Feeling Grateful in the Midst of Struggle

Shared from Feeling Grateful in the Midst of Struggle – Uncover Your Joy

There’s a song by a dancehall artist called Pitbull, that I play in my Zumba Class.  In it there is a refrain that goes:

Everybody going through something
I said, everybody going through something
So you might as well roll it up
Pour it up, drink it up, throw it up tonight

This refrain is about the struggles many of us endure as we go through life, some more egregious than others.  Below is a re-post of an article that acknowledges that brave face we attempt to put on while we’re going through them.

 Gratitude is good for us, but how the heck do we foster an “attitude of gratitude” when life is super tough? When it’s hard to get through each day, the last thing we want to do is count our blessings. Feeling grateful seems nearly impossible. Gratitude is even more important when life is hard. This is when we need it the most.

Feeling grateful is not about erasing the hardship from our life. It’s important that we recognize and validate that things are indeed difficult. Gratitude is also not about being thankful for the ick we’ve been through. There’s no reason to have gratitude for our hardship, for the times we’ve been hurt—it was painful and that’s that. Fortunately, we can still have a gratitude mindset and simultaneously validate the tough stuff. It’s all about focusing on gratitude for ourselves and on the little gifts life hands us.

Gratitude was elusive for this author for a long time in my life, but I finally learned how to grasp it during the last year of living in an abusive situation. I was exhausted, traumatized, and stuck in the dead of winter (which is my least favorite time of year!) and honestly—I was miserable. Feeling grateful was the last thing on my mind.

But, then the sun fell on the couch I was resting on. It suddenly warmed me, brightened the room, and ignited a little light within my heart. I was grateful for the sun. And it was a real, moving, form of gratitude. The kind that brought tears to my eyes. From then on, I started to notice the little things I enjoyed. I began to believe I deserved these good things, I started feeling grateful for my choice to keep going, and now I’m able to look back on my past with love.

Feeling grateful is a self-loving action. It’s all about truly acknowledging our reality and making the choice to balance how we see our life. True gratitude never forces us to love the bad stuff. It simply shows us how to notice the good.

(2) I want to invite you to be grateful for whatever is happening today. Close your eyes and see yourself in your hardship, look at your fears and look at your uncertainties. Then I want you to imagine a bright white light coming from above. It’s the light of gratitude. Now surround yourself in that light. Get covered from your head to your toes in that white light and let it surround your fears and your pain. Once you visualize yourself covered in that bright, white light, release the light back to the Universe. Release it with your lessons, your heartache, your fear and your pain.

Hope this makes Monday more mindful. See ya’ next week.