How to live a peaceful and happy life? Just one thing is enough!
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You’re probably here because you’re curious to know what it takes to be serene and happy in your life, maybe because you don’t feel that way now or you struggle to be so.
Life is not always easy and sometimes it is a real chaos. There are times in life when everything seems to collapse or go against you.
The best way to deal with the complexity of life is with simplicity. You don’t need huge, complex, particular solutions. It’s all very simple but actually not obvious to implement in your life.
I’m talking about gratitude.
Gratitude
As humans, we have a negativity bias, as our brain, for survival reasons, focuses more on negative episodes and supposed dangers. And so, we easily tend to think with a scarcity mindset: we don’t think about everything we have, but we think about everything we DON’T have and that we desire.
Just saying you want something, or have a desire, implies that you don’t have it now. Saying “I want to be happy” implies that you aren’t happy now.
To get something you want in your life, you have to tune into the vibration or frequency of the person who already has that thing. Otherwise, being in a state of scarcity, it is difficult to attract that thing you want so much. According to the law of attraction, you attract what you are. Considering that everything is energy in this universe, you can become a magnet of what you want if you embody it in the present moment.
Gratitude has the power to make what you have now enough. Enough to be happy. Recognizing that the present moment is perfect just the way it is now and that everything you want is already inside you.
What you want is the emotion
Any desire or goal, whether it’s making a lot of money, having a cool car, or meeting your soulmate, is not external but internal. That is, what you really want is to feel a certain way, to experience a series of emotions. What you are looking for is the emotion and you simply have the illusion that something external is needed to make us feel a certain emotion.
The reality is that you can choose to feel the emotion here and now. And gratitude is the emotion par excellence of those who have everything they desire in their life.
Gratitude is the silver lining of any situation or moment in life. It highlights the positive.
Let’s take a very strong example: think of a chronic health problem. The pain, the fear, the discomfort and everything that a chronic disease or syndrome entails is true and valid, but even in such a situation there is always a side to be grateful for. The health problem is an alarm bell that is sending you a very specific message, it is showing you the way, it is telling you that something is wrong and that it needs to be changed. It is indicating to you that you are chronically on a low vibration or frequency. Imagine if this alarm bell did not ring? Imagine if you did not know that something was wrong? It would be a disaster. And this pain is what leaves room for growth, for evolution, for improving yourself. Without this discomfort, you would have no reason to change, to upgrade. It is in the pain that the opportunity, the teaching, the true value lies.
This is something we should be very grateful for.
Scientific studies
Now I will explain the science behind why gratitude can be the best medicine for living a happy life.
Your body runs on proteins that each cell inside you makes. To make a protein, a gene in the cell has to be regulated.
Genes are like Christmas lights: when they are turned on and upregulated they make a good protein, and when they are downregulated they make a crappy protein.
The body is made up of 100,000 proteins but in reality there are many more genes: 23,688 genes have been mapped.
Each gene can have 3,000 variations. Genes do not create disease. It is a signal from the environment that instructs the gene on the type of protein it must create.
If you have the same experiences and feel the same emotions, you always activate the same genetic types and variations.
Dr. Joe Dispenza conducted an experiment on 120 randomly selected people. He wanted to measure blood levels of cortisol (the stress hormone) and levels of a chemical called IGA Mungana, immunoglobulin A, the first line of defense against bacteria in the body. When stress hormones go up, the immune system goes down, right?
The more you continue to activate the sympathetic nervous system (the stress one), the more you steal energy from the vital energy field that you have around your body and transform it into chemistry, and the more you do this the more this field diminishes. You become more matter and less energy.
If you keep stealing from this camp, the immune system goes down because all the troops are on the front and none are left to cover the interior territory. And the immunoglobulin A levels go down.
The emotions you experience under stress are all those with a low frequency, which we define as negative, such as anger, fear, anxiety, worry, envy, jealousy, and so on. Living under stress means living in survival: the body is not in homeostasis. When you are frustrated, the heart beats incoherently, not constantly, while when you experience high emotions, such as joy, gratitude and love, the heart becomes very synchronized and coherent.
In the study, people were asked to feel a heightened emotion 2 or 3 times a day for 10 minutes.
When you feel a heightened emotion, the energy field around your body grows and you are now more energy and less matter. More wave and less particle. And you feel more connected to something bigger.
This energy is a frequency and every frequency carries information, like a radio frequency. Thought is the intention or message that travels on that wave.
After 4 days, the results were clear: cortisol levels had decreased by 3 standard deviations, while IGA levels had increased from 53.5 to 87.0. This indicated that these people, with a simple 10-minute exercise twice a day, had created new genes and new genetic pathways, and therefore a new type of protein.
As humans we become dependent on stress hormones, and we find reasons in the outside world to continue feeling that way. But no organism on earth can handle living in a constant state of stress. That’s why we get sick.
This study proves that just 10 minutes a day of gratitude can heal you.
How to implement it in your life
The good news is that it’s so simple to implement moments of gratitude into your life.
The typical practice that many recommend is simply to write down in a journal or somewhere every morning 3 things you are grateful for. They could be the simplest things: a sunny day with good weather, a conversation with a person you care about, or a drink that you have the opportunity to drink every day.
What I like to recommend is not only writing down what you are grateful for but also why. Why you are grateful that there is a sunny day, why you are grateful to have two legs and a body… This allows you to feel gratitude more and understand how much value that thing has in your life, also contemplating how it would be if it were not there.
A second, even stronger way is meditation. During meditation, you can recall and experience strong emotions of gratitude and feel them for a certain amount of time, not just for a few minutes. In the app, you will also find this type of meditation!
What are you waiting for? Be grateful now
Don’t wait any longer. Start feeling grateful now for what you have in your life. Close your eyes, take a deep breath. And release it. Two more times, a deep breath and release it.
Now imagine that you are in a place that makes you feel safe. Your subconscious knows where that place is. You are there now and you feel so calm and serene. Everything is perfect. Everything is beautiful. What are you grateful for? What can you thank the universe for? What makes you happy in this life?
It’s that simple. But it’s in simplicity that the real power lies that makes the difference.
