Learn more about the two forms of gratitude, and how gratitude impacts every area of your life. Discover why it's important to prioritize your life on a daily basis to increase your gratitude. Walk away with empowering questions to ask yourself to help you be more inspired, enthused, centered, and grateful.

This content is for educational and personal development purposes only. It is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any psychological or medical conditions. The information and processes shared are for general educational purposes only and should not be considered a substitute for professional mental-health or medical advice. If you are experiencing acute distress or ongoing clinical concerns, please consult a licensed health-care provider.

USEFUL LINKS:

Free Masterclass | Balancing Emotions: https://demartini.fm/emotions

Learn More About The Breakthrough Experience: demartini.fm/experience

Learn More About The Demartini Method: demartini.fm/demartinimethod

Determine Your Values: demartini.fm/knowyourvalues

Claim Your Free Gift: demartini.fm/astro

Join our Facebook community: demartini.ink/inspired

Mentioned in this episode:

The Breakthrough Experience

For More Information or to book for The Breakthrough Experience visit: demartini.fm/seminar

We always think we're victims of history by looking out there thinking

something's happened to us, but it's our perception of what's out there.

And we can take whatever's out there in our world and find out how it serves

what's valuable to us. And that increases our gratitude.

First I'm gonna say that there a superficial gratitude

a distinction.

A superficial gratitude is when things happen to be supporting what you value

and seems to be going easy and it seems like things are happening in the way

that you want and you go, 'Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you.' And it's kinda like a superficial,

easy dynamic and you don't really feel like there's anything going on that's

really testing you.

And then there's a gratitude that occurs when you've actually been challenged in

what you value, you feel like there's hindrances,

but then you found out how to perceived it differently or take actions on it

and actually came through it and had a deep gratitude. And you felt a deep,

absolutely feeling almost tears of gratitude for the realization that 'Wow,

I thought there was some sort of apparent chaos,

but there's actually a hidden order to what's happening.'

And you got a deep fulfillment coming out of that and a gratitude that came from

the challenge, not just from the support.

And both of those forms of gratitude are useful.

But the one that is actually able to take the challenges and turn 'em into

gratitudes,

those are the ones that are most empowering because

happens in your life, you can turn it into an opportunity.

But let's look at what gratitude does.

And then I'll talk about the distinction to those again.

Gratitude has an impact in your mind. Actually

the prefrontal cortex,

the medial prefrontal cortex in the forebrain is not only called the executive

center, but it's also called the gratitude center.

Because whenever you're doing something that's deeply meaningful,

truly inspiring, highest in value,

things that are really highest in priority in your life,

the thing you feel is meaningful and purposeful in your life,

that's when you end up having the highest degree of gratitude.

And you have the most resilience, most adaptability to whatever happens.

And you're able to see whatever you think is on the way, not in the way.

So you're able to see how whatever challenges you

what you want. You're able to see under, go through it, underneath it, around,

over above it, to get the outcome you want.

And that type of gratitude is very profound.

And that's occurring whenever you feel that anything is connected to what you

value most. And let me just go off on a little tangent here.

You have three things you have control of in your life, your perception,

decisions, and actions.

If you take command of your actions and prioritize your actions to the very

highest priorities,

you're going to have the highest probability of having the most gratitude.

Cause whenever you're living by highest priorities, the blood glucose,

oxygen goes in the forebrain, activates the medial prefrontal cortex,

the gratitude center, and you easily see gratitude.

You know when you've done a day,

when you've got the highest priorities knocked out,

you're more resilient and adaptable, you're more fulfilled, more grateful,

you can handle almost anything.

But when you're putting fires out and you're doing lower priority things and

feel like you're trapped and overwhelmed by extrinsic, you know,

fires you feel whoa, and you're a bear and you're ungrateful. So,

if you're not living by high priorities, you're going to be less grateful.

And so you can take command of that.

You can sit down and decide what is the highest priority action I can do today

to help me fulfill my mission on earth, to help me serve the most people,

to be able to fulfill my life? But you can also do that on your perceptions.

And the perceptions are you can ask;

how is no matter what's happened in my life today,

how's it helping me get what I really want to do?

How's it helping me fulfill my mission? My priorities,

my most important things in life, what I feel is most fulfilling?

Asking yourself, how specifically is whatever's happening,

helping me fulfill what's most meaningful to me, what's most inspiring,

my purpose, the thing that I want to do that serves the world?

If you ask that question and answer it, not sit down and go, 'I don't know.

I can't see it.

It's in my way.' But be accountable and find out how it's linked.

