S2 EP251 – A Simple Choice with Profound Positive Results

Hi everyone. Dr. Margaret Paul here. Welcome to the Inner Bonding Podcast.

I have the honor of belonging to an organization called the Transformational Leadership Council, TLC for short, which was started by author and trainer Jack Canfield about 16 years ago. This is a group of about 130 transformational leaders from all over the world, and we meet every six months to connect, learn, grow, and enjoy each other.

I was at the last TLC retreat in July. At meals, we sit at tables with others talking and getting to know people we don’t yet know. The last night of the retreat I was sitting next to Ken Honda, a Japanese best-selling author who comes from Japan to the meetings every six months. I had read Ken’s best-selling book, “Happy Money,” and loved it, so I was pleased to be sitting next to him to get to know him better. 

We talked about a lot of different things, and then he told me about his latest interest and what he is teaching through workshops in Japan. This is what he said to me:

“I’ve discovered that saying ‘Thank you’ – which is ‘arigato’ in Japanese – 3000 times a day changes everything!”

“Wow,” I said, “Are you actually saying ‘arigato’ 3000 times a day?”

“Yes,” he said with a big smile and a twinkle in his eye. And he proceeded to send me a text thanking me for sitting next to him at dinner. He also signed his new book to me, “True Wealth,” which I read as soon as I got home and loved.

Ken is a wonderful example of what he is teaching. Even though it’s obvious that he is an introvert like me, he has a beautiful warm welcoming energy and a wonderful smile. I felt privileged to spend the evening in his loving presence.

Do I say “Thank you” 3000 times a day? Probably not, and I don’t know how to keep track. But since then, I’ve been very aware of how many big and little things there are to be grateful for.

I often think about people suffering in Gaza and in the Ukraine, or solders who are fighting in different parts of the world, or people who don’t have enough to eat. And when I’m brushing my teeth, I often wonder how many of them have a toothbrush and toothpaste and dental floss. How many of any of them would love a piece of dental floss or a tissue? Often when I grab a tissue, I think about people in various parts of the world who would likely just love to have a tissue with which to wipe their nose, and I am so grateful for my tissue. I turn on my faucet and clean filtered water comes out, and I wonder how many people in the world don’t have access to clean water. And I say “Thank you” for each of these and for so many things I have and can do in a day. 

I’m so grateful not just for my home and my healthy food and my pets and my Golden Girls housemates, and my children and my grandchildren and how well they are all doing, and I’m so grateful that they are healthy and successful. I’m so grateful for my wonderful and fulfilling work that I’m not tired of even after 56 years of doing this. I’m so grateful for my health and my clear mind at 85 years of age. I walk through my beautiful home, and I love the beauty of what’s on our walls, and of the surrounding nature. I speak to my many plants, thanking them for keeping the air free of toxins and for growing so well and being so beautiful.

Since I’m so sensitive to toxins, I’m so grateful that organic clothing is available at reasonable prices, and that over the last few years, I have enough organic clothing that I can wear it most of the time. I’m very grateful that I live on a 35 acre ranch, and I don’t have to deal with the light pollution and other forms of pollution that are part of a city.

I get into bed at night, and I often think about how many people around the world don’t have a bed to sleep in and I’m grateful for my bed. I go to our local ranches to pick up our organic raw milk, our grass-finished organic meats, and our freshly laid organic eggs from pastured chickens, and I’m so grateful that there are people like our local farmers who devote themselves to raising healthy food in humane ways.

I think about Dr. Erika’s brilliance and creativity and ability to love and live life to the fullest, even in the face of her terrible abusive childhood, and I’m so grateful that she is my best friend. 

Right this moment, I’m so grateful for everyone who attends my Masterclass and does their inner work, and I’m grateful for those of you who are listening to this podcast. I’m very grateful for my little recording room so I can do these podcasts. And I’m grateful for my clients who are deeply motivated to become whole, loving human beings.

 I’m deeply grateful for my long-time assistant, Valerie, who is so honest and loyal and caring that I can live in Colorado while she takes care of the Inner Bonding business in California. 

Just thinking about all I’m grateful for makes me feel so joyful and peaceful inside! And saying it out loud brings even more joy!

Since I love feeling happy, joyful, and peaceful, and since I also know that like attracts like, which is The Law of Attraction, I know that being grateful for all that I have draws to me more of what I want. I know that being grateful raises my frequency so that I can connect with my spiritual guidance, which is what keeps me on course toward my highest good and the highest good of all. But I also know, which I will talk about soon, that if I have any attachment to an outcome of being grateful, then this isn’t true loving gratitude. Instead, it becomes a form of control.

I don’t know if I’m saying “Thank you” 3000 times a day, but I am saying it a lot. And it always makes me smile and fills me with a feeling of joy, which I’m also so grateful for. I know that Ken Honda is right about the power of choosing to stay in gratitude throughout the day.  

I love this quote by Author Melody Beattie:

“Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos into order, confusion into clarity. It turns problems into gifts, failures into success, the unexpected into perfect timing, and mistakes into important events. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today and creates a vision for tomorrow.” 

