EP25 - A Deeper Understanding of Gratitude to Elevate Your Life

Shaista Fatehali: 00:00:04

Imagine being present, calm and connected, while creating a family environment where everyone can thrive.

Dimple Arora: 00:00:15

Welcome to the IM mom parenting podcast, providing inspiration and actionable steps to manifest the meaningful and magical life you desire for you and your family.

Shaista Fatehali: 00:00:28

We are your hosts dimple, Aurora, founder and mindful evolution and shape the daily founder of Thrive kids.

Dimple Arora: 00:00:37

Thank you for sharing the I am mom journey with us. Let's get started. Hey, and welcome back to our podcast. As we record this, today, we're celebrating Thanksgiving in Canada. And we decided, why not do an episode on gratitude. Now gratitude has become a buzzword, and I'm sure many people around the country this weekend, sat around the dinner table each expressing what they're grateful for. And the benefits of gratitude have been well documented. So in addition to covering some of those, in this episode, we're excited to discuss what gratitude really is, and how you can use it for yourself and with your child to have higher levels of well being and ultimately raise your human consciousness at a quantum level.

Shaista Fatehali: 00:01:31

Yeah, I love Love, love expressing gratitude, as well as talking about gratitude. And actually, to be honest, I, we sat at the dinner table, but we didn't see. And I think because like I've just like do it all the time. Right? Yeah. With, particularly with with my owl. So the thing is, when we're expressing gratitude, we often think of in think of that, in terms of expressing appreciation towards someone when they've done something nice for us, or we have benefited from them in some way, right? Sometimes it's also required or expected, right? Like you're tell your kids Oh, you got this say thank you. But the thing is, when you are intentionally creating a practice of gratitude, on a daily basis, it actually produces different chemicals, chemical reactions in our brain, that helps us to experience different positive emotions, as well as rewire our brain chemistry.

Dimple Arora: 00:02:54

Oh, I love that you brought that up. I love that you brought that up. Because gratitude really is it's a feeling. It's a feeling, it's a positive emotion that you feel and when you think of emotions, you can think of them as energy in motion. And when we look at the work of Dr. David Hawkins, he was a world renowned psychiatrist, physician, researcher, and spiritual teacher. And he came up with the map of consciousness, which measured the frequency of different emotions, and gratitude calibrated at 540, which is the level of unconditional joy and inner joy. And it really is. It's a very high state of being. Okay, and I want to read an excerpt from the book becoming supernatural, which I'm actually reading right now by Dr. Joe dispenza. This is a great explanation of how emotions work, okay. So when we think of thought, those networks of neurons that fire in our brain create electric charges, and those thoughts cause a chemical reaction that results in a feeling or an emotion and in this case, we're talking about gratitude. And those feelings and emotions create magnetic charges. And then the thoughts that create the electric charges go on to produce a specific electromagnetic field that creates your actual state of being

Shaista Fatehali: 00:04:33

oh my gosh, that is so powerful, like when you read that I was just getting chills in my body because it's such a fantastic explanation of this practice of gratitude. And you mentioned this in the introduction, right that it's become such a buzzword Oh, oh, okay. You know, all you need to do is just be grateful for what you have or practice gratitude or you hear this a lot, but to hear You're on such a level of how it can be reflected in our bodies really, really puts much emphasis on us, right? So the thing is here with gratitude, Jay Shetty, actually, in his book, think like a month he talks about gratitude a lot. And what he says is that when you're present in gratitude, you actually cannot be anywhere else. There's a study done where it was a neuroscientist who did the study, Alex Korb, and he found that you can't focus on positive and negative feelings at the same time, you can only focus on what so when you're training your brain, to have Mo, to focus on moments of gratitude, they're going to going to elicit these, these chemical reactions that you just spoke about, and it will allow us to escape negative feelings or feelings of unworthiness or not enoughness and instead focus on these positive emotions.