The moment you link it,

you neuroplastically reopen up your brain back into the frontal cortex and back

in the gratitude center. And then you see the hidden order in the chaos,

and then you're in command and you're not a victim of history,

you now master of your destiny. By asking;

how specifically is whatever's happening,

helping me fulfill what's most important to me, my highest priority?

You master both of 'em. You can master your motor actions.

You can master your sensory perceptions.

And then knowing when to make the decisions on which one you're gonna do.

Am I either gonna go prioritize my actions or am I prioritize my perceptions?

Either go do what you love through delegating or love what you do through

linking I call it.

Linking means asking how specifically is this action gonna help me fulfill my

mission and linking that action with that experience,

that sensory perception to what's most important. If you do that,

you have command and you increase your gratitude. Now gratitude, what that does,

when you're in that prefrontal cortex, you have less noise in the brain.

You're more creative, you're more solution oriented.

You actually feel purposeful. You have meaning in life.

You have more fulfillment, you're more inspired. You're more leader oriented.

You're living by design, not duty.

And your mental capacities are more heightened.

You wake up more of a genius. And in your business,

when you're in gratitude like that,

you're more resilient and adaptable to whatever happens.

You're also more in fair exchange. You're more objective.

So you're more likely to think about your customer in a fair way.

Because if you look down in your customer, not meet their needs,

you learn a lesson, you get humbled.

And if you look up and sacrifice your profits, you get, it doesn't work.

You learn to have objectivity in a balanced state.

When you're living by your highest values you're more objective and more neutral

about that, and more fair in your exchange. So from a business perspective,

you're gonna grow your business, you know, less noise in the brain, more genius.

And in your finances, when you're able to manage your emotions,

when you're living by your highest values, you're less volatile, less emotional,

less blood supply down into the amygdala, less predator prey oriented,

less impulse instinct oriented, less distracted, you're more focused.

When I asked in the 1980s,

what was the most common thing people were facing in their life? It was,

they were having hard time staying focused on what it is that was important to

them, they're easily getting distracted.

If you're not prioritizing your life and sticking to highest priority things,

you're gonna be inundated with other things. In fact,

if you don't fill your day with high priority actions that inspire you,

that brings gratitude to you,

your day's gonna fill up with low priority distractions that bring ingratitude.

So that's how important it is. And that's the way it is when it comes to money.

People who can't manage their money,

it's because they can't manage their emotions because they're in their amygdala

and they're not in their executive function.

So if you prioritize your actions and prioritize the actions that help build

wealth, automatic, your savings and investments,

and automatically serve people in ever greater numbers,

you'll grow your finances. And relationship, if you ask the question,

how specifically what they're dedicated to is helping you fulfill what you're

dedicated to?

You'll be able to take no matter what they've done and turn into something to be

grateful for. It's not what they do that makes it,

if you're waiting for people to support your values,

that's the amygdala function.

The amygdala is always wanting a pleasure and avoiding a pain,

an ease and avoiding difficulties. And that's where you, you don't grow there.

You grow by having challenges and innovating and creating.

And so a relationship is not meant for you to be always supported.

The relationship is there to make you authentic.

And you're not authentic if you're being juvenilely dependent on that thing,

that you're infatuated with them. You want the challenges in life.

And the challenges are one that make you learning how to make sure that you turn

those challenges into something to be grateful for is the mastery of the

relationship game. So ask; how specifically is what they're dedicated to,

what they do every day and what they love doing,

how's it helping you fulfill your highest values? If you do that,

you're gonna end up with more resilient, more adaptability,

and you'll be more appreciative of them,

and you'll be able to say with integrity, 'I'm thankful to you,

thank you for what you're doing. I didn't see it,

but now I see it.' We always think we're victims of history by looking out there

thinking something's happened to us,

but it's our perception of what's out there.

And we can take whatever's out there in our world and find out how it serves

what's valuable to us. And that increases our gratitude.

And the same thing socially,

when we're being really inspired and living by our highest value,

we're more social leaders and we're more impactful.

And instead of following a culture, we create a culture.

We create and lead the pathway.

And your job is not to sit there and subordinate to the world out there and

conform and be part of the herd,

it's going out and getting heard and giving yourself permission to make a

difference. We all wanna make a difference.

You're not gonna make a difference fitting in.

You're gonna make a difference standing out.

And when you go into take priority actions and take your perceptions and turn

'em into how it's helping you get what you want, and you're more grateful,

you're more of a leader and you're more likely to be a leader in society that

way. And also your physiology. I wrote a book many years ago,

Count Your Blessings, The Healing Power of Gratitude and Love.

