This is my book The Synergy Game. I am serialising it here a chapter a week. Each chapter will be available for everyone to read because, after all, that’s why I’ve written it, to help others, to share what has helped me to rebuild my life. I will be adding extra insights, sharing my poetry and adding audio to a section below for paying members.
Chapter 2 - Embracing Gratitude: From Daily Ritual to Lifeline
“Be grateful for what you already have while you pursue your goals. If you aren’t grateful for what you already have, what makes you think you would be happy with more?”
Roy T Bennett
I first read about the concept of practising gratitude many years ago. I knew about being grateful and that my life was pretty good compared to many. I'd travelled enough to be able to see that. But actually making it a daily practice, something that I was conscious of doing, that was new to me.
I thought it was a good idea so I started keeping a gratitude journal. As I mentioned previously, I would write ten things every day that I was grateful for. It wasn't hard at that time, as my life was running pretty smoothly.
As I said, I started writing in Moleskine journals. Just a page a day for a while. Sometimes I would even write the same or similar things each day. It didn't matter though as writing was helping impress on my mind what I was grateful for, it was reminding me each day of my blessings.
It had a few benefits. As I always did it first thing in the morning while I was drinking my tea, it was a good start to the day. It's difficult to have a really bad day when you've started off thinking about how many great things you have in your life.
Secondly, as this became my regular practice, I found I was noticing more and more things to be grateful for. I was becoming more mindful, more observant. So, I wasn't just showing gratitude for those ten things I'd written in the morning, I was noticing things throughout my day to be grateful for as well.
As I said, it wasn't hard at first. That's why you should never delay starting this practice. Because it's good to be in that habit if things start to become challenging, which is what happened to me.
A couple of years after I started doing this I made a major life change. I left the strict religious group I had been a part of for my whole life. Why I did it is irrelevant here, but the consequences of doing it meant that pretty much all my former friends no longer wanted contact with me. My mother and my brother also cut off all contact and wanted nothing more to do with me.
All of a sudden, I really needed to find ten things to be grateful for every single day. I needed to focus on the good in my life so that the pain of all the rejection didn't overwhelm me. Not surprisingly the rejection by my mother was the hardest to take. That broke my heart.
I have two children and I spent countless hours trying to imagine what they could do that would make me want to never speak to them again. I couldn't think of anything. I imagined the worst crimes they could commit or the most horrid things they could do, and I would still want to be in their lives, I would still love them. I'm their mother ffs! So not being able to comprehend why my own mother would choose to follow some man-made rules and put that first rather than me, her daughter, still to this day is something I will never understand. It hurt, it hurt so much.
Another thing about writing a gratitude list is that you won't believe how good it makes you feel. Just focusing on what you have, instead of what you don't have, what you're missing, is an absolute life changer.
We can always find things that are lacking in our lives, maybe we want more money, more friends, a better job, better health, romance, adventure etc. etc. But the amazing thing is that once you start to focus on what you have, you seem to attract more of it. So, you focus on how that one friend that you have is so special to you and how grateful you are to have her in your life and guess what, you attract more friends like that.
It's not magic, it's the law of attraction or more accurately, the law of vibration. It's the way things work. The universe gives us more of how we feel. So, if we feel happy and grateful, we attract more things to be happy and grateful about. If we feel unhappy and that we are lacking in any way, guess what will happen? The universe responds to our vibe. It reminds me of a bible verse in Matthew 'For to everyone who has, more will be given, and he will have abundance; but from him who does not have, even what he has will be taken away.'
I always used to think it was a bit cruel and miserable for God to do that, but now I realise it has nothing to do with a god, it's we ourselves who determine what we have and what we don't have. It makes total sense to me now. So, if it's our feelings and thoughts that determine our lives, shouldn't we make sure that they are good thoughts and feelings? The best way to do that is to live with gratitude, to make it a daily practice.
Focusing each day on my blessings, no matter how bad I was feeling set me up for my biggest challenge that was to come a couple of years later. This was when my marriage broke up and my fairy tale life came to a screeching halt and turned into a drama with a sad ending. This is when my gratitude practice changed from 'Things I have to be grateful for' to 'Things I have to live for'.
I had to dig so deeply to find my blessings, to find things to be grateful for because it seemed as if there was nothing. But the more I wrote the more I realised that it was the little things, and maybe some of the things I had taken for granted when my life was going so well.
