When you receive appreciation and gratitude, what kind of affect does that have on you?It makes me feel good, and more eager and enthusiastic to help that person and others in the future and I am sure it has the same affect on you. The greater the appreciation and gratitude you show, the more you make the giver feel good, and the more likely you will receive again. As you are grateful, this will make you want to give back, and the receivers will be grateful and want to give again etc etc. It is more than just the expression of the simple words thank you, your whole demeanor changes when you are truly grateful, you give off positive energy, attracting more positivity, you heart is open to receive and give.

It’s a simple but powerful circle. Feed the circle and it will grow.

Now imagine opening out your appreciating to the universe and how much more will it bestow back at you.

We have our daily patterns and when things go as normal, its all fine. The things that go right that enable our day to work as usual we take for granted and are too boring to converse, but when something goes wrong we get annoyed, and curse or go on and complain to others. We can easily get into habitual thought patterns focusing on bad things and only discussing them. It is even more difficult to break these patterns when you are in slump and if a particularly negative thing has occurred. You could get into a situation where it seems that more negative things just keep occurring. Be careful not to get caught in negative cycle, by keeping check of your thoughts. By continuing to think of negative things (by the law of attraction) you attract more negativity into your life. To get out of this rut, you need to change the habitual negative thoughts.

During the period when I was depressed, everything seemed black to me. All I could see, or perceive, were the bad things in life. I knew mentally it was just perception, but I just seemed to want to hold on to the bad. The real change happened when I made a decision that I did not want to stay this way. I knew I had to re-train my brain if I wanted to change and be the happy person I was before. I decided I had to force myself to notice and make a mental note of anything that was good that happened during the day. It was a while before I could naturally see positive things again all the time.

Habitual thoughts are so, because our repetition of them, have made them so.

We can ensure our habitual thoughts are positive by making a concerted effort to noticing the good things and giving appreciation for them constantly. An easy way to do this is to:

1. Take mental notes of any good thing that happens during the day, either to you or in general
2. Give love and gratitude every night, by saying thank you for all the things that had happened during the day, before falling asleep.
3. Try to list at least 8 things and even more if you can think of them.
4. To generate and automate habitual positive thoughts, this should be done diligently every day.
5. After a while you will be finding that you are naturally noticing good things more and more, which will attract more good things into your life

If you are in a slump it may be difficult to think of anything at first, but try the hardest to think of at least 3 things and build this up. These can be as simple as getting a seat on the train or having your favourite breakfast. I know this can be very difficult.

You can train your brain to perceive things in any way you wish. Just be persistent and you can train your brain to perceive things more positively. Starting with being more aware of your thoughts as they happen. If you notice bad thoughts, stop them in their tracks by diverting your focus on something positive. That may be hard at times, so place your focus elsewhere like reading a book or concentrating on work, as long as you stop continuing the bad thoughts. Then as you train yourself to see more positive things, you can dwell on them.

As you see more positive things and are grateful for them, will attract even more positive things into your life as you send positive messages to the universe. The smallest of change in perception can start this circle of growth of positiveness. By continued gratitude you will entice others to want to give more and you will want to give too, as above, and soon you will be well settled in the eternal circle of appreciation and gratitude.

Looking back I realize how really I was un-training my brain from the thoughts I had trained it into thinking during the bad period of my life. If I can train my brain one way, I could certainty train it another. We all used to be happy, even if seems quite a distance away, even if it was as far as when we were children. This is our natural state. When you watch children, you can see they are just focused on having fun. They are so resilient, that when they fall they may cry a little but then they are off running around again, or if they are upset you can just change that by diverting their focus on sweets or a toy. They don’t dwell on the bad; they find anything to have fun with and are happy as they are focused on this. Remember a time when everything intrigued you, with your resourcefulness you could turn anything into a toy, anything could make you happy.

Random simple things now make me laugh again. Even things that may be seen as bad by some, like silly mistakes. Little things, like my personal afternoon award of a choccy biscuit makes me happy. This may seem silly but it only leads to the bigger stuff making me really, really happy, and who doesn’t want to be really happy.

Tiny Happinesses Build Ecstatic Lives.

Another good way to keep focused, and a great way to start the year, is to keep a jar of happy moments. Note down happy things that happen throughout the year and pop it in a jar, then at the end of the year or at the end of each month read all the little notes you made.

Further Reading:
Positive Power
Law of Attraction