Along with enjoying turkey and stuffing, Thanksgiving is a day to practice gratitude. It is easy and certainly an effective way to shift your vibe.

How to Start

Think about something you’re grateful for – a family member, pet, wonderful meal, good health, your job, your home… Got it?

Next focus on the center of your chest where your heart chakra is located. Now notice how you feel when you are grateful. Are you happy or sad? Peaceful or agitated? Angry or loving? Expansive or contracted? That’s the power of gratitude. Thinking about something you are grateful for transforms your emotions and creates a positive vibrational shift.

Gratitude Research

Gratitude, joy, love, and abundance all carry positive vibrational energy. These positive vibes displace fearful and uncomfortable emotions, which helps to increase confidence. Of the four positive emotions—gratitude, joy, love, and abundance—gratitude is the easiest to cultivate because we can intentionally increase it.

The more grateful you are the healthier you are. Research shows that gratitude strengthens the immune system and lowers blood pressure. It also increases optimism, generosity, and compassion and decreases feelings of loneliness and isolation. Why is gratitude so powerful. It appears to stimulate  parts of the brain responsible for regulating stress and producing pleasure.

When you nurture gratitude you train your body, mind, heart, and spirit to be a magnet for all the other positive vibrations. Infuse your life with gratitude (even when you’re unhappy or life doesn’t feel like it’s going your way) and you will generate love and abundance not only for yourself but for everyone around you.

As Barbara De Angelis explains:

“Gratitude blesses you. It opens you so that more can come in. It literally expands the vibrational space around you. When you’re living in that expansive space, more of everything will flow into your life.”

Keep a Gratitude Journal

Keeping a gratitude journal is an easy way to increase wellbeing. Each night before bed spend five minutes reviewing your day. Why journal at night? When you sleep your  mind processes what happened to you during the day. As a result, you’ll train your subconscious to resonate with good vibrations and view the world in a more positive way.

Here are some suggestions about what you can write about:

• All the people and things—big and small—you are grateful for and why.
• Unpleasant things that have departed such as an illness, the neighbors with the barking dog who moved away or the co-worker you disliked.
• Challenges that are teaching you valuable lessons.
• What is beautiful and special about you.
• The wisdom of midlife.

Try it for 30 days and see what happens!

“Grace isn’t a little prayer you chant before receiving a meal. It’s a way to live.” —Jacqueline Winspear.