For the last month, I had been diving into a journey of self-appreciation. I have been swept up in my own process of suffering, healing and personal evolution due to a health issue I have been dealing with. This is why I haven’t been sharing anything new for a while! 

Therefore, in this transmission, I would love to share why I have decided to devote myself to the theme of appreciation and gratitude! As we dive into the new year, I want to share how important it is to feel and express gratitude and feel appreciation, in particular self-appreciation. 

Gratitude and Appreciation

Gratitude and appreciation and interwoven. At times I find that it can be challenging to access gratitude, especially when things are not going well.

When we are feeling like this and gratitude is off the cards, it can be easier to drop into appreciation. 

Feeling appreciative of just the littlest things is much easier than being grateful. Being appreciative can be as simple as appreciating the sun coming out or a friend who reached out. It could be appreciation for the ability to make a meal, sleep in a warm bed or breathe fresh air.

The power of gratitude journaling

When I was deep in my healing journey recently, I remembered that I used to have a gratitude journal. This was when I was going through a really tough time with my mum getting sick and eventually passing and going through severe burnout.

During this time, I would write in my gratitude journal in the morning before I did anything else. I would write three things I was looking forward to experiencing that day. At the end of the day, I would share three things I am grateful for. 

Sometimes I felt stuck because I didn’t know what t share in my journal. I didn’t have anything exciting happening to be grateful for, I was alone and my mum was still sick. 

It was another shitty day amongst other shitty days.

But yet, I knew that this gratitude practice would literally save my life. And it did, it saved my mental health. So, I stuck to it, no matter what. I found myself being in gratitude for just the smallest of things. Often I would write about my cat (can you relate?!), who would give me so many cuddles. 

I always mentioned my kids and my friends were mentioned often.

I started to realise at that time, I rarely wrote about being grateful for myself. And still, to this day, I struggle to share how grateful I am for myself and how much I appreciate myself. There is still work to be done here!

Tapping into self-appreciation is a game changer

Going through my health issue in the last month, I made the effort to fully feel appreciative of myself. I so appreciate myself for having the courage to move into a beautiful house back then, even though it was hard. Because now, it has become my healing sanctuary. 

I had to move through a lot of intense fear but I am so appreciative that my past self was courageous enough to take that step.

I started finding new layers of self-appreciation. And isn’t this the root of everything? It is self-appreciation, which is really just another word for self-love. 

We can always explore more layers of self-love as we journey through life.

Connecting to your future self

If you are like me and you are a high achiever, always wanting to better yourself, you may find yourself oriented towards the future. When we are oriented towards the future, a really powerful practice is to connect to our future self.

I share many journeys and activations with my students inside my programs to connect with their future selves! I love doing this, but when we are constantly in this space of thinking about the future, we can forget the amount of work we are already doing now. We start to only see what we are lacking and missing out on.

Replace despair with appreciation

When we enter this mindset of lack, for example, “I can’t believe I’m still alone, I have to do everything for myself, I feel so sorry for myself”. 

These thought patterns do not serve us!

This is something we all intellectually know and understand, but when it comes to actually embodying this knowledge, it is a different story isn’t it?

However, when we do catch ourselves, we can make a conscious effort to replace negative thoughts about ourselves with appreciation and gratitude.

“I am so appreciative of myself for being courageous. I am so grateful for looking after my body so it can heal faster. I so appreciate all of the inner work that I have done in the past which will help me get through this tough time.”

When I appreciate myself I am much less likely to get angry about what is happening. 

If I do end up in anger mode, I may stay for an hour but then I catch myself. I give myself a kick in the butt and change my mindset. 

If I cannot find positive thoughts I will then distract myself with Netflix. Thank you, Universe for Netflix, Disney Plus and the Gaia channel that I can binge-watch when I feel like shit. 

These platforms allow me to distract my mind so I don’t go into dark places ruminating on things. That isn’t helpful!

You are courageous as an Earthling

Every time there is something that is bothering us, can we pause for a moment and look inside? Take a moment to pause and realise that you are courageous and strong.

Have you noticed that life on earth can be pretty challenging? 

It is by no means a piece of cake for any of us! 

Most of us don’t come here to sunbathe in a tropical paradise every single day. And even if we did, we would have moved through so much just to get there.

Can you feel this courage that is already in you?

Can you feel that self-love is already in you?

If you did not love yourself, you would not be here.

Many humans go to the depths of self-halted until the end of their life. And it is so sad. Losing someone because they cannot find any way of having a little bit of appreciation for themselves is devastating.

Bring your life into perspective

Self-hatred is like a disease of the century in our society. We continuously push push push into having more and not appreciating what we already have. We then find ourselves unable to appreciate ourselves, our bodies, the people in our lives and so on.

Even if our life may seem boring at times, it is amazing. Many people dream of a boring life, especially those in war-torn countries or countries where they don’t have many rights or are oppressed.

Being able to zoom out and look at the bigger picture of what’s happening on earth allows us to have a wake-up call. We don’t need to be so self-centred in our own misery. 

People act as mirrors for self-appreciation

Some people in our lives simply mirror how we can be more appreciative of ourselves. Like our friends who dish out beautiful compliments and reflections of who we are. Many of us struggle to even accept these kinds of compliments, brushing them off and saying, “I’m not really like that”. Brushing it off, pushing the love away.

Learning to love ourselves is a long path of reconciliation with the heart.

We are already unified, we are a fractal of source. We need to place ourselves in that position to be able to heal, activate and upgrade our human.

This is what I teach extensively to all of my students! I would love to encourage you to find appreciation in the little things. How can you appreciate yourself more? Open a little door every day to more appreciation. Write down one sentence in your journal about what you appreciate about life.

Thank you, dear one, for reading this post and allowing me to share my gifts with the world and to anchor why I came here. From the bottom of my heart, I appreciate you. And I send you lots of love.

© 2023 crystalwind.ca. All rights reserved. We track all IP addresses with sniffer technology. Using a VPN will not hide your IP.