Family & Personal Gratitude Journals
November is the prefect time to reflect on Gratitude and showing how thankful we are for our very, very blessed lives. With the thrill of the holidays already here, now is the time to start this personal and/or family tradition.
What is Gratitude? The state of being grateful; warm and friendly feeling toward a benefactor; kindness awakened by a favor received; thankfulness. Pleasing to the mind or senses; agreeable or welcome; refreshing.
I couldn't have said it better....gratitude is such a deep feeling, but it's free, and it's always available to give. I know as a mother how often I love to hear a simple, but passionate thank you and I'm satisfied beyond measure. The power of gratitude is larger than we can imagine. We need to teach our families about the importance of gratitude, not just in November, but all year long. The rewards and blessings will come even more as we share our gratitude with our families.
A Gratitude Journal can be a simple notebook, a beautiful leather journal, or even a pre-designed "gratitude journal". I keep a personal journal and within that journal I note my personal gratitude. Our family has just started a family journal using Cherish Bound's Gratitude Journal. We have been sitting down as a family and noting our blessings and what we're grateful for. We all add something to the journal multiple times a week. When we first started out the kids would throw out the basic answers like....Grateful I can play soccer, grateful for my new shirt, and so on. Good things to be grateful for, but then they started to have to think...go deeper. Now I'm hearing, grateful for the opportunity to serve a needy families, grateful for the quality time I got to spend alone with my dad, grateful for twins that make me smile every day....we've all slowly moved away from being thankful for material things and are now recognizing life's simple moments and opportunities.If you need a Gratitude Journal, check out Cherish Bound's Gratitude Journal here. It's a beautiful 5x5, purple journal that allows room for everyone to write in. There is an intro to gratitude, ideas for feeling gratitude, ideas for being grateful, how to use the journal, and lots of pages to write on.
Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life.
It turns what we have into enough and more.
- Melody Beattie
It turns what we have into enough and more.
- Melody Beattie
3 comments:
There was an article in the Readers Digest earlier this year summarizing some studies done on gratitude and the health benefits that come from consciously being grateful. It was a fabulous article! I blogged about it at the time, so maybe I should dig it out of my archives and re-post!
How awesome and what a perfect time of year to hear this! I hope your day is as beautiful as you are! ♥ Hugs!
A few years ago I started a gratitude journal. I would write down 5 things every night that I was thankful for. If I had a particularly bad day I would reflect back on some memories from childhood that made me happy and I'd be thankful for those memories. So it sort of evolved into a memory journal too.
I would love to have my mom and dad work on a storybook like your mom and aunt. I'm gonna plant the bug in their ear and see if they'll be game.
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