By David Clayton
Try it for 30 days, and if you don’t like it, we’ll return you misery with interest!
Here’s a quick and simple exercise I have been doing daily for nearly 30 years and it has brought such spectacularly positive results in my life that have accumulated steadily and incrementally ever since I started.
Every day, I jot down on a scrap of paper a ‘gratitude list’.
The gratitude list is a list of good and beautiful things that have been given to me today for which I offer thanks to God. I put down the ‘essentials’ of life that are true for today, for example, I am alive, I have a bed to sleep in today, I have somewhere to live, food for today, clothes to wear and so on. I then put down all the little events specific to that day that go beyond what is necessary for life, you might call these ‘luxuries’, for example, sunshine on this January day (sorry New Hampshire), a kind word here, the relationships with others that I have and so on.
Actually writing the list is important – it forces me to crystallize the thought in my mind that much more concretely and makes the exercise more powerful. So nice thoughts in the shower, or on my morning walk don’t count. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with that but it doesn’t work as well for this exercise. I reach for pen and paper.
Also, I don’t wait to feel grateful before I put them down – I write down what I ought to feel grateful for! The idea is that this exercise changes how we feel, and we grow in gratitude over time even if we don’t start out that way. So right now I am grateful for a huge cup of steaming coffee! Fantastic!
Then I go further, I write down the bad things happening in my day and thank God for those too.
It may sound perverse, but this is powerful for turning around my attitude to what is happening to me. I believe that all that is good comes from God and that once we hand ourselves over to his protection and care he will look after us. While it is undeniable that there is evil and suffering in the world, these things to do not come from God, for a God that is all good cannot be the creator of something bad. Rather, (Read More)
Source:: http://thewayofbeauty.org/2018/01/a-one-minute-daily-spiritual-exercise-for-cultivating-faith-joy-gratitude-an-ability-to-apprehend-beauty-and-it-might-even-be-a-treament-for-adhd/
