(This is an excerpt from a University Of Metaphysical Sciences course at www.umsonline.org, please feel free to visit the school website)
Flow the intense energy of appreciation for just one minute. That cancels out thousands of hours spent in victim mode. Gratitude is the fastest way to having what you want. When you are grateful, the universe dutifully creates more things for you to be grateful for, since that is the vibration you are resonating at. If you are ungrateful, the universe will provide more reasons to be ungrateful. Remember, physical reality is a machine of sorts that responds to your consciousness. It doesn't care what you create. It is simply a reflection machine. Gratitude has been proven time and time again to be a most effective method for creating a beautiful life. Below is what a few authors say about gratitude:
Lynn Grabhorn continues to say in her book Excuse Me, Your Life Is Waiting (2000), The vibration of appreciation is the most profoundly important frequency we can hold, for it is the closest thing to cosmic love that exists. When we're appreciating we're in perfect vibrational harmony with our source energy or God energy… Appreciation is the fastest and highest vibration we can use for attraction. If we would shoot appreciation at anything and everything all day long we'd be guaranteed to have heaven on earth in no time, living happily ever after with more friends, more money, more beautiful relationships in total safety and closer to the God of our Being than it's possible to fathom.
Esther Hicks says in her book Ask And It Is Given (2004), Appreciation and self-love are the most important aspects you could ever nurture. Appreciation of others and the appreciation of yourself are the closest vibrational matches to source energy of anything we have ever witnessed anywhere in this Universe… The more you practice appreciation, the less resistance you will have in your own vibrational frequencies and the less resistance you have, the better your life will be.
Wayne Dyer says in Manifest Your Destiny (1997), Gratitude is your expression of acknowledging the oneness of the universal energy working in cooperation with your desires... It is an absence of feeling alienated or separate. It represents our full acknowledgement and appreciation of the energy flowing through all things, and brings gifts to us in the form of the fulfillment of our desires… The nature of gratitude is the complete and full response of the human heart to everything in the universe... When your heart is filled with gratitude, it is grateful for everything and cannot focus on what is missing… When your attention is on your scarcity, you are telling the universal spirit that you need more and are not grateful for all that you have… Gratitude is a way of experiencing the world with love rather than judgment. Taking things for granted means going through life unaware of the multitude of gifts that are here in each and every moment. Change an attitude of ingratitude by imagining, just for a moment, how empty your life would be without those blessings."
An abundance of gratitude is a blessing which everyone can receive. Open your mind to the manifestation of simple things in life: love, power, grace, spirit, gratitude inspiration and you’ll feel a radical awakening begin manifesting itself within you. A positive attitude is the best healing for the soul. By keeping an awakening evolutionary journal, you can manifest the inspiration to help others keep their own gratitude journals. Encouraging and positive poems and quotes also help.