“If the only words you ever said in your whole life were thank you, that would be enough” Meister Eckhart

Hi there and G’day from sunny Australia: Byron Bay to be exact.

This morning I woke up and thought what a good idea it would be to really practice what I preach! I wrote a blog post about that (practicing what I preach) some time ago already so this is really putting my neck on the line, isn't it? I do apply most of it, but there are so many tips and tricks to living a passionate, fulfilled life that to be honest you could do an ‘hour of power’ every hour of the day and never sleep!

I’m making a mental note to myself here to write about that one of these days in case you don’t already know how effective The Hour of Power can be if you apply it regularly. However this practice I’m going the share with you now is quintessential to living a joyful, successful life as the above quote from Meister Eckhart illustrates.

So anyway, with practicing what I preach in mind when I got up today and as the weather was a perfect sub tropical Spring day… 24 degrees Celsius and radiant sunshine, I decided on a walk on the beach before I got down to work and immersed myself in the computer; and as I believe in making the very best possible use of my time, (I’m a woman aren’t I, so I can multitask!) when I got there I decided I'd spend half an hour brainstorming all the things I feel grateful for: give myself the ‘biggest bang for my buck’ so to speak.

What a way to start the day! Talk about the ‘Feel Good Factor’! If you ever want to release resistance, raise your vibration and focus on ‘feel better thoughts’, then practicing gratitude is a surefire and almost instant way to do that.

You know, if you want to live an extraordinary life, one of the most important factors in creating it is to accept 100% responsibility for whatever is going on in your life, and as a Law of Attraction coach I sometimes meet resistance from my clients who are unwilling to believe that. They argue tooth and nail that life is about Karma and Destiny and that they have no choice ~ these are the victims of life. They don’t co-create their life but life happens TO them, and even those who do believe they have choices often beat up on themselves for past decisions they've made - the results of which they are living now and which consequently perpetuate the merry go round.

All the events, conditions and circumstances that you’re currently experiencing in your life are the upshot of the thoughts and emotions you’ve chosen, either consciously, or more likely unconsciously, sometime in the past. It’s as a result of those thoughts and emotions that you’re experiencing whatever you currently are.

Remember, you’re the one that thinks your thoughts.

Your thoughts do not think you.

Pay attention to what you're paying attention to ~ THAT’S the key.

That is what I call meditation or conscious awareness.

When I first heard the notion that we all create our own reality, I also had trouble accepting it. How or why would anyone in their right mind create all the grief and suffering I saw in the lives of so many, including myself? It didn't make any sense! Why on Earth would an intelligent human being create illness, painful relationships, lack of abundance, etc. etc. etc.? Why would I knowingly subject myself to any of that? The key for me was when I understood the Laws of Attraction and exactly HOW we do it and how most of this is created in our SUB-conscious mind automatically.

Similarly, the emotions you are experiencing serve as your barometer and are a reflection of the quality of thoughts that you’re thinking. The way you feel is a direct indication of the balance of your emotions, so if you want to feel better, switch your attention to something you could feel good about, even if at the time you’re having difficulty finding anything to feel good about.

Just give it a go at least.

You get what you focus on - it's the Universal Law of Attraction at work. If you're paying attention to what you do not want to manifest in your life, you'll still manifest it, because simply by focusing on it with enough emotional energy, you're bringing its vibration into your vibration.

Happily the reverse is also true.

When you focus on what you want, on what feels good, you'll manifest only that.

It's really pretty straightforward once you get it.

I believe that if you want to change any aspect of your life that’s not working for you, you need to change your mindset… and as a result you’ll rapidly change your life! Just about all the quintessential work of personal development is also about making sure that your conscious beliefs and your SUB-conscious beliefs are aligned, so that your energy is also balanced and this is where gratitude and appreciation can be extremely helpful.

You’ve probably all heard that consciously utilizing The Power Of Gratitude is an extremely important component of attracting all the abundance and happiness you long for in your life, and that developing an attitude of heartfelt gratitude for your current blessings frees up the energy for receiving even more. Uttering it out loud and being witnessed by another person to boot is even more powerful, as well as provoking insight and thoughts about other things for which to be grateful and which we might never have come up with independently; so for this reason I called my best friend and we set out for that beach walk together.

