The Power of Oxygen 1st

EP 86: What If Gratitude Is the Most Powerful Therapy?

• Dot Rock

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Gratitude transforms us in ways we rarely recognize. While we often think of gratitude as a polite expression of thanks, its power runs much deeper – it's actually a potent emotional detox that lifts heaviness from our souls and raises our vibrational frequency.

In this episode, I share a deeply personal gratitude project that helped pull me from a dark emotional place. After postponing sending obituaries to the children of a father figure who passed away two years ago, I finally created a meaningful ritual around completing this task. Armed with thank you cards and Dunkin' Donuts gift cards (a nod to his habit of enjoying donuts while reading the newspaper), I spent an evening writing heartfelt notes expressing how their father shaped me into the woman I am today. With each "thank you" penned, I felt layers of accumulated emotional weight lifting away.

The divine timing of this gratitude project became even more apparent during my son Dominic's frightening hospitalization. After days of poor progress, I prayed desperately for help. Minutes later, a young nurse named Gerald entered our room – the same name as my father figure who had passed away. This nurse engaged with Dominic, who finally began eating and showing improvement. It felt like a direct answer to my prayers, a spiritual connection reinforcing the power of gratitude in our lives.

You don't need elaborate practices to experience gratitude's benefits. Simple actions – writing thank you notes, creating a gratitude photo journal, or even thanking yourself in the mirror – can profoundly impact your wellbeing, especially during healing, divorce, or burnout recovery. The key isn't perfection but authenticity. When we make space for genuine gratitude, we create room for life to feel beautiful again. Try your own gratitude practice this week – the ripple effects might surprise you. Download our free Hiring ROI Calculator at dotrockconsulting.com to discover how receiving support can increase your time, energy and freedom.

Download my free Support + Breathe Calculator here: https://dotrockconsulting.myflodesk.com/hiring-calculator It’ll show you how much time and energy you can reclaim by letting go of what’s not yours to hold.

Remember: your energy is your greatest asset. Protect it, invest in it, and always put your oxygen mask on first.


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Remember: your energy is your greatest asset. Protect it, invest in it, and always put your oxygen mask on first.

Speaker 1:

Hey guys, this is the Power of Oxygen First podcast, and I'm your host, dot Rock. I am an entrepreneur, a mom, a stepmom and a scaling consultant who is obsessed with the art of hiring, support and that dirty word we call delegation. I'm a recovering perfectionist who pushed my body and my limits to the extreme until one fateful day I learned that, just like pilots, I needed to take care of myself first. This podcast is all about the journey to healing, to getting clear on the desires of your heart, stepping into them with courage and leaning into and asking for support. I hope you feel inspired to do less, to follow your passions and infuse them into your daily life and truly claim the life you were meant to live. Well, hello my pod squad friends. I hope everyone is just doing so well out there.

Speaker 1:

I'm loving June in Durango and it's just been raining a lot and it's just kind of been a soft, peaceful reset the last few days just to kick off June and I've really enjoyed it. So one of the things that's heavy on my heart right now is what it looks like to have gratitude, but not just like, oh, I'm so thankful I have a car and I'm so thankful for food on my table. Yes, of course, I'm so thankful for that. But I like to really think about gratitude on a little deeper level. Two things, first of all who are you grateful for, and how have you been showing them that? And then, what are you grateful for within yourself and have you been celebrating that? Because what I have really been finding is that gratitude is like. When we express gratitude, it is actually a lot like a detox for our souls, and I mean that because all of these really positive emotions come up and out of us when we actively express gratitude for the people in our lives, for the things within us that are special, that are unique to us in our lives, for the things within us that are special, that are unique to us. It's interesting because when we release and express these positive emotions of gratitude, I feel like it also grabs a lot of the muck and the yucky and the negative and it just pulls it right out of us. It pulls this odd heaviness out of us. So I just want to talk about that a little bit today.

