“Gratitude opens the door to the power, the wisdom, the creativity of the universe. You open the door through gratitude.” - Deepak Chopra
A gratitude practice can radically change your life.
Our brain inheritely has a negativity bias. It's always scanning for danger and threats to our safety, so naturally it is prone to seeing a lot of "precieved bad" things.
With a gratitude practice you intentially bring attention to all the abundance surrounding us. In even in the hardest of times, there is so much goodness to notice too.
Calling out our gratitude can truly change our perspective and bring more peace, joy and acceptance to our moment-to-moment experience.
Cultivating this practice with children is so impactful because they often help us see some of the simply beauty around us! But sometimes kids default to the same answers when asked what they are grateful for - - grownups too 😀.
If you want to reach deeper into this practice and help exercise the gratitude muscle with your kiddos, try making it more personalized and a game of sorts!
Here's what you need:
popsicle sticks (if you don't have these, just use some little scraps of paper)
markers
a cup to hold the popsicle sticks
this gratitude chart download ⬇️
Directions:
First color the tips of your popsicle
Next, put the popsicle sticks (color side down) into a cup
With the same colors you used on the sticks, color the circles on the printout.
Now think of categories of gratitude that are meaningful and personal to your family.
For example, if you child has specific interests you can make that a category. For example, if they are creative, you could have categories that spark deeper gratitude in their craft such as; artists, trees so we can make paper to paint and draw on, their art teacher and art supplies.
You can have a category for experiences, books, people, a time you laughed really hard, acts of kindness they received or offered. You can make it as broad or specific as you want.
Practicing gratitude this way can help broaden our field of gratitude, ignite loving memories and initiate some very sweet conversations. Enjoy!
I'm grateful for you, thank you for being here.