Dimple Arora: 00:06:13

Yes, yes. Because the frequency of gratitude, it's an elevated emotion. And it's much higher than the emotions of stress, such as fear and anger, because those emotions carry a very different level of conscious intent and energy. So that's, that's what it is. And, and when you're not living in gratitude, you You're right, it leads to this feeling of not not enough, right? So not having enough not being enough. And it really has to start with, with being grateful for what you actually have in the present moment. Because it's not about like, desiring what you want in the future, right? It's about, like you said, in Jace chedis book focusing on the present moment, and what you have in this moment, right. And I know that it's probably hard for people to feel gratitude when, you know, when there's a lot of adverse stuff going on, right? And when there's bad things happening in your life, it's really hard to get to that place of gratitude. Sometimes, yeah. Right. But what we can do is, like, as you clear, the lower level emotions, as you clear the emotions like shame, fear, guilt, anger, you start raising your frequency, it's really raising your vibe, right?

Shaista Fatehali: 00:07:49

Oh, yeah, totally. And, you know, the other thing, though, I think is so it's, it really takes us out of that place we're in right, where this is, where we are, where we're stuck. And it just opens us up to the possibility that we don't have to stay where we are. Because when we wait in this graph, gratefulness, we allow ourselves to suddenly become open to way more opportunities, and for these experiences, or joyful moments that life will bring towards us. But we have to be open enough to receive them. And that's what gratitude does.

Dimple Arora: 00:08:38

Exactly, because when you are in that stuck energy, you're, you're not allowing the energy and the emotion to flow through you because you feel stuck. And your body is like your energetic field is like you're like a tuning fork, right? You're turning tuning into a different station or frequency we can say. And so when you tune into a state like gratitude, you really are plugged in to a very high level. state of being and when you talk about gratitude, it's important to speak in the present tense, right? So so if you say, you know, I'm grateful for my car, right? That's, that's in the present tense, but you're not going to say, I'm grateful when I get that car, right. Yeah, exactly. So it's important about, like, teaching kids on how to speak about gratitude is is also important.

Shaista Fatehali: 00:09:41

Yeah, totally. And the benefits for kids are huge, right? So there's physical benefits, emotional benefits, psychological benefits. So for example, one really benefit great benefit for kids is that it helps with their mental A positive mental attitude, right? And their aptitude because what happens is, and again, we we talked about this earlier reconfigures the brain, right and really allows them to look for things that they are grateful for in moments of distress. So it improves a lot of the resiliency that kids require, right. And it also improves their self esteem. Because when you think about what you are, what you have, and what you're grateful for, you automatically feel good about yourself, right? And that increases the self esteem. And then that's like the snowball effect that's going to affect relationships, it's going to affect friendships, it's going to affect academic confidence, and help them to get to their next level. Yeah, and that's why I feel like

Dimple Arora: 00:11:03

a gratitude practice with children at a young age, starting early is really important. Because like you said, it trains their brain to look for the positive. So like we've spoken about in other episodes, that reticular Activation System in the brain, the Raz, what you focus on is what you see is what is what energy you attract into your life. It's what you what expands more into your life. So if they are constantly looking for things that they are grateful for, it is going to train train their brain, and I always tell partners, look for what you appreciate in your partner, because usually we're looking for what they're doing wrong. Yeah, that's true. And, and I notice if I get into a pattern of looking at what my husband's doing wrong, it seems like he's doing everything wrong. But when I started focusing on what he did really well, and I started appreciating it, then all of a sudden, it seems like it's happening more.

Shaista Fatehali: 00:12:08

Oh, yeah, totally. And, you know, with kids, too, I have to say, though, okay, and I get this sometimes with parents, but I experienced this myself. When. So when we're practicing gratitude, sometimes there's not going to be like, okay, sure, let's do that, Bob, or, you know, but I think what happens though, it just kind of it trickles, right? Like it transfers into their brain, just the fact of us even saying, okay, like, tell me a little bit about what happened in your day, what was really great about your day today. Or if you're doing activities around that, right, that we'll talk about a little bit later on. Even if they're not engaging in that conversation, or that activity, you've already planted that seed, and guess what's gonna happen, they're gonna end up doing that themselves independently, in that time, and time and time again. So if you find that your child is not willingly participating with you, just try and encourage that discussion or bringing up the topic. And they will organically do it.

