How to rope in your Monkey Mind’s stories…
… To fill your day with gratitude.
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Hi %%FIRST_NAME%%,
Welcome to Step 2 of your 28 Day Gratitude Kick Start programme!
How did you get on with our first technique – your Gratitude Minutes? Any insights? Any questions? I’d love to hear from you, over at your members-only forum:https://www.clarejosa.com/forum/gratitude-kick-start-online-course/gratitude-minutes-how-did-you-get-on-with-this-technique/!
Today we’re diving into the realm of the Monkey Mind – and how you can use its pesky stories to help you create a Gratitude Habit!
We’re looking at the power of the Monkey Mind – your thinking mind – and its addiction to story-telling; specifically the stories we tell ourselves.
Don’t believe every story your mind tells you.
One of the things I have found with one-to-one clients and seminar students, over the past decade, is that they’re all at least as good as I am at telling themselves stories. We have all spent years, training our minds to evaluate, discuss, critique, re-tell, ‘what-if’, rehearse and even embellish stories about what goes on in life.
It’s not the experience that hurts; it’s the story we tell ourselves about it.
These stories often run in the background, half-unnoticed, while we’re doing other things. But they’re still there. The problem with these stories is that, whether you experience the event for real or just tell yourself a story about it, those thoughts trigger the same shifts in your body’s chemistry and emotions, as though the event were really happening.
Your body can’t tell the difference between what is ‘here’ and your mind’s stories. It treats them all as real.
So if we tell ourselves an angry story, we get angry sensations in our body and feel angry emotions. Tell yourself a happy story and your auto-pilot happy hormones are released, triggering the physical and emotional experience of happiness for you.
The thing is…
Gratitude will put a smile on your face much more easily than grumbling ever could. 🙂
With this next gratitude technique, you can experiment with deliberately using this auto-pilot response, to shift our experience of life. It’s really simple. And it works! It’s a great way to tame and retrain your Monkey Mind to concentrate on gratitude, rather than complaining.
Make A Daily Date With A Gratitude Story
[audio:http://]- Deliberately choose a time, each day this week, to play with this technique.
Set an alarm. Do whatever it takes to make sure you keep that date. It only takes a few minutes, and setting a definite time means it will happen. Leaving it to chance means it probably won’t. - Take a ‘snapshot’.
Pause for a moment and notice how you’re feeling – physically and emotionally. Notice what your thoughts are. Notice the current tone of voice in your head. - Think about an event that has happened (any time!) which triggers grateful emotions for you.
Really allow yourself to dive into that experience. Feel the emotions you were feeling. Think the thoughts you were thinking. Hear the subtleties of the voice in your head shift. Notice the change in colour and vibrancy of any images you are seeing. Smile! - Now for the fun! Imagine you are telling this story to someone else.
Talk your way through the story, in your head (or out loud, if you have a willing audience!). Really help your story come to life. Share all the best bits. If it helps you dive into it, turn up the dial a few notches. For this exercise, it doesn’t matter if you embellish a little. It’s about getting into the habit of shifting the tone of our stories. - When you feel you have finished, smile and thank yourself for taking the time.
Repeat your ‘snapshot’ from step 2.
How have things changed? What did you notice? Can you sense a shift?
How about sharing your insights and questions, over at our members-only online forum or via our Facebook page: Miracle Of Gratitude?
Affirmation:
I choose to tell myself stories that make me smile.
I hope you enjoy today’s gratitude technique!
Remember you can share how you get on with it and get answers to any questions, over at the online forum: https://www.clarejosa.com/forum/gratitude-kick-start-online-course/making-a-daily-date-with-gratitude/ and you can catch up with the latest gratitude news via our Facebook page: Miracle Of Gratitude.
I’ll be back tomorrow when we’ll be discovering how you can work with your body to create your daily Gratitude Habit.
See you then.
Namaste,
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