Obviously, I had my daughters and my sister, I had friends. I was beyond grateful for them, but my world had fallen apart and I needed to find reasons to want to see the spring and another birthday. So, I started back at the very beginning.
My morning cup of tea, hearing the birds singing in the tree outside my window, a warm fire, a house I felt safe in, living in a beautiful village with good neighbours, a reliable car to drive (a necessity, as where I live is very rural), the light on the trees in the evening, a stray cat that seemed to come and check up on me every day (my daughter named him Mr Tuna, but that's another story!) and on and on.
I looked for small things because the big things had gone. And in the small things I found peace, and it made me stop and realise that although I was feeling that I had lost everything, I still had so much.
I didn't write lists any more. I wrote pages of how much help I was getting, how my sister messaged me every single day to make sure I was ok, how my daughter went shopping for me when I couldn't bring myself to leave the house and how much her little gifts in the following weeks meant, my other daughter calling me every day those first few weeks with her sweet love and understanding, how amazing my neighbours were in looking after me, how I just seemed to be gathering more and more friends around me and how comforting their support was, how grateful I was for the forest at the back of my house so that I could walk in nature and feel that strength and how grateful I was to feel safe in my home.
Then I started to be grateful for my own strength, my own determination and my own courage. I wouldn't have realised this if I hadn't been in the habit of writing each day and looking for things to be grateful for. Doing this saved my sanity in those first few months, it saved my dignity and my grace, so that I wasn't tempted to indulge in revenge or 'payback'. (Well, I have to admit, I did burn his favourite hat on the fire!) But I realised how grateful I was for all the things I'd learned, all the tools I had at my disposal, and in realising that, I started to use them all.
I used my knowledge of herbs and nutrition to keep myself healthy through the winter as it was my first cold winter in many years. Previously we had spent all our winters in Thailand.
I started to listen to music all the time and to dance when I felt happy and when I felt sad.
I meditated every day and connected to a place outside of myself, a higher power, a wisdom, I listened within to get through the days.
I used crystals and reiki, yoga, positive reminders everywhere. All these things and more were practices I'd learned mostly over the past 6 to 8 years. It was as if the universe was preparing me for the biggest challenge of my life.
When it came, I won't say I was prepared, but I definitely had the tools to get me through it. And once I realised that, I knew I could do it, I knew I could survive. And I was more grateful than I'd ever been in my life before, because I knew now that I wanted to do it. I wanted to survive. I knew how.
I would just be grateful for one day at a time and remember how many blessings I still had, even though I'd lost the person I thought I couldn't live without and with that everything I thought I could count on in my life.
What I discovered though is that I can't live without me, and I can always count on me. I became grateful for myself. I learned some new ways to practice gratitude so that it became something that was just a part of me and a part of who I was becoming.
I started taking gratitude walks. As I walked through the forest, whether it was an energetic walk up the hill or a stroll through the trees and by the river, with every step I would say Thank You. After every thank you, I would think of something I was grateful for. It’s amazing how many things you can think of to say thank you for when you don’t think too much. You just walk and say thank you and things pop into your mind and the realisation hits that wow, there is so much I’m grateful for. I would come home from those walks not only energised by being out in nature, in the forest, but also with a heart full of gratitude.
A surprising effect of doing that was the feeling of connection I would get. It seemed to connect me with everything in my life, everything around me. I was grateful for so many people in my life, the things I had materially, the beauty around me and the support of the unseen forces that I could feel around me.
Another practice I adopted was making a gratitude jar. Every night before I went to bed, I wrote on a small piece of paper the one thing I was most grateful for that day. It focused my mind for a few moments as I ran through my day and looked for all the happy moments and chose the best one. Sometimes it was a hug from my daughter, or talking to my other daughter via video, the feeling of solitude as I wrote in the morning, the feeling of peace and acceptance, a sweet message from a friend or something I’d accomplished that I was proud of.
But there was something else apart from writing and being grateful that was to get me through those dark days of my winter and it's something I still do every day now.
Previous Chapter - Writing to Heal: Scribbling My Way to Sanity
Next Chapter - My Journey to Stillness: How Meditation Became My Sanctuary and Guide
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This next section is for paying members only. In it, I’m sharing some poetry I wrote in the weeks following our separation and some further personal insights, feelings, and musings. There is also an audio reading of the chapter.
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