Gratitude practice for realising you are already "enough" this new year

There’s something about the new year that inspires us to want to make changes, to live our lives with more joy, passion and freedom. This year maybe more so than most.

Every January we are encouraged to makeover our lives, “New Year New You!” the adverts shout. But here’s the rub: It implies that we are not already enough as we are, that we are deficient in some way and with this miraculous diet / new car / beauty treatment etc. we will then be the shiny new us that can do all the wonderful things we have dreamed about.

I’m here to remind you that you are already enough. We all are. We are born enough.

Personal growth to me is accepting that you are always loved and supported and enough as the foundation to then doing the inner work to really feel and believe it. Along the journey you may nourish your body better and feel better, you may exercise more, you may treat yourself to new things that play to your new confidence, but all of this is while you are still enough in the process.

You deserve to feel it, to be happy and healthy in body, mind and soul but it all starts from within.

One practice that is consistently shown to improve our happiness is a gratitude practice, why not start the new year by making gratitude a habit?

Reasons why a gratitude practice works

As the saying goes, “Energy flows where attentions goes”. From an energetic perspective the law of attraction states that we will attract more of what we are a vibrational match for. Practicing gratitude will help raise our vibration, attracting more higher vibration experiences in to our life. Practicing gratitude will also work with your heart chakra, help you feel more connected to the world around you and grateful to a higher power (whatever your understanding of that is).

From a neuroscience perspective we all have a cognitive bias. Our brain will sift through all of the information it receives in a day and filter out all that it considers “unimportant” but really pay attention to the things that fit with our existing beliefs and expectations. So if we make it a habit to be grateful, we start looking for things to be grateful for. It becomes a habit. Once our mind realises, “hey, this stuff is important to us now”, it will start noticing more things that fit with that belief and you will start to find yourself noticing more and more things to be grateful for. These things would still have been there but if your mind doesn’t know that these things are important, it will likely just filter them out and pass them by.

It’s a simple fact that our emotional state affects our physical body. If we buy in to the fact that we are not enough, our life is not enough, this can impact our sense of self esteem and self worth, potentially having a role to play in persistent low mood or depression. We now know that depression comes with a whole heap of physical symptoms: low energy, increased sensitivity to pain, back pain and aching muscles, headaches, abdominal pain… the list goes on. By finding ways to shift our emotional state, if we can decrease our length of stay in the lower vibration emotions then we can in turn start to reduce the impact on our physical body.

One way to get started with a gratitude practice

Buy a separate diary to dedicate to gratitude, it doesn't have to be fancy - pop down to the pound shop. Every day write down what you are grateful for, from “my family and friends” all the way down to “the way the sun was glistening off the frost on my car this morning”. Notice the little things and anchor them in by writing by hand. 

Need a little help getting started?

Come join me online for a gentle reiki-infused intention setting yoga class on Friday 20th January 2023 at 1pm (GMT). REPLAY is available to everyone who signs up.