Reiki and Gratitude Practice

 Here is an article I wrote in January 2007...

I have often found January a tough month with the anti-climax after all the busyness and festivities of Christmas.  Once the New Year arrives, I am usually exhausted and often ill. 

I have also learned that I am affected by the lack of light during the winter, so in the past have regularly been quite miserable as a result and January is usually the worst month of all: it is cold, dull, there is nothing special to look forward to in the near future and money is tight due to the Christmas spending. 
Oh, and then there's the taxman who needs to be paid at the end of the month!

In recent years I’ve found things improving, however.  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 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 single day for 2 years.  As I don’t find it easy to practice anything on a daily basis this was truly amazing!  After a bad day it was 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 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.

This article, along with many others, will be included in my forthcoming book "Musings of a Reiki Master (volume 1)" which contains articles I wrote for my newsletters from 2007 - 2011.