I was quite skeptical about this book. It is written by the author of The Secret, and thought it is just a mainstream Law of Attraction book. I still gave it a go for two reasons:
1. It was the book of the month in our Book Club for January.
2. The theme of my year is living in gratitude, being thankful for what we have. It figured that the best way to start the new year is with a book encouraging 28 days of gratitude. Even better, Mike and I decided to do this challenge together.
Well, we were hooked from day one! The book consists of 28 simple practices, the first two you do every single day for the 28/27 days, the other 26 are just for the actual day. I heard a lot of people saying that it is quite difficult to do these practices. Maybe we are in the right frame of mind, or it was just meant to be, but we found this so much fun and absolutely uplifting. I think this was one of our happiest January for sure, and that I can attribute to this book.
Without spoiling the fun for you too much, Day 1. - Count your Blessings -is is the biggest challenge: starting the day by writing down 10 things you are grateful for and also explaining why, feeling it, than going through your list and with each item say Thank you, Thank you, Thank you! The key is not writing things that you 'should' be thankful for, but only putting down things that you are actually thankful for that morning. The one that has a feeling behind it. Sounds like hard work? Oh, but so worth it!
Let me tell you a few of the magical things that happened through this practice for me in January.
The day I put my teacher/mentor's name and wholeheartedly thanked her - was actually her Birthday.
The day I sent all my thanks and love to my car and the car service people (it has been playing up with the tyres for a while and they couldn't fix it) Mike took the car to the garage and the tyre burst right there and then. Not on our road trip to the South at Christmas, not when our oldest was ferrying us to and from London Stanstead Airport, not when Mike was doing 70 mph on the highway on the way to the garage for the 3rd time in the last 2 months - but there, in the safety of the garage, where they changed it nice and easy.
The day I felt all the gratitude for skiing and my love for the sport was the day we ended up booking a few days away for me to visit our daughter in France doing a ski season (no, it was not planned to book this, in fact it seemed like an impossibility to be able to pull this off).
So here you go, that is just the Day 1 practice. Any area of your life, relationships, health, money, carrier, goals, desires are covered. I also had the realization here, that all the practices I was already doing naturally - surprise surprise - those areas of my life were amazing. The one where I was stuck in complaining mode? Nope, not so well.
After having done the whole of the 28 days, these practices are definitely staying with us! Even made a little board to remind us of the practices (see below, or don't, if you wanna keep the suspense of what new practice is coming when you do it for the first time!). We are planning to pick and choose one practice whenever the Magic seems to be dwindling in our lives. I really encourage you to give it a try, maybe pair up with some fun people to do it with, as it is much easier when you are encouraging each other. I am even thinking of redoing the whole 28 days in May, our birthday month. Would you like to join me? Let me know what you think.
Love
Dora
SPOILER ALERT! - our Magic Board (Day 2. is missing as we do that every day)
