We don't need to embrace all the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune but we can be thankful for the lessons they provide. Life is about learning to love oneself and keep making new mistakes.
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The Power of Gratitude

This was Thanksgiving week and for that reason, I wish to talk about how healthy it is to be grateful.

Gratitude:
noun
1. the quality or feeling of being grateful or thankful:

 

Living as a human, with all our insights, passions, and imagination, is a challenge.
As I explain in my book, The Telomere Miracle, I believe that learning to optimize your mindset to increase telomerase activity entails several important things that can be summed up in three things: Live, love, and laugh.

 

My theory of consciousness is that all thoughts and memories that matter are meta-tagged with emotional significance. We cannot be human without emotions. When we try to resist them or live in our thoughts, we suffer. To live is to feel.

 

Love is an action of consciousness that accepts the unity of everything. There are many times we do not want see that unity and invite the darkness of fear and false separation. But to walk through life with balance and flow and we grow in wisdom. To love is to allow the light in.

 

Finally, to laugh is to accept the that our experience of life is fleeting, ironic, and absurd.

 

If we live without the veritas of no authentic feeling- life would be a lie
If we live withour the gravitas of love- life would be meaningless
If we live without the levitas of laughter- life would not be enjoyable

 

So be grateful for all the sorrow, enemies, self-pity, and loathing. Learning to feel, see the connections, and find perspective will transform sorrow into joy, enemies into teachers, self-pity into growth, and loathing into guidance towards what brings you joy.

 

There is a saying to never go to sleep mad at your spouse. There is good reason for this as I explain in the chapter on Sleep. I have found that since the intensity and efficiency of sleep and self-teaching through emotional meta-tagging is accelerated on adaptogens, some people get nightmares if they go to bed anxiously.

 

In my book, I describe a technique to do a Top 10 things I’m grateful for before you sleep to prevent your demons from learning the wrong lessons from the days feelings and stories. We don’t need to embrace all the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune but we can be thankful for the lessons they provide. Life is about learning to love oneself and keep making new mistakes.

 

If we stay stuck in our stories, decline to feel connected, and get bogged down in seriousness, we will age faster and not enjoy living. So live, love, and laugh your way to a longer and happier life using the techniques in my book.

 

2 thoughts on “The Power of Gratitude”

  1. Perry T. Combes

    Dr. Park, I was a full time caregiver for my mother for years (I mean 24-365) up to 5/15/15 when she died. my mother was severely demented and totally incontinent for several years. I designed and built devices to assist with my unpaid care giving job. I read your book ‘ Telomere Time Bombs’. knowing that long term care giving is a major telomere shortener, I had a mouth swab t length test in June 2017. I was pleasantly surprised to learn my t length was 8000 base pairs which is equivalent to a biological age of 31. my chronological age is 67 according to Viaguard, the lab that did the test. actually, the t length result fits in very well with some other biological characteristics of me: my waist is 32 inches as it was when I was 18, my lung capacity is greater than normal for a man my height who is 20, my fasting insulin is 2.4 (Lab Corp ref range is 6-27). etc. other than that, I practice an extreme version of ‘Counterclockwise’ (Ellen Langer’s experiment 1979).

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