There's no doubt that gratitude is one of the keys that opens up the gateway of

the heart and inside the heart is love and love opens up

and radiates light you might say from our heart and allows us to physiologically

be more balanced in health, in healing.

I think that gratitude and love are still the greatest healers of on the planet.

So we get more vitality and more energy when we're grateful and when we're in

feeling of love. And from an inspirational level, a spiritual level, you know,

what more spiritual can be except the grateful heart and a loving heart

and a grateful mind?

Those are the two things that represent spirituality as far as I'm concerned.

If you're not grateful for your life, your life is hell.

And if you're not in grace, you know, you're in disgrace.

And I'm a firm believer that all areas of life, all seven areas of life,

your spiritual path, your intellectual pursuits, your business, your finances,

your family, your social, your health, all of them are empowered by gratitude.

Gratitude is the a thing I mean, my mom was,

told me when I was four years old to count my blessings before I went to bed,

cuz people who are grateful for what they have they get more to be grateful for.

And I was born on Thanksgiving day in America.

My birthday's coming up on Thanksgiving this year.

And I'm a firm believer that if you take the time to stop and reflect and look

at what you are grateful for on a daily basis,

which I have the largest list of gratitudes and opportunistic things,

I go through and add 'had the opportunity to do this today,

had the opportunity to meet this individual,

had the opportunity to film this program,

had the opportunity to be interviewed by this,

had the opportunity to write this article.' And I

on a daily basis.

And in the process of doing my gratitude then filters out and I get way more

done. And I have more fulfillment in life and less resistance in life.

And I don't age as much.

I really believe that when you're grateful and you have love in your heart,

you don't age as much.

So there's a tremendous amount of value in the gratitude attitude.

And I really believe that that's the key.

If you sit down and prioritize your life, your actions,

and prioritize your perceptions and do that on a daily basis,

you're gonna have more gratitude. The forebrain is the gratitude center.

And every time you're living by priority, you activate that area.

And every time you're not,

and you're letting the world run your life and you become victims of the outer

world and victims of your history, you won't become master of your destiny.

So don't allow the, you know, when you get up in the morning,

if you don't design your day, if you don't fill it the way you want it,

it's gonna fill up with how you don't.

And if you don't empower all areas of your life,

people are gonna overpower you in those areas.

And they're gonna fill up that day with all kind of trivial stuff.

And you're gonna say, well,

I've never got anything that I wanted to get done today.

And then you feel crap about life. You don't feel inspired by your life.

Take the time to prioritize your life, prioritize your perceptions,

your decisions. If you haven't gone on my website to do Dr.

Demartini's Value Determination process, do that.

That'll help you determine what really is important to you,

so you can prioritize according to what's meaningful and not prioritize

according to what you think it should be according to some outside source.

You want the inner voice and inner vision to be directing what's priority.

You wanna be able to do something that's deeply meaningful because when you do

that, you have a yearning to want to go and be of service to other people.

When you're empowered, you wanna be of service. When you're disempowered,

you get focused on your own problems. When you get empowered,

you want to go out and make a contribution.

So gratitude is the key that opens up the gateway of the heart allows love to

come out, radio washes the brain and the mind,

allows it to be more inspired, more enthused, more centered, more present.

And those are healing capacities, healing of not just a physiology,

but the whole body, whole life. So take the time to prioritize your life.

Take the time to activate your executive center and realize if you do,

you'll have more time in your life. You'll have more gratitude too,

and document what you're grateful for on a daily basis.

It does make a difference.

I have the largest collection of gratitudes of anybody I've ever met.

And I do it every single day and I don't miss a day on it.

And I guarantee you it makes a difference in your life if you take the time to

actually stop and reflect on the things you're grateful for,

how is everything is on the way, not in the way?

I remember a teacher when I was 23 years old, I had a 35 year old guy,

he had six PhDs, he was a brilliant man, he says,

'Don't go to bed at night until you can look back at your life and see

gratitude. If you can't see anything in gratitude,

there's something that is not grateful for,

stop and look at it again before you go to bed.',

Anything you can't say thank you for and gratitude for is baggage.

Anything you can say thank you for is fuel.

So let's use both the superficial and the deep form of gratitude,

and let's go move forward on there and get life on the way, not in the way.

And if you do that, you'll say thank you even more. So this is Dr. Demartini,

until our next little presentation, stop, reflect,

and prioritize your life and say, thank you.