Gratitude like weight training

If it just sounds too weird to relate to, think about what our body needs to do to become stronger and more resilient. If you want to build muscles, any form of resistance helps. The heavier the weight, the harder your muscles have to work to build up.

We use weights to fight against your muscles, to grow them. The muscles actually tear a little as we work them; stretch and then re build, connecting more fibres. The muscle growth doesn’t happen during the session, but afterwards when we rest up and let our muscles mend. 

We use weights to fight against your muscles, to grow them. The muscles actually tear a little as we work them; stretch and then re build, connecting more fibres. The muscle growth doesn’t happen during the session, but afterwards when we rest up and let our muscles mend. 

To build muscles best you need to work them so they tear a little, feed them to give them the power they need and rest them up. The resting and feeding is just as important as the work out. 

So how does this compute with gratitude? Well if you want to make the most of any traumatic situation, where you’ve felt your heart and mind tear a little, (or worse) then you rest up from it, and you allow it to heal and you add in some gratitude that you made it through it. This is how we become stronger. 

Being grateful that you’ve made it through doesn’t mean that you are giving that experience power or importance. In fact it’s giving the power to yourself because you are saying that you beat it. It didn’t beat you. And that feels good.  

Learning from our experiences, and our past unwise decisions is about being grateful that you don’t need to repeat the lesson again. You learn to read situations that others may miss, you can see things as they are, not as people try to portray them, and you change the way you see the world.

If you are reading this, and you’ve recently gone through something awful, then this may be the very last thing you want to hear. Everyone needs a bit of wound licking time. But it’s something that is good to keep in mind. This is about not letting our life’s experiences control us in a negative manner. It’s about finding a reason somewhere in all the horribleness to find a gem of gratefulness and let go of the pain.

Sometimes we just can’t see the bigger picture 

When we are in the midst of trials and horrible experiences we often feel “What on earth that is good come from this situation.” It feels like a hopeless case. We wonder why we’ve got the feelings we do, know the people we spend time with, why doors aren’t opening. It’s often only with the benefit of hindsight, when we can look back and see how those times were the very ones that shaped us that we can see it was all worth it in the end.  

Often the very things we long for and want are not in the shape we expect. TO get to those things we often have to go on a journey that we don’t expect and experience things we weren’t prepared for.

CASE STUDY 

Rosie wanted to be a writer. She did pretty well in school, and had a flair for words but nothing ever opened up. She too some time away from writing and focused on another career. Though a series of unplanned events she experienced a great deal of heart break and worry that changed her perspective on many things. Once again she began to write, and people commented don her ability to connect with others through her writing. It felt real, and something others could relate to. 

Rosie discovered the pain she had experienced actually gave her in some ways the opportunity to be the person she had always dreamed of being.

To make us ready for the big dreams in our heart sometimes we get put into places and situations that build our mind and heart muscles. It might be loss, hardship, pain, death of a loved one. All to build us into the person we need to be to reach our dreams.

Look at it this way. Imagine your dream is to own a mansion by the beach. If you don’t have the character you need to won it, it won’t be a lasting pleasure. You’ll let it run down, or worse, you’ll lose it. But if you are able to let like create the character in you that means you could look after it, well that would be worth it right? Sometimes our hearts need to tear a little, build a little muscle and then get a little stronger to reach our goals. 

If you learn the lesson fast, there is no reason for the bad even to repeats itself. While we never stop learning, and never stop experiencing life, as we learn from each one, the less difficult it is to learn from the next lesson. It’s a bit like those muscles- the more you use them, the more second nature it is to keep on building them and using them every day. The heart that is torn then built stronger finds it easier to be grateful, and tends to attract more and more experiences to be easily grateful for