being grateful when life is challenging

When the proverbial hits the pan... and it does (that's life), how easy does expressing gratitude come?

When life is all tickety-boo, our gratitude practice tends to be easy because we don't have to look too far or too hard to find things to be grateful for. However, when life takes a turn and we feel we're wading through treacle, where moving forward even the tiniest bit seems like a mammoth task, is it even possible to be grateful during such times?

How can you find things to be grateful for when everything seems to being going wrong and belly-up?

Whilst gratitude helps us maintain a high vibe during good times, helping to attract even more good times. When times are rough and challenging, gratitude will not only help us through, it's absolutely essential to see us through to the other side. Indeed it is when times are challenging that we can gain a true sense of the power of gratitude.

Now, I get it. When things seem to be going against you and life is tossing everything it can at you, it can be hard to feel grateful. After all, how many people feel grateful for losing their job, for struggling to make ends meet due to rising costs, for giving thanks for being and feeling ill and in pain? Nobody feels grateful in those circumstances. However, just because you don't feel the gratitude doesn't mean you can't be the gratitude.

When times are challenging and you just don't feel grateful, those are the exact times when your focus should be directed towards being grateful.

It's wrong to try to force yourself not to feel what you feel. It's wrong to try to avoid the emotions naturally rising up inside you. That's not why we practice gratitude. Indeed, practising gratitude in such a way is toxic as it means you're using gratitude to try to ignore your problems and pretend them away.

However, even though you don't emotionally feel grateful, it's important to find things in your life, no matter how small, for which to be grateful. How you feel isn't a choice and it's important to allow yourself to feel your feelings and let them pass through so you can let them go in a healthy manner. However being is a choice, it's an attitude.

When our world feels like it's crumbling in and around us, the choice to find things to be grateful for will not only raise your vibration and energy, it will help you change your state of mind from one where you're struggling to cope to one where you find you can manage and muddle through.

So, in times of crisis, gratitude can help teach us how to better survive and cope.

Gratitude also plays another role in times of crisis and hardship. It teaches us not to take what we have in life for granted.

Often, during the buoyant times, the times of plenty, when things are moving smoothly, it can be all too easy to take our life and the many beautiful things in our life, for granted. However, when a crisis or challenging time hits, we soon learn how fragile our life is and how easily we can lose what we love in our lives. And that, in itself, teaches us the lesson not to take what we have for granted; a valuable lesson we can then take forward into times of plenty and prosperity also.

So, in challenging times, our gratitude can support us two-fold: it can help see us through those challenging times and it teaches us not to take thigns in our life for granted, rather take them with gratitude.

Viv xx