Hal Elrod: Hello, friends, Happy Thanksgiving if you are here in the United States. I know it’s not Thanksgiving everywhere in the world, but here in the United States, tomorrow is Thanksgiving. My mom is coming to visit. We’ll have my wife’s family here, so always look forward to this time of year. It’s just the holidays are fun. My wife, of course, already has the Christmas tree up if you follow me on social media. You saw a picture last week, the day after Halloween, in fact, of her and I with our Christmas tree. I was actually just doing my Miracle Morning right next to it, and she snapped a photo.

Today, we’re talking about gratitude in a way that you may have never thought of it before. I might actually title this something controversial, like you’re doing gratitude wrong or something like that, because I wouldn’t say there’s a right or wrong way to do it. I think there’s value in experiencing or expressing gratitude in any way. It’s kind of like exercise, like, if you do any exercise, it’s better than no exercise, right? But with gratitude there’s, at a high level or in essence, the difference between what I call intellectual gratitude and heart-centered gratitude, and intellectual gratitude is where I think most people, if they do practice gratitude at all, that’s where they practice intellectual gratitude.

And what that is, is it’s where you think about, if I were to ask you what you’re grateful for, you would list the things off, right? I’m grateful for my health, check. It’s literally like checking things off. Most people approach gratitude as a mental exercise, if you will. So, they think about what they’re grateful for, they write a few things down. Maybe they check that box and there’s nothing wrong with that. In fact, it’s where many of us begin, but again, what I call intellectual gratitude is when you think about what you’re grateful for, and your mind acknowledges what’s good in your life.

But heart-centered gratitude is something entirely different. Heart-centered gratitude is felt. It is alive. It’s not a thought, it’s an experience. And so, when you practice heart-centered gratitude, you go beyond listing your blessings on paper, and instead you open your heart. You breathe into your being, you wrap your consciousness around the presence of gratitude itself, and you feel it radiate through your body, softening your edges, relaxing your nervous system, and literally elevating your state of being.

And here’s what’s truly extraordinary. Heartfelt gratitude doesn’t depend on your circumstances. It is not reserved only for when life is easy or it’s pleasant, or you have a financial windfall and everything’s going great. In fact, its greatest power, I think, is revealed when life is hard. If your life is going well right now, it’s easy to feel grateful. When your relationships are thriving and your finances are stable and your health is strong, gratitude just kind of flows naturally. It’s just like, yeah, I’m grateful. Everything’s going great.

But what about when life is difficult? What about when life feels unbearable? When a relationship is strained or your body is in pain or your bank account is empty or your heart is broken, gratitude in those moments can feel impossible, and yet those are the moments when gratitude is most needed. So, gratitude is not just a reaction to what’s good in the context of how we’re talking about it today. Gratitude is a practice that transforms what’s difficult. So, it’s a way of shifting your consciousness from resistance to acceptance, from fear to peace, from suffering to strength, and you don’t have to be grateful for the pain or for the difficulty, but you can be grateful in the pain. You can be grateful for the lessons that you’re learning, for the strength that you’re developing, for the breath that fills your lungs, the food that you get to eat, the people that love you, for God. I’ve been spending a lot of time in prayer and meditation more than I have in years. And a lot of that prayer/meditation is also done in nature. I find that there’s something very magical about being in nature and just getting really quiet and really present and tuning into the sounds and the trees and the feeling of the wind on my face, right, and that experience of being grateful in the moment.

My three favorite words are “thank you, God.” Those are my three favorite words. Now, favorite’s a strong word in and of itself. So, could I think of three other words that are my favorite, like, I love you or probably, whatever? But three of my favorite words are, for sure, “I love you, God” or “thank you, God.” Those are the three. When I say that, I just feel like this rush of peace and love and gratitude, I would say, right? Like, in one word, gratitude fills my soul, like I feel it in my body. And so, if you’re going through difficult times or when you’re going through difficult times, when you can find even a single thread of gratitude in the darkest moments, you begin to reclaim your peace, your power over suffering, if you will, because suffering is rarely about what happens to us. It’s about how we relate to what happened to us.

I’m going to say that again. Suffering, if you’re suffering right now in your life, mentally, emotionally, even physically, suffering is rarely about what happens to us. It is about how we relate to what happens to us, and gratitude changes that relationship. Gratitude changes that relationship. And you know my story if you listen to the podcast, like the high points of my car accident and my cancer and the death of my sister and my financial crash in 2008, like, those were some of my most difficult moments. I wouldn’t say the death of my sister was a difficult moment for me because, or not that it wasn’t difficult, but it wasn’t the most difficult because I was eight years old and I wasn’t mature enough to process what actually had taken place. And like, I didn’t fully, like, oh, my sister died, what does that mean? I wasn’t mature enough or emotionally mature enough to handle it. And I think I just did all sorts of spiritual bypass, emotional bypass. I just was like, everything’s fine. I’ll just focus on the positive. And there was that.

