“Holding onto anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.” – attributed to Buddha and others.
Do you have a lot of anger concerning the events in your past?
Have you considered having gratitude for those events instead?
Often when I ask people that they say something like “Of course I am not grateful for ____” and they fill in the blank with things about divorces, breakups, job losses, family strife, career challenges and so on and so forth.
And I get it. Those things were upsetting and challenging. But let’s look at what came out of those situations.
So often those difficult times were the ones that pushed you forward. They showed you just how strong you really are. They showed you who truly has your back and who doesn’t.
Often they brought you opportunities to allow things to leave your life which often brought something even better to you.
When you are authentically able to release your past, it leaves you with giant open space in your life to create your new future.
So, how do you get to allowing yourself to have gratitude for your past, for the difficult times? Here is an exercise that I use with my clients. It can really change your outlook on situations that are causing you upset.
It allows you to have gratitude for what the events created or will create in your life, that’s why I call it gratitude discovery because you will be discovering gratitude that you didn’t consider before.
Gratitude Discovery Exercise
- Close your eyes and relax
- Think of something you are not grateful for, something that upsets you or makes you angry
- Really look at it and see if there is some aspect of it that you CAN be grateful for, something that is contributing to you or
will contribute to some aspect of your life. If you can’t find something, then just be grateful for whatever it will teach you even if you don’t seewhat that is. - Spend a minute or two really feeling that gratitude
- Allow the anger to fade and be replaced by the gratitude
- Come back and open your eyes
- Is there less upset about the original thing now?
Realizing that even the difficult events in your life can create forward movement and expansion is a huge gift to give yourself!
Allowing yourself to have gratitude for your past and releasing the anger is an even larger gift!
Stop drinking that poison and expecting the other person to die!
Throw the poison away and allow yourself to be grateful for the release! Make space for more joy!
Start now!
Looking for more questions that can help you get unstuck and moving forward with your life? Get my ebook “5 Questions to Change Your Life” by clicking here.