“Every time you say, ‘I appreciate that. I really like that. I applaud that. I acknowledge the value in that.’ Every time you do that, you spend some of your Energy, and it is the spending of the Energy that creates a vacuum, so to speak, or an attraction, so to speak, that draws more and more and more and more.” ~ Abraham

When you’re grateful for everything you have, no matter how small it is, if you allow your self to FEEL the gratitude you will receive more of what you are asking for. If you’re grateful for the relationship you have, even if it’s not yet perfect, the relationship will improve; if you give thanks for the amount of money you have, even if it’s still not sufficient to meet all your desires and needs, you WILL start to receive more of it; if you’re in a job you don’t enjoy that much but can still appreciate the aspects of it that you DO take pleasure in, opportunities either for a new one or improvements in the current one will present themselves. Guaranteed: perhaps not instantly, because it does take time for things to gather speed but beyond any doubt in the fullness of time it WILL happen if you keep up the daily practice.

This is why it's SO important to look for gratitude and happiness around us - It's the secret to getting everything we want - to manifesting all our dreams. Our modern world is not concerned with looking for joy, focusing instead on everything that can go wrong. You rarely see "good" news in the media ~ it's nearly always "bad" The focus is on complaint, ill health, poverty, crime, fraud, war, death, etc. etc. …… And let’s not forget the good old G.E.C! (Oops, I don’t mean to lower your vibration here!)

So is it any wonder it's such a challenge to pay attention to what brings us joy and ‘feel good thoughts’ when most of the world is conditioned to talk about anything BUT?

If you are capable of finding a place in your heart where you feel truly grateful, the more you say ‘Thank you,” the more it will expand and the more love you will be sharing. Gratitude for the abundance you have already and are currently receiving is the best guarantee of the abundance and gifts to come! So practice gratitude for everything you’ve already received in the past, be grateful for everything you are receiving in the here and now, and be grateful for everything you want to receive in the future as though you had already received it.

Imagine that ~ by deliberately focusing on and expressing gratitude, you can literally change your life! If you use gratitude a little bit your life will change a little; if you use gratitude each day, even several times a day, your life will change irrevocably.

At this point I’d like to draw your attention to a crucial subtlety that in my opinion is a very critical component of the Law of Attraction and of becoming a deliberate creator. As many Law of Attraction aficionados know, magnetizing stems from the feelings and emotions we experience but also partly from the words that we use. When I am coaching or even listening to my own self- talk I am doggedly insistent that words certainly do have a significant vibrational impact on what we manifest, and there is one subtlety of language that is pretty important here.

Let me elaborate:

Countless people have understood that cultivating an ‘attitude of gratitude’ goes a long way in helping us to ‘think feel better thoughts’ ~ BUT it was recently brought to my attention that there is a subtle difference between the vibration of the word ‘gratitude’ and its almost synonym ‘appreciation’. And as we know where there is a dissimilar vibration, there will be a different effect. 

Personally I find there to be a significant distinction between the two words and right now I have a strong preference for using ‘appreciation’ over the word ‘gratitude.’  For my part I’ve noticed that gratitude seems to have an element of thankfulness that something didn’t happen or that there is an understated evaluation comparing one thing to another; when I use the word ‘appreciation’ my energy lifts and I feel elevated and inspired, whereas when I say the word ‘grateful’ I feel ‘flatter’ and not quite so enthused.

But this is not a place to create a debate about semantics and split hairs, so don’t misunderstand me here: I still maintain my Gratitude journal every day plus right now I’m getting massive value from consciously choosing to appreciate more things! 

Keep in mind too that your life is impacted by the quality of the questions you ask yourself.

Well I’m making it part of my daily practice to regularly ask myself during the day “What can I love and appreciate right now?” And then I look around, find something to focus on and appreciate it.  For me - the minute I even ASK myself what I can appreciate in this moment -my spirit starts to soar and if I spend 68 seconds or more actually steadily appreciating it, well, I’m setting up a whole vibrational wave of intention and deliberate creation, and implanting my Future Vision.

