Hello friends and welcome to the 5^th month of the year! The mental theme for this month is: Letting the fresh air in! To explain what I mean by this I would like to use this analogy:

Imagine that your mind is a luxury penthouse condominium in downtown Chicago, furnished according to your highest taste and desire, with floor to ceiling windows. For the most part of the year so far, you have had to keep your windows shut due to the freezing weather outside. The air in your penthouse has been ventilated using only the central air condition to keep the inside of your apartment warm and cozy.  You keep the condo smelling good with quality fragrances and incense but every now and then you still find that you have to go outside to get some fresh air. Now it is approaching summer time and you can finally open your beautiful floor to ceiling windows and slide open the balcony door to allow some natural fresh air to flow through your penthouse! You can finally get rid of any old smells or lingering odors in your penthouse that do not serve its highest purpose or that you simply want to get rid of!

• “The penthouse” is your mind
• “The floor to ceiling windows” are your windows of perception (Your focus (eyes, ears, thoughts, words and feelings) and your heart disposition)
• “The freezing cold” are the challenges you may experience through the year
• “The central air condition” is your guiding beliefs and principles
• “The incense/fragrances” are the blessings you can count or have counted (gratitude)
• “Fresh air” is the unlimited abundance of the spirit (gratitude and love) that is within us and all around us
• “Lingering odors” are complaints, feelings, thoughts and outcomes that are not in line with your highest well-being

So how do you let the fresh air (the abundance of spirit) back into your penthouse (your mind)? Instead of focusing on or complaining about the lingering smells you do not like (events, thoughts, emotions and outcomes), we can simply open up the floor to ceiling windows (eyes, ears, and heart) to allow the old odors out and the fresh new air (abundance, love and gratitude) in! To bring this analogy home to this blog post, we let the fresh air in by activating the power of gratitude and the power of letting go of guilt and judgement of our self and others. These are powerful ways to refresh your mental and emotional health by eliminating any self-imposed negative blocks (thoughts and emotions that aren’t aligned with your highest well-being and intentions) from your nervous system.  In this article we would focus on activating the power of gratitude by looking at how to feel gratitude as your natural state of being.

If you ask the average adult if they are a grateful person, chances are they will respond with a yes. Most adults have been conditioned since child hood to say “Thank you” when someone shows them any form of kindness, lends them a helping hand or gives them something they consider valuable. In essence, the average adult has been programmed to see gratitude as an action, a response to some form of external good. Having this form of gratitude is good, but it makes us solely dependent on external events to feel grateful. Therefore, when perceived good things happen you can feel grateful but when perceived bad things (things not going your way) happen, you become ungrateful as you believe there isn’t any other outcome to recognize. This limits your ability to recognize opportunities and your ability to grow as a person.

In the chapter “Becoming aware of gratitude” in my book “21 Affirmations: igniting a positive mental reset,” I discuss how the game changer for me was shifting from understanding and showing gratitude only as an action in response to external events, to feeling gratitude and understanding it as my natural state of being. I explain in detail how that shift happened for me and the benefits of becoming aware of it.

“I define gratitude as a state of being where we begin to recognize the abundance that already exists within us and feel happiness, peace and contentment as our natural state, with or without, external events. It teaches us to lose our dependency on other people, events and things to feel happiness and to learn to be the happiness and peace we want to receive from the world”

We begin to become aware of gratitude as our natural state of being, the more we begin to practice active gratitude, which is gratitude generated by our awareness, versus relying on responsive gratitude, which is gratitude in response to external events. We generate gratitude by awareness every time we recognize a reason to be grateful in the present moment. Bringing our awareness to something within us or around us in the present moment and realizing a reason to be grateful for it.

For example, right now I am grateful for the concentrated thoughts that are forming this article. I do not have to wait for a million people to read it first, I am grateful for the ability to create it and share it. I am grateful for my body and for air to breathe. This is an example of active gratitude. Responsive gratitude would be if I wrote this article and became anxious, until I got my first 100 views and 5 positive comments, before I began to be able to feel grateful for writing it.

As adults we go through different challenges in life and it is normal to feel overwhelmed with negative emotions over time. In order to manage our energy efficiently, we have to discover healthy ways that work for us, to release these negative emotions. If the only way we know how to release our negative emotions is by complaining about them, we end up filling ourselves even more with negative energy. In order to truly let the fresh air in we must find activities that allow us to honor our feelings, express our feelings and to let them go. We also have to become intentional about reducing our complaints and practicing active gratitude.

My challenge to you this month is to practice active gratitude daily and to be intentional about avoiding complaining. Do not be hard on yourself when you find yourself complaining, just try to replace the complaint with a thought of gratitude. To keep the air fresh inside your penthouse you have to be mindful of the smells and odors you allow guests to bring into it. We must learn to set healthy boundaries for people around us that want to focus on complaining and negative outcomes.

Activities for increasing your awareness of gratitude

• Make a habit of saying positive words of affirmation to your body parts and yourself as a whole
• Make a habit of saying thank you and I love you to your body parts (Thank your organs and body parts for supporting you in your experience of life)
• Write down your personal gratitude list of everything you are grateful for in life (update it over time and read it)
• Create a daily gratitude practice for yourself (reflect on at least 5 reasons you are grateful for everyday
• Create a daily gratitude challenge with family and close friends (each person comes up with 3-5 reasons for being grateful every day)

Healthy activities for releasing emotion

• Journaling: writing down your feelings from your personal experiences in a notebook
• Prayer
• Meditation
• Crying
• Listening to music
• Gym, sports and recreation
• Spending time in nature
• Creative expression
• Getting an accountability partner, support group or joining a community
• Working with a life coach
• Working with a therapist

Look out for part 2 where I discuss more on how to let the fresh air in through practical mindfulness activities focused around letting go of guilt and judgement. You can read about these in more detail in my book “21 Affirmations: igniting a positive mental reset”

Link to purchase a Hard copy: https://www.amazon.com/21-Affirmations-Igniting-positive-mental/dp/B09LGW4PT7/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

Link to purchase the eBook version: https://paystack.com/buy/21-affirmations-igniting-a-positive-mental-reset-orkyev

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