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Leah Russell3 min

How Gratitude Can Help You Take Control Of Your Life

March 2, 2020

by Natalie Louise Fox

What I’ve learnt along the way in life is that gratitude is an energetic gateway between negative emotions such as fear, shame, anger and apathy… and those positive, higher emotions such as love, joy, excitement and play.

A gratitude practice is a very personal thing. It’s an inside job. Done properly, it’s about opening your heart and creating a personal energetic alignment with feeling good. Gratitude sits in the chasm between how you don’t want to feel and how you do. It has a certain energy about it, a quality of lightness that we can all tap into, no matter what is going on around us. When we feel good, we are more aligned with our soul. When we feel good, we can pull good things into our energetic field. That’s when we can set intentions and manifest more easily. That’s when we can experience the energies of love and happiness and bliss. Creating a daily gratitude practice helps you to begin to move on up to those good places and move away from the energies of fear and lack and sadness. Gratitude is a tangible energy created by the heart. This is why I believe that practicing gratitude is about taking control of your life. When you practice gratitude you start to really shift things on an energetic level, because gratitude is a tangible energy created by the heart. It’s like being stuck in a dark tunnel. One of your options might be to wait for someone to come and rescue you. Another option might be to curl up helplessly in a ball. Or you could grab whatever you can and start to dig yourself out of the tunnel. Even if you can only dig for two minutes a day, you’re doing it. You are taking control of your experience. Eventually, you start to build up momentum and your experience changes. You are not in the tunnel anymore. To sit and be still for a few minutes every day and think “Right, how do I feel?”, “How do I want to feel?” is a very powerful habit to create. You can reflect and reframe. You can start to take control of things and direct your physical experience much more positively. You have the power to change your experience. By tapping into gratitude, you can feel first-hand that you have the power to change your thoughts, your emotions and eventually your actions. You can become more aligned with the energies of love and self love. You can reflect on the past with your heart instead of your head, which ultimately will help you to heal things. When you think about your future you can think more optimistically about it; instead of thinking about what problems might crop up you can think more in terms of “How would I like things to be?” Everybody has at least one thing to be grateful for. If you only have that one thing, then use that. Cast your mind back to something in the past that you were grateful for and start to reflect on it. Gratitude isn’t necessarily about counting up all the nice things going on for you, it’s about tapping into a feeling, a memory, an energy, that you can use as a catalyst to move towards a better-feeling place and start to take back control.