This is one reason why I value appreciation as being perhaps the definitive personal development tool, because it instantly transforms your vibration.

When you’re in a state of sincere appreciation, your energy or vibrational resonance is one of receptivity and harmony as well as elation. You resonate acceptance and joy, and as a result project a much higher vibrational frequency than when you are complaining, stressed out and focusing on lack. Being appreciative is exactly what attracts to you the events, conditions and circumstances that you desire, and the more you focus on them with appreciation, the more you will attract. (Equally you know by now that the more you focus on lack, the more lack you will attract as well, but I didn’t need to remind you of that, did I?)

Right now imagine yourself as a giant magnet. Whatever you are feeling, whether it be love, fear, anger, happiness, joy, appreciation, resistance etc. you are basically creating a magnetic force that attracts and draws to you events, conditions and circumstances which are in direct relationship to what you are feeling. Fear of something creates a magnetic force that will attract more of what you fear, but expressing appreciation for anything at all projects a profound magnetic force that draws to you more of what you are expressing appreciation for.

Appreciation puts you in a harmonious vibrational state of resonance that attracts the kind of energies you’d prefer and deflects those that you do not. Just one small but important thing I need to add here and that is that it is also wonderful to be grateful for those things we might feel less than enthusiastic about, because it releases the resistance we have to blocking those things. It doesn’t mean you’ll get more of the lack of a situation; it does mean that you are seeing it as a gift and not fighting it.

“The more I appreciate, the better I feel. The better I feel the more I am allowing who I am to flow through me. The more I allow who I am to flow through me ~ the better I feel.” Abraham

In short, any time you’re not expressing appreciation for a specific outcome, you are in reality resisting it, and when this happens, where are your thoughts and emotions occupied? On what you don’t want, agreed? When you focus on what you don’t want, you are effectively creating a virtual ‘magnetic force’ which only serves to draw to you more of that which you do not want or are resisting.

Furthermore I am discovering that even when you remain ‘neutral’ you are in fact passing by on an opportunity to magnetize positively and could even well be in an unconscious state of resistance.

So there we were walking along the perfect beach under a cloudless blue sky and it was pretty easy to see why we felt appreciative, as you can imagine. But let’s say that hypothetically there wasn’t so much to be thankful for, how would you set about doing this exercise instead of feeling cranky and unappreciative? People counter all the time with, “How in the world can I be in a state of gratitude when everything seems to be going wrong?” when I respectfully suggest that appreciation is the fastest way to attract joy, happiness, prosperity and abundance into our lives. It’s the key that opens the door to wealth and is an essential ingredient of the Law of Attraction, so I often prompt them with “What COULD you appreciate right now?” Even this will start to release resistance and effect a shift in vibration.

This month I’ve talked about why appreciation is so important if we want to grow and prosper. Sometime soon I’ll explain to you how best to set about creating more appreciation in your life and give you some more of the ‘how to’s’ plus some specific structures you can use to magnify and attract more of it, including Keeping a Gratitude Journal and that aforementioned Hour of Power I mentioned at the beginning of this article.

Till then I know you’ll have an awesome day focusing on gratitude and appreciation and I also know it’ll leave you feeling great as well as powerfully magnetic.

If you’d like to connect with me with any Law of Attraction or coaching questions, please feel free to send me an email to sandhaninc@gmail.com or visit my blog www.sandhaninc.com to download a free eBook called The Pillars of Prosperity ~ Achieving, Joy, Happiness and Genuine Fulfillment through Personal Transformation and Co-creation.

You can also arrange a complimentary 30-minute coaching session with me to identify where you might like to be supported in expanding your levels of success, better health and personal happiness.

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This article is brought to you by Sandhan ~ co-owner and founder of Soul Search Publishing, a personal development and self help publishing company whose goal is to help customers realize personal happiness and success.

Sandhan has also co-authored The Stress Book with her business partner Maxim Haim, as well as being responsible for numerous blogs, Twitter accounts, websites and online articles. But her biggest joy is when she knows she’s had a positive impact and made a difference in someone’s life through her Law of Attraction Coaching and Spiritual Mentoring!