How to feel really great, really often – gratitude!

The few days after overcoming a flu simply eating a meal feels fffking awesome, because I can actually taste something. Why does that feeling eventually fade? Thinking about how our sense of gratitude is very relative, I wrote about a circumstance we could regularly imagine to help with remaining grateful more consistently.

You don’t know what you’ve got, until it goes, ooh ooh

Quote is from Kesha in Good Old Days with Macklemore. Great song! Link to song on YouTube.

Imagine you are a famous actress and you are well known around the world for being a singer, a model, and an actress — mainly known for playing the Marvel character Wonder Woman. One day, during a performance in Dancing with the Stars, you do a move you’ve done since you were a child, a cartwheel. Your arm unexpectedly slips, because the floor is wet. You suffer severe brain damage. After a week in the ICU, you finally come out of a coma. You can tell you cannot feel or move anything neck down. You’re paralyzed.

You remain paralyzed for 7 years. Eventually, you start to get a little feeling back. With the help of 35+ trainers, doctors, healers, family, and friends around the world, you’re able to remain motivated to keep working towards recovery. For 9 more years you remain fully paralyzed — you do rehab for 3 hours a day M-F and you spend most of your waking hours laying in your bed. Eventually, you are able to walk again. At this point, you are unfortunately a single, unmarried 48 woman with no kids and no job, but you can walk!

You are actually able to run! And now you can take pictures with an iPhone, shower without assistance, and eat with your own hands again. Also, for the first time in 17 years, you gave your mom a hug. :)

Imagine if you then walked into a Lyft and the driver asked, “How are you?” What would you say?

I feel absolutely great! Healthy! So I am quite happy!

I don’t want to be paralyzed for 16 years before I am extremely grateful and really ecstatic that I can do the simple things like peel a clementine, text a friend, or hug my mom.

My goal is to try to regularly imagine the above circumstance or something similar (e.g. when I got out of a bout of depression) on a weekly basis. This practice may be worthwhile for you.

Dadaji, I’m happy that you encouraged me and your millions of followers worldwide to focus on gratitude on your birthday (October 19).

Dadaji is a philsopher who led an organization that focused on individual self-improvement. The thoughts were based off a variety of philosophies, religions, and historical leaders. Many of my values and friends come from the organization he started — Swadhyay.