Lets Face it - Being Human Is Hard Work

If you’re stuck in a rut, gratitude and mindfulness may help you get more out of life and navigate difficult challenges.

Between a long to-do list, endless notifications, and worries about the past and future, it’s not uncommon for days to fly by on autopilot. Then, when a curveball hits, life becomes even more overwhelming.

You’ve heard that gratitude and mindfulness may help, but perhaps you’re unsure where to start. And just how is gratitude related to mindfulness, anyway?

Gratitude allows you to notice your blessings and create balance from life’s difficulties. Mindfulness helps you handle tough times with grace, acceptance, and surrender.

Put simply, gratitude is the intentional practice of noticing the good in your life. It relates to anything that makes you feel grateful, fortunate, or blessed.

Some examples can be…

Family

Friends

Community

Faith/Spirituality

Health

Home

Pets

Job

Your Partner

Personal Belongings

Sentimental Items

Practicing gratitude may improve your overall quality of life in a number of ways, yet it’s not a cure-all. Although it can potentially help with a more balanced perspective, especially when things feel difficult or that they are falling apart.

Painful emotions must be felt – You must feel it to heal it. But that doesn’t mean you have to stay in that level of it forever either. This is where mindfulness can have a positive impact on our lives. This just means being fully aware of the present moment and seeing your reality from a place of non-judgment, if possible.

Whether you pause to notice and accept your thoughts, reactions, actions or feelings; you extend your awareness to your surroundings and environment; or you direct your thoughts away from the past and future, allowing yourself to root down into the ‘here and now’; these are all ways to redirect from the mayhem into mindfulness.

When you combine mindfulness and gratitude, it allows you to acknowledge the blessings in your everyday life and sit with this moment, right now. All of this something we learn, grow and practice, one moment at a time. A simple exercise we can do is to set a gratitude alarm. Set it for a random time in each day. When the alarm goes off, go through your sense (what you see, smell, taste, touch, and hear) then think of three things you are grateful for.

Gratitude and mindfulness are powerful on their own. But combined, they may help you enjoy the present moment and navigate life’s challenges as they arise.

Let’s keep going together,

Pamela