to aim for is joy.

“Joy is not an emotion; it’s a way of being, a state of mind (or rather a state of heart) that is available to everybody. It isn’t found in things, it is found in us. Just as the sun is always shining somewhere but we don’t see it, so life’s experiences and our limiting beliefs cloud the happiness that we were born with.” – says Ben Renshaw again. And I agree.

Martin Seligman, professor in psychology and the author of Authentic Happiness, does research about what makes people happy. And even more important: what keeps them happy. Fond memories, a feeling of commitment, the right livelihood, hope and trust in the future make a good start. But the essential ingredient is a feeling of gratitude and appreciation. Combine any of above characteristics with gratitude and you’ve got yourself a winner.

Gratitude not only enhances happy feelings, it sustains them as well. Experience appreciation in your heart and you’ll be well equipped control your moods. And that does more good to your immune system than a bowl full of vitamin and mineral supplements.

Gratitude in Action!

So start making a list: what are you grateful for? What can you appreciate in your surroundings? No matter how miserable your life has been until now, there is always something to feel grateful about.

A beautiful sunset, the laughter of a child, one pair of socks in your drawers without holes in them, today again no virus in your computer, it’s spring again – summer, fall, winter, having accidentally stumbled upon this book!

This may seem like seeking happiness in pleasure and contentment, but there is a difference. When you take a moment to realize what you’re grateful for in this moment, you live in the here and now. Which never begins and never ends. So all of the sudden you find yourself to be eternally happy!

Count your blessing and you will begin to find joy in your life. It’s in your heart. Thus every time you do this exercise, your focus will automatically be drawn to your heart. And with your focus in the right place and your heart feeling content, it starts producing those desired Happiness Hormones.

Feel blessed, be happy!

(From the chapter 'Can you hear your heart?')

Grateful Kittens

When people want to ridicule those who conserve and protect the Earth, they call them "tree-huggers." Maybe that's not such a disrespectful description when hugging a tree means showing gratitude. We had an example of "tree-hugging" recently when Cuddles, our kitten, sparked the fire of gratitude in our hearts.

www.the-cats-meow.com