Perhaps this quote is always relevant, but I think it’s particularly relevant right now with our world in such turmoil.

How often do you feel genuinely grateful for what you have, rather than resentful for what you don’t have?

This quote is even more extraordinary because Melody Beattie is a woman who lost her beloved 12-year old son on a ski trip, which she wrote about in her book, The Lessons of Love: Rediscovering Our Passion for Life When It All Seems Too Hard to Take. She was deeply connected with her beloved son and, I can’t think of any loss in life greater than losing a child of your heart and soul. Yet here she is speaking of the importance of gratitude and all that gratitude does for you. The power of gratitude is what brought her to the point of being able to rediscover her passion for living.

 Right now, in this moment, what can you be grateful for?

Can you feel gratitude for your hearing that hears this podcast, and for your mind that understands it? Or, if you are deaf but have your eyes, can you be grateful for the transcript that allows you access this? And for your computer through which you hear or see it? Can you be grateful for the time you have to hear it or read it?

What else? The place you live? The food you eat? The clothes you wear? The tissue with which to blow your nose? I encourage you right now to look around you and choose gratitude for the big and little things you have and for any beauty around you. And say “Thank you” out loud and notice how that feels. 

However, as I briefly mentioned earlier in this podcast, it’s important to be aware that an expression of gratitude can be loving, or it can be controlling. Anything, even gratitude, can come from either an intent to control or an intent to be loving. 

We are often told that gratitude opens the heart and raises our frequency. And it does – when our gratitude is coming from a sincere desire to be loving to ourselves and with others.

But have you ever expressed gratitude to control others, or to control God or the outcome of things?

I’ve read tons of stuff that essentially said, “If you want to manifest your dreams, express gratitude for what you already have and what you know is coming.”
 

So what’s the intent? Is the intent of expressing the gratitude to love yourself by expressing the fullness in your heart, or is the intent to have control over manifesting, by doing it “right”?

Whether expressing gratitude is loving or controlling depends on your intention. And, as we all know, intention can be very subtle!

For me, expressing gratitude is loving when my heart is truly full of love and gratitude for my life. I think about those times when I’m in awe at the wonder of life, at the guidance that is always here for me and for everyone, and for the sacred privilege of being in my body to evolve my soul in love.

Then there are those times when I’ve heard my wounded self say, “We should be grateful now. We need to be grateful in order to manifest what we want. This is what the teachers of the Law of Attraction say, so this is what we should do. Now, let’s think about what we are grateful for.” At those times, I can hardly think of anything!

My wounded self would love to be able to control outcomes by following the “rules”, but the problem is that when the intent is to control, my frequency is not high enough to be truly grateful or to manifest. Of course I want to manifest what I want, but I know that manifestation needs to be the result of my true gratitude, not the focus. We can’t be in true gratitude while having an agenda in mind. Gratitude is a form of expressing love, and real love never has an agenda other than to be loving.

I have seen over and over that manifestation occurs when my frequency is high due to being loving and expressing my love through gratitude. When I’m genuinely open and grateful for all the gifts of spirit, that’s when God’s magic can work through me.

There is no pretending this or acting “as if.” Either I’m genuinely filled with gratitude and my heart is overflowing with love, or my heart is closed and I’m trying to control the outcome of things by acting grateful. Spirit cannot be fooled!

From my point of view, this is one of the problems with so much of the “new age” stuff – it’s based on following the rules and doing it “right” in order to control. If you pray right, or meditate right, or have the right crystals or gems, then you can manifest what you want. What is left out of all of this is intention. I love prayer and meditation and crystals and gems, but these will do nothing for me if my intent is to control.

I find the same thing true of so many therapies. In fact, intention is left out of most therapeutic and communication modalities. And I haven’t seen any other modality that stresses the free will to choose our intent to control getting love and avoiding pain, or our intent to learn about loving ourselves and others. 

We are told if we say it right or act right, we can have control over how the other person feels about us or treats us. But we are all extremely sensitive to energy and our intention is always revealed by our energy. If my intent is to control, then no matter how “right” I say something, the other person will likely feel the controlling energy and not like it or even resist it. On the other hand, when my intent is to love myself and others and support the highest good of all, it hardly matters at all how I say it!

When you express gratitude, you might want to open to learning about what your intent really is. If you’ve been focusing on gratitude and doing gratitude journals but you are not feeling the joy of expressing gratitude, then you might want to dig in and be honest with yourself regarding your true intent in expressing gratitude.

Similar to gratitude is true appreciation. Sometimes, when I look at the beautiful art on my wall, some which I’ve created and some which others created, I feel the joy of deep appreciation for the beauty, and I say “thank you.” I’m so grateful for the welling in my heart of the feeling of appreciation. I love that feeling.

Expressing true gratitude and appreciation is vital for creating healthy relationships. But again, it’s very important to be aware of your intent, because there is a huge difference between appreciation and approval. 

At one of my Intensives, we had a wonderful discussion about the difference between approval and appreciation. I had never thought about the difference until someone asked about it. As so often happens when someone asks a question, the answer came through me and others and delighted all of us.