Speaker 1:

So recently I did a little gratitude project and one of my father figures passed away a couple of years ago two years ago and I went to be with his family during that time, which was a really special time for me, and I was asked to get his obituary and send it to each of his kids. Well, I got the obituaries from our local newspaper, because I live in the town that they put the obituary in and the rest of the kids don't. And I got those newspapers two years ago but I never mailed them. As you know, I've been through a lot of trauma and change and things like Dominic's hospitalizations all four of them and the moves, all the things that have been through the last few years have really derailed me, but I still had those newspapers.

Speaker 1:

So I recently, a couple weeks ago, was really in a darker place and very sad, but decided one of the best things that I could do was to jump into this little gratitude project, and it was twofold, like, first of all, it got that heaviness of a to-do of sending the obituary off. It got that off my to-do list, right, and then it also just lit me up. So what I did was I went across the street to the Mexican restaurant, took a stack of thank you cards. I also went and bought a stack of Dunkin' Donuts gift cards for each kid because my father figure that passed away. He used to always eat donuts and read the newspaper and I just thought it was fitting to send them Dunkin' Donuts gift cards so that they could get a dozen donuts to have or share with their coworkers and have that newspaper. It just spoke to me and I think that my father figure sent me that message to do that for his kids.

Speaker 1:

So I tromped over to the Mexican restaurant and took my thank you notes and turned on some music. I even ordered a glass of wine. I sat there and wrote thank you notes to them telling them how thankful I was for their father, how thankful I was had impacted my life, because I truly know and believe with all of my heart that I would not be the woman that I am if I had never met him or any of them. And so I just wanted to share that and talk to you about how gratitude can just really detox you and it can raise your vibration and it can make you feel lighter. And so for me, one of the best ideas I've had lately is that stack of thank you notes walking over to the Mexican restaurant, sitting alone and writing thank you notes. It's a beautiful new ritual in my life. I try to do this a couple times a year, where I write thank you notes to people for random ways that they have touched me, because the reality is is not many of us even receive mail anymore.

Speaker 1:

So I was curious what your thoughts are on this and if you've ever thought of gratitude as not just being an expression of positive emotions but actually a detox and a cleansing of our bodies from toxins, because emotional and energetic toxins really do build up in us Things like resentment and disappointment and burnout and fear but gratitude is one of the most effective tools to actually clear them out of our bodies. And I had never thought about it this way, but I did notice. After I did this project I felt freer, lighter, happier, with more access to joy as a quick emotion rather than almost secondary emotion. What I didn't know is that when I wrote those thank you notes when I sat down, I was holding a lot of heaviness, but every single time I wrote thank you, I felt a layer lift right off of me and I felt seen again. I felt connected and I felt like myself, because gratitude actually really does raise our frequency, quite literally our vibrational frequency, and it shifts our brain from threat responses to this beautiful state of connection and calm. It's really like turning the dial from static to clarity and the reason I did this particular project what re-inspired it is.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, it's been on my to-do list to mail those newspapers, but when Dominic was in the hospital he was in really bad shape. You guys, like I, haven't really dove into the sharing of that and what a scary week that was for me, but I mean he needed to be put on oxygen in the middle of the night. He was, his vitals were really, really poor and he was one step under the ICU. It was scary. It was a scary time to be a single mom and to be alone. And I got One night. Things were not turning around. We had already spent three nights there and it was not getting better and I prayed and I begged God to help us and five minutes later a male nurse walked in the room and he was like 26, and he was funny and he engaged with Dominic and Dominic started eating and, as it turns out, his name was Gerald and Dominic started eating and, as it turns out, his name was Gerald, and that is the name of the man who passed away who. I just did this gratitude product project for his kids Right. So it felt like a true, very sudden answer to my prayers. It felt like you know, jerry is definitely a angel of mine and it felt like this divine intervention.