But the car accident, the financial collapse, the cancer, those were moments where gratitude literally was one of the most effective tools to get me through those experiences. So, my car accident, came out of the coma, told I had 11 broken bones. I was never going to walk again. And every day in the hospital, I practiced gratitude. First and foremost, the first decision I made was acceptance. Okay, I can’t change that I was in a car accident. So, there’s no point in wishing it didn’t happen. There’s no point in feeling sorry for myself. And you can apply these things I’m saying to any challenges that you’re facing in your life right now, or that you faced in the past or that you could ever face in the future, right? I can’t change it. This is my reality. How can I make the best of it? How can I be the happiest, most grateful person I can possibly be even in the midst of the most difficult time in my life? Those are literally the words that I said to my dad when he came in and told me that the doctors thought I was delusional because I was so happy all the time. They thought I was in denial. And I said, dad, I can’t change that I was in a car accident, so I have decided, I’m asking the question I’m asking every day that I’m leaning into is, how can I be the happiest and the most grateful I have ever been while I endure the most difficult time in my life?

And so, every day in that hospital bed, I practiced gratitude. I was grateful that I was alive. I was grateful for my parents who never left my side. I was grateful for the doctors and the nurses that cared for me. I was even, in some weird way, I was grateful for the pain because it reminded me that I was still here, that I was still human, right? I was like, oh, wow, the fact that I’m experiencing this pain means I get to live. I’m still here. I get another chance, and I’m healing. I mean, that pain is, it’s me healing. I’m still, right, I’m alive. And that gratitude, it changed everything. It didn’t take away the pain, but it changed my relationship to it. Instead of letting the mental and emotional pain and the worst-case scenario and the fears and all of that consume me, gratitude gave me peace and it gave me strength. And within three weeks of the crash, it gave me the ability to walk again, even though the doctor said that I never would.

And then, that you fast forward, I’ll skip, I’ll go to the cancer journey, right? 17 years later at 37, I faced a different kind of challenge. I was diagnosed with this rare, aggressive form of cancer and given a 30% chance of surviving, and the treatments were brutal, 700 hours of chemotherapy, hooked up to IV bags, poisoning the cancer, poisoning my body, living apart from my wife and children for months at a time. And there were nights I was not certain I would live to see the morning. I was in 105-degree fever. I got no immune system. I’m on death’s doorway. My body is, I’m literally dying. I’m literally dying. And one of my nurses said, the goal is that the chemo kills the cancer while it kills your body and we try to keep you alive long enough for the cancer to be destroyed. And then we try to keep you, get your body back to life. Like, that’s a gruesome reality, that we’re killing you while we kill the cancer. And hopefully, even though 70% of people die while they’re getting the chemo, like, think about that, right? The odds are 70% of people that we do this treatment for, yeah, they die. But we’re hoping that you’re in the 30% that don’t die and that you actually can barely hang on long enough to kill the cancer and come back, right?

So, you may have seen, if you watch The Miracle Morning Movie, there’s a scene in that movie that I didn’t know would be in the movie. It was a cell phone video that I had my dad record. I was in the hospital. The nurse had accidentally stuck, injected my nerve. She meant to inject my spine with chemotherapy, and she accidentally missed my spine and injected my nerve. Now, if you would’ve said that to me, I’d be like, okay, is that bad? I’m like, I don’t know. Well, it was the most horrific pain I’ve ever experienced in my life. And not just for like a minute, but for, I think it was 11 days if I remember correctly. It might’ve been 9 days, I forget exactly, but it was something like 9 or 11 days. Let’s just say it was 9. It was horrific.

So, if you’ve had a migraine headache before where you’re in so much pain that you can’t keep your eyes open, like, you just want it to stop, you can’t handle this. Even the sound of a pin drop, like, it causes you, it just amplifies the pain. I had constant, the worst migraine of my life for the full 9 days, 24 hours a day, 7 days, like every single day. It was horrible. And I remember I was in the hospital and I was like, this is, I was like, I want to die. I just want to die. And I just handed my dad my phone. I said, “Dad, I want you to record this.” And he goes, “Hal, you’re crying.” Like, what? Or like, you’re in bad shape. Why do you want me to record this? I said, because, dad, I keep recording all these inspirational videos about, that I’m making the most of this. I’m like, I want to capture this. I want to capture, this is like the worst experience of my life, and I want to capture this. I don’t know why. I don’t know, but I just, I like, I just want to capture it.

