Keeping a Gratitude Journal

I have often found January a tough month with the anti-climax after all the busyness and festivities of Christmas.  January can be the worst month of the year for me: it is cold, dark, with short days and there is nothing special to look forward to in the near future.

Giving myself Reiki on a daily basis has improved my health, including my mental and spiritual health.  I have also found other practices that help me and I would like to share one of them with you as a gift to welcome the New Year...

Keeping a Gratitude Journal

All you need to do is find a lovely notebook that gives you pleasure to handle and a good pen or pencil you enjoy writing with.  A simple notebook will do, but if it is a thing of beauty it will encourage you to pick it up each day.  Then simply write down in the book, at the end of each day, 5 things that you are grateful for.  You need to write 5 different things, but you can write the same things again the next day if you want to.

You could write down people you are grateful to have in your life, your home, your animal friends or the food you eat.  You could write about something of beauty you have seen or experienced during the day, such as waking up after a good sleep, being free from pain or meeting an old friend.

I made a commitment to keeping a Gratitude Journal for a year and ended up doing it every day for 2 years.  As I didn’t find it easy to practice anything on a daily basis this was truly amazing!  After a bad day it was often difficult to think of 5 things; but on those days it helped me to refocus on the blessings in my life.  Then I was able to go to sleep with those positive thoughts in my head, instead of staying awake and worrying about the bad things.  Also I was able to look back at previous days and see how much good there is in my life.

Sometimes I had more than 5 things to write and this brought home to me the wonderful abundance of my life.  Writing the gratitude journal each day seemed to allow more abundance to come into my life too.  I attended a workshop on the Reiki Principles only 6 months after starting this practice and we were asked to spend a 10 minutes writing down things we were grateful for. I wrote for the whole time without stopping and still could have written more, thanks to being so much in touch with gratitude in my life.  And I noted that the Reiki Principles encourage us to SHOW gratitude, in other words make it an action, not just a thought.  Keeping a gratitude journal does just that!

So why not make it a resolve for this year to keep a gratitude journal?  It is a simple thing to do that will help to improve the quality of your life.

From an article in my 2007 January newsletter