Speaker 1:

So what I encourage you to do is to get a stack of beautiful cards, something that calls you. They don't have to be thank you cards, they could, could be anything. I then encourage you to think of people who have impacted you Friends, mentors, neighbors, old coworkers, people you've met in the past and just write. Just write a few lines no, please don't think it has to be perfect. Thank them for being here, thank them for being in your life, thank them for showing you what was possible, thank them for their laughter, for their honesty, for their kindness. Just thank people for being who they are. It's so beautiful, I mean. And on the other side of this, just imagine them opening these thank you cards, because I can guarantee it'll make their day in some way. It'll fill up their heart, it'll send light their way, and isn't that one small way we could change the world?

Speaker 1:

I mean, what if we each did a gratitude practice every week and just started sending thank you notes. It would be so dang cool. Thank you notes. It would be so dang cool. And you know, when I mailed mine, the response was incredible. Each one of these people reached out to thank me and once again, it connected people who don't tend to connect that often. And I wasn't doing it to get anything from them. I was doing it because of what their father had done for me. But I received through that as well, a text, emails, messages and tears and reconnection. It really did start a ripple and it made me want to share this with you, because maybe you're looking for a way to clear out some kind of emotional fog or to feel lighter or to reconnect with yourself or to even reconnect with others. So I encourage you to try your own gratitude practice. Take a thank you note stack Don't overthink it and just go. Just go write a few notes and mail them.

Speaker 1:

You could also there are plenty of other ways to express gratitude. It doesn't have to be through thank you notes. That was just my little idea. You could do a gratitude photo journal where each day, you take a photo of something you're grateful for. You could create an album or a digital board called this is the Proof of Good Things. You could even create a text note in your phone amazing things happen every day and write one thing you're grateful for every day and then go refer to that after a week or two. It's pretty impressive. Really, great things do happen every day. We just have to let ourselves see them, and sometimes we have to document them, because life is so dang busy and you can create text chains where you text people that you're grateful for them.

Speaker 1:

You could express gratitude to yourself, look in the mirror, say I'm grateful for you, tell yourself three things about yourself that you're really grateful for. And it's really impactful during healing and divorce and burnout recovery to do those types of things. So your gratitude doesn't need to be polished, it doesn't need to be poetic, it just needs to be really authentic. And I encourage you to just play with this, because when we make space for gratitude, we make space for life to feel beautiful again. It's not just the clearing of the fog with the false stories, it's not just a detox, but it is oxygen for your soul. And so if you don't do anything, just at least this week say thank you to someone or to yourself or to even your life. It's beautiful. I hope you all have a beautiful day and enjoy expressing some gratitude.

Speaker 1:

Hi, my podcast friends. Hey, have you heard about this new hiring return on investment freebie on my webpage, dotrockconsultingcom? If you download it, you'll get some valuable insights that are simple and fast, that can help you shift into understanding why hiring, or just plain asking for support, can help you save precious resources and increase your time, your energy and your freedom, and they can help you delegate in your business and personally. And it's backed up by data. So head on over to dotrockconsultingcom to access the very first Oxygen First Hiring Return on Investment Calculator. You'll be able to finally hire with confidence, make some data-driven decisions, but also really shift into the mindset of receiving this support and how it's going to add to the bottom line of fulfillment and joy in your life.

Speaker 1:

I hope you enjoy it. Thank you from the bottom of my heart for listening to another episode of the Power of Oxygen First podcast. I hope you walk away feeling inspired to do less, to follow your passions and infuse them into your daily life and truly claim the life you were meant to live, and I hope that you start leaning into the art of receiving support. I'm here to support you on that journey, the art of receiving support. I'm here to support you on that journey. Find me at dotrockconsultingcom or dot underscore rock underscore on Instagram. I'd love it if you'd go, follow me and shoot me a quick DM and let me know what takeaway from this episode hit you the hardest, sending you love and adventures on this beautiful day.

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Dot Rock

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