It took me a long time to feel gratitude for my past. And yet I think that is an important part of developing your intuition. Gratitude is about being at peace with. Gratitude is not always felt in the moment. Perhaps gratitude for the good moments, that is much easier and they can often be named like that. But feeling gratitude for the difficult moments is sometimes only noticeable years later. Then you can start to feel gratitude retroactively.

Gratitude with recurring power is about consciously experiencing and expressing gratitude on a regular basis, creating a constant, reinforcing influence on your life. Here are some ways to do this:

1. Gratitude reflection: take some time each day to reflect on what you have experienced and consciously reflect on what you are grateful for, even the small things. This reinforces the positive in your life.

2. Gratitude Journal: Write down what you are grateful for daily or weekly. This helps you recognize patterns and increase your awareness of the good things that keep coming back.

3. Gratitude in relationships: regularly express to others what you are grateful for in your relationship. This strengthens the connection and also gives the other person a feeling of appreciation, which makes gratitude come back as a kind of positive circle.

4. Mindfulness and meditation: Practice gratitude through mindfulness or meditation, where you focus on the present moment and consciously be grateful for what is there at that moment. This helps you to feel and hold gratitude more deeply.

5. Gratitude for challenges: look back on difficult moments and recognize what you learned from them or how you became stronger because of them. This helps you to experience the power of gratitude even in difficult times.

By consciously cultivating gratitude and bringing it back into your life regularly, you build a repetitive force that increases your well-being and resilience.

How could you apply gratitude in your life? Also for the difficult moments that you have experienced. By the way, that has nothing to do with acceptance in the sense of being okay with it. You don't have to be okay with something to be grateful for it. I am certainly not okay with experiences from my youth, or with certain events that happened only recently.

It means recognizing that even negative or painful experiences can have value, without condoning or liking the situation. It’s about finding meaning or lessons in difficult circumstances, while still recognizing that the experience itself was not good or wanted. Here are ways to do this:

1. Recognizing Growth: You can be grateful for what you learned or how you grew from a difficult experience, without condoning the event itself. For example, a painful situation may have strengthened your resilience or empathy.

2. Gratitude for support: In difficult situations, you can be grateful for the support of others, or for your own ability to continue, even if the situation itself was painful or unwanted.

3. Focus on the bigger picture: Sometimes a negative experience can help you find direction or change things that will ultimately lead to something better. You don’t have to like the situation, but you can be grateful for the insights or opportunities that come from it.

4. Gratitude for yourself: You can thank yourself for how you responded, despite the difficulty of the situation. This strengthens your self-esteem, without seeing the experience itself as “okay”.

I ask you to write yourself a letter and focus on one of the 4 points. Gratitude is such a powerful phenomenon. My day always starts with drawing an awareness card and on the day I am writing this I drew a card focused on gratitude. In the hours that followed something happened that was so not okay, but where I managed to stay calm and not take any action at all. If I had done that, there would have been a lot of unrest in my family. So I felt a lot of gratitude for a pattern that I had broken, by not reacting impulsively and from frustration and anger. And that strengthened my self-esteem, exactly as described in point 4.