Dimple Arora: 00:13:27

Yes, yes. And it's I mean, for older kids, it's easy to get them a gratitude journal to have a practice before bed, and they can write in it. But for younger kids who don't know how to write yet, you can use statements like, because they might not even understand the word grateful. So you could say things like, what are you happy for today? Right? I am happy that I am thankful that I love that. Right? So that's going to train them to to use those kinds of words. Right? And one thing also I noticed with kids is it really helps them I mean, even with adults, even with us, gratitude helps us to move past disappointments. Because whenever something really difficult happens in our life. Don't you find that when you reflect back? You're always so appreciative for that experience.

Shaista Fatehali: 00:14:21

Yeah, right. When you look back, definitely Yeah.

Dimple Arora: 00:14:24

As hard as it was right? As hard as it was. You're so grateful that you went through that because somehow you became stronger, you became more resilient. You got out of a tough situation, you It's such a triumph, right? It's such a triumph. And so we can use gratitude to help kids learn lessons to learn some life lessons and it helps them to move past the experience. Right so helps them to okay this is you know, what not to do next time or share this experience with somebody else so that they can also learn from this mistake, right? Or they can help a friend going through this time. And that's what usually happens, you go through a really tough time, like say, somebody goes through a health challenge, or a marital problem. They're, they're going through a divorce, you use your experience to help others. Right? And you'll become grateful for that experience, because you gain the knowledge and you gained the ability to help others through it.

Shaista Fatehali: 00:15:29

Right, exactly, yeah. And there's so many different ways in which you can teach gratitude to your kids, right. And there's a lot of practices that you can do. And that leads us to some of the strategies that we have for you today. Now, you mentioned a little bit about little kids, right? And just explaining it to them in a way that makes sense to them. Like what are you happy for? A really good add on to that is to make it very tactile. And so what I do with younger kids is I actually find, usually it's a rock maybe during like the fall, it could be a leaf. But basically, you're you're picking out something, let's say it's a rock here. And you ask them to pick it out by how they feel towards the rock, right? Towards the rock, like if they like it, and so they'll pick it up, and they'll be like, Oh, I like it, because it's so pretty or whatever, right? And so, they will then take the rock and carry it around, and maybe even put it in their pocket. And then you're gonna encourage them, and you'll do it with them. Whenever you touch that rock, think about what really made you happy today. or whenever you see that rock, think about what happened today that made you feel really good. So you're combining this tactile experience with a cognitive experience. And this is really, really fun, and super beneficial for younger kids.

Dimple Arora: 00:17:12

Oh, that's awesome, because that rock acts like an anchor. So you anchor into that moment, that present moment to use that to change, change, train the brain, right. So that's awesome. That's really awesome. And, you know, one thing that we did as a family last year was we created a gratitude jar. And so we had these little pieces of paper. And every time we were grateful, or something really amazing happened, we wrote it on the paper, we threw it into the jar. But then what happened was we forgot about the jar, and then we forgot to open it at the end of the year, because at the end of the year, you open it and you read all those amazing little moments on those pieces of paper. So actually, we had planned this weekend to actually open that jar. So we're gonna, yeah, we're gonna do that. So we still have all those tiny pieces of paper in there. And it'll be really nice to read those, those experiences read about those experiences that we had.

Shaista Fatehali: 00:18:13

Yeah, that is a really fun activity, the gratitude jar, I find that it becomes such a family activity, like you write, and you just basically, like you said, Get the jar and every day write down something that happened, right, that you're really grateful for, and put it in, and then you pull it out at the end of the year.

Dimple Arora: 00:18:35

Exactly. You know, there there are so many things you can do with your kids, like even if, even if they're in a bad mood, right, even if they're in a bad mood, you can use gratitude to shift their mood. So even just giving them an opportunity to see the positive, you know, around around them in that moment, right. So if they seem to be in a funk, or they're really unhappy, or they're complaining about something, you can get them to use gratitude. But that's why we want to train their brain early, we want to start the gratitude practice early, so that they have that ingrained in them. And they are out there elevating their their frequency at a cellular level from a young age which is affecting their, their their cells and their physical health. And you know, even for us, it can help with depression. Gratitude practice can help with keeping us healthier and even more productive studies show there's so many benefits, right and we can actually go through a few of them. Yeah, and