We realized that approval is something we give from our ego wounded self. Approval is conditional upon the other person performing in the way we want or expect. Approval is manipulative – that is, we give it with an outcome in mind. We hope that the other person will continue to do what we want as a result of the approval.

Appreciation, on the other hand, is something we offer from our loving adult. It comes from the heart and is offered spontaneously as the heart wells up with feelings of delight, awe, joy, or love regarding another’s way of being. Appreciation has much more to do with the person’s true essence than with performance. We are appreciating their true soul self, who they are and the results of who they are, rather than merely their performance. There is no attachment to the outcome, no expectation that the other should or will continue to perform. Appreciation is a true loving gift, while approval is often manipulative.

Generally, when someone says they want appreciation or do not feel appreciated, what they are really seeking is approval. It is their wounded self who is not feeling seen and appreciated from within – from their own loving adult. The wounded self then projects outward the need to be seen, understood, and appreciated and pulls from others to get this need met. Whenever I hear someone say that they do not feel appreciated, I know that their inner child is not being seen and loved by their own inner adult.

When we are giving ourselves the attention and appreciation we need, and we then receive appreciation from others, it feels wonderful, but it is the icing on the cake, not the cake itself. When it becomes the cake itself, then we need to look within and recognize that we have handed over to others the job of defining and validating our own worth.

When you share something about yourself with the intent of getting approval, attention, or appreciation, it doesn’t feel like sharing to other people. Instead they feel pulled on to validate you. When you share something about yourself with the intent of offering something to others, it feels like a gift. This is clearly illustrated in the wonderful older movie, Good Will Hunting. In this movie the therapist, played by Robin Williams, shares much personal information about himself with his client Will, an angry and resistant young man. He shared it, not because he wanted or needed anything back, but purely to help Will feel safe in opening to his own pain.

We can all challenge ourselves to be aware of the intent of our communication when we offer positive feedback to others; is it a true gift or is it manipulative with strings attached? And we can challenge ourselves to be aware of our intent when we share things about ourselves: are we being loving and giving or are we trying to get something from the other person?

Here again is where our intent is so important. Awareness of our intent to control or to love is both the unique power of Inner Bonding, and the subtlety of Inner Bonding. When you are grateful for the food you eat, is this a ritual that you’ve been taught to do and you want to keep doing it because it’s the ‘right’ thing to do, or because it feels genuinely loving to you to express this gratitude?

When you do a gratitude journal, as many have been encouraged to do, are you doing it to fully express your deep appreciation for what you have, or are you doing it because you believe it’s the ‘right’ thing to do, with an outcome in mind? 

There is great power for both yourself and your relationships of offering true gratitude and appreciation to yourself and to others from your open and full heart. But how aware are you when you say “thank you” to someone or you show them appreciation of your intent when you are offering this? Do you have any agendas, expectations, or outcomes in mind? If you do, then it’s likely that the energy of your gratitude or appreciation might not be accepted with gratitude or appreciation! 

It’s sometimes easier to be tuned into another’s intent and resulting energy than it is to be tuned into your own. This is where the challenge of awareness of intent comes in.

When my new friend Ken Honda told me about saying “Thank you” 3000 times a day, I could tell from his energy that he had no agenda other than to bring joy to himself and to others. While he did say that this could help people with manifestation, that wasn’t his primary focus. His primary focus was the happiness and joy it brought to the people in his workshops. Manifestation might be an outcome, but it wasn’t his agenda.

There is a huge difference between doing something because you want to do the ‘right’ things or you want to do the loving thing. We’ve often been told to be honest with ourselves whether our intent is to be right or to be loving, especially in relationships. You might want to be aware that if your intent is to be right, you may not be genuinely open to learning about what’s loving. In fact, I often have the experience with my clients of believing they are open to learning about loving themselves, but when I reflect to them what’s happening with their energy and their wounded self, they get defensive, explaining how they are doing things ‘right.’ Their intent is to get my approval for doing Inner Bonding right rather than be open to learning about their wounded self and the false beliefs that are limiting them. This is the subtlety of intent.

So, look around you right now. Smile at something or someone you appreciate. Say “thank you,” or “arigato” for something you feel grateful for, or express appreciation for who someone is. Notice the expansiveness in your heart as you smile and express genuine gratitude and appreciation. Now do it again, and again, and notice how you feel. You might not say it 3000 times a day, but even ten times a day will feed your heart and soul.

I have found expressing genuine gratitude and appreciation the quickest way to open my heart to learning. And imagine how much loving energy we could add to our planet by focusing more on gratitude and appreciation.

I invite you to join me for my bi-monthly masterclass and receive my live help, which you can learn about at https://innerbondinghub.com/membership. 

Heal your relationships with my 30-Day online video relationship course: Wildly, Deeply, Joyously in Love.

And you can learn so much about loving yourself, creating loving relationships, and healing from my newest book, “Lonely No More: The Astonishing Power of Inner Bonding” and from our website at https://www.innerbonding.com.

I’m sending you my love and my blessings.