Shaista Fatehali: 00:19:49

with this grant with gratitude, like you were talking a little bit about the self awareness right and sense of well being and I find That when you actually do create it in terms of a practice with consistency, it becomes a reflection, right? So one way that I like to do this is usually like right before bed, where we do the two stars in a wish or like that right before you brush your teeth, whatever works for you at the dinner table. But I just like to call the two stars in a wish, because it just makes us visual in your mind, right? And so again, it's the two stars like, what are you really grateful for. And something that maybe you want to change is the wish, right? But it's still you're putting the emphasis on what you're really grateful for. But you're not dismissing some of the other challenges that you had, because we don't want to do that either. Right? So exactly want to put emphasis on the gratitude, but not dismiss any of the events, other events that happened?

Dimple Arora: 00:20:59

Exactly. So then you can look at, you can actually look at this practice as a coping strategy. Right, a very healthy coping strategy. And there are so many studies on gratitude, we could not possibly go through all of them here today. But some of the studies do show that grateful people have less negative coping strategies. So they are less likely to try to avoid a problem or deny that they have a problem or blame themselves, or cope through external substances. Grateful people also they sleep better, they are more patient. But I think it's because you're thinking less negative thoughts before you sleep. Because if you do a gratitude practice before bed, you are more likely to go to bed thinking more positively instead of negatively. So I think that's probably why they sleep better. Right? Yeah. And other studies. Sorry, go ahead. Yeah, yeah,

Shaista Fatehali: 00:21:57

exactly. And I think that also just lowers your stress response as well. Right?

Dimple Arora: 00:22:02

Exactly. It lowers your cortisol levels, it show that it lowers your current cortisol levels. And it also helps people to have more control of their environments, and their personal growth and their purpose in life and their self acceptance, like these are all studies and like really well researched and well documented studies on gratitude. There's 1000s of them.

Shaista Fatehali: 00:22:28

Yeah. And he had, there's so many studies on gratitude. Which is, again, why sometimes people feel like it is just a gratitude. I've heard it, yeah, we what we really want to do here is emphasize how beneficial it is for you and for your children, and how easy it can be to implement it as a family.

Dimple Arora: 00:22:58

Absolutely. And it really will increase your level of happiness. And I know that there was one study, I heard that people wrote down five things they were grateful, every grateful for every day. And after 30 days, they found out that those people were 60%, happier. Right? And I'm not sure what the criteria was for measuring that. I don't remember the study now. But just the fact that it can actually help you be happier and more satisfied with your life. And like you had mentioned earlier, even your relationships will improve, right?

Shaista Fatehali: 00:23:33

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, there's a there's so many of these studies. Particularly with there's a lot around like students, there's a lot of students that had to practice gratitude. And then they found that when they did those students that practice gratitude actually did well on certain tasks,

Dimple Arora: 00:23:53

right? Oh, wow. Yeah, it makes you more productive to write. And so what we're emphasizing here is that it really does affect you at a cellular level. And it does help you to raise the consciousness of your energetic field, okay. And that the doc the studies are very well documented around the research of it and it helps to train your brain to be happier because then you become automatically programmed to become happier. So there are many strategies and all you need to do is start a gratitude practice as a family and I do know of a colleague who was in her sister had passed away. She was going through a very big financial loss with her spouse, and all she was able to do was get up to the get up off the bed to go Go to the bathroom. And I remember she said a she did a talk one day at a women's event and she said she started just writing down three things that she was grateful for. And she did this every day. And she said that within a few weeks, she started getting out of bed, she started putting her life together, she got back to normal, she was able to cope with the death of her sister, she was able to cope with the marriage, marital stress from the financial loss. And she attributes it all to doing that gratitude practice. Oh,

Shaista Fatehali: 00:25:35

my gosh, that is so incredible and inspiring. It just goes to show you that you can start this wherever you are in life or state you're in and you just never know how far the impacts of just a little bit of gratitude can reach.

Dimple Arora: 00:25:57

Absolutely. Thank you for listening. And you take care. We'll talk to you next week. Bye. Thank you for joining us on the IM mom parenting journey. If you enjoyed today's episode, please follow us and head on over to iTunes to leave us a review.

Shaista Fatehali: 00:26:16

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