And so, I gave him the phone and he just hit record and I started talking and I was out of it. I think I was on pain meds and like, I was out of it and I was bawling. You see this in the movie. But here’s what I said as tears are streaming down my face and I’m telling whoever’s ever going to watch that video, again, I didn’t know it’d be in the movie, but I’m telling this is what happened. This is what I’m going through. This is what happened to me. This is how I feel right now. And I said, even this pain doesn’t change the fact that I am grateful for my life. I am grateful for everything I’m going through right now because it’s part of my journey, it is part of my growth. It is shaping who I’m becoming. And by the way, I’m paraphrasing. I don’t know if that’s the word for word what I said in the movie. You can go, if you go check them side by side, I might be like, you didn’t say exactly that, but that’s essentially what I said, and I meant it, right?

It wasn’t, again, I didn’t know being in the movie, it wasn’t like, oh, I want to– I’m going to say this, so it sounds good. No, this was– my literal reality is, because I’ve practiced heart-centered gratitude for so long, it’s an element of my consciousness. Like, it’s the lens through which I experience every moment of my life, including the most difficult ones. And remember I said that, right, it’s your relationship with the pain and the challenge that you’re facing that actually determine how they impact you, how they affect you. And I think the gratitude was also essential to my healing because it kept me at peace when I could have been paralyzed by fear. And I had fear, but I would use gratitude to override the fear. I’d replace the fear with faith. I’d replace the fear with gratitude.

And there is science that shows it does strengthen your immune system. So, it strengthened my immune system. It gave me hope. It allowed me to focus, not on dying, but on living. And so, I want to share this, like, I want to share how can you practice this, right? So, you’re like, okay, yeah, this all makes sense. I get that. Okay, wow, that’s powerful. Those stories are powerful. Heartfelt gratitude is a conscious choice, first and foremost, right? So, it starts as a paradigm shift where it’s a decision to look for the light even when you’re surrounded by darkness, right?

It’s saying, yes, this is hard. Yes, I’m scared, but I can still find something to be grateful for, and that might be my lifeline. That might be the most important thing that I can do right now.

So, again, you don’t have to wait for your circumstances to change before you allow yourself to be grateful. You can start right now. And again, it can be for the things like the breath in your lungs, the beating of your heart, the lesson in your pain, or the love that still exists in your life even when it’s hard to see. It can also be for optimism, like it can be for the person that you’re going to become on the other side of the difficulties in your life. That was always something that I was grateful for when I was going through difficult experiences in my life is I know there’s a better version of me. Like, this sucks. I don’t like it. In fact, I don’t want it, but since I’m enduring it, there’s no point in resisting it. There’s no point in wishing it wasn’t happening because it is. So, for step one is always accept your reality, right? In fact, the Miracle Life ABCs that I taught in the Miracle Equation, the new updated edition in the final chapter of the book, the Miracle Life, the ABCs of gratitude, the A is accept life exactly as it is, and the B is be grateful for everything. Be grateful for everything, even the challenges, even the most difficult things.

And the more you practice heartfelt gratitude, and I’m going to encourage you to do it here in a minute in writing, okay? To journal it. But the more you practice heartfelt gratitude as in daily, and I do it almost every single day. In addition to it being like just how I process things is through this lens of gratitude, I actually do it in writing, in my journaling, my scribing practice on a daily basis. So, the more you practice heartfelt gratitude or heart-centered gratitude, and I use those terms interchangeably, heartfelt, heart-centered, but the more you elevate your consciousness above your circumstances, you’re able to look over your difficult circumstance. Imagine yourself floating above your circumstances and going, man, woo, this is tough, right?

But gratitude, it gives you that perspective. It becomes your center, your home base, your resting state of peace and joy no matter what’s happening around you. And from that state of gratitude, healing begins, mental and emotional healing, physical healing. Again, I don’t think it’s a coincidence. I don’t have a graft to prove it, but that two weeks after I came out of the coma and was told I would never walk again, and I spent those two weeks in a state of gratitude and peace. Peace for accepting what I couldn’t change, gratitude by focusing on what I had in my life to be thankful for, right? The doctors came in with routine x-rays after they told me I would never walk again and they’re like, we don’t know how to explain this, Hal, but your body is healing so quickly. Like, please listen to this, y’all, right? This is a powerful anecdotal lesson in the power of our mind and our spirit and our body and our emotions. And when we take control of all of those things and we don’t become a victim of our circumstances, but we become empowered to focus on what we can control. So, accepting what I couldn’t change, and then living in a state of gratitude, I took my first step three weeks after I broke my leg in half and my pelvis in three places. Like, I started walking in three weeks later and the doctors couldn’t explain it.

And so, there’s a whole side lesson there of like, experts, “so-called experts.” I would use air quotes there. Not to disrespect anyone who’s worked hard to become an expert in something, but also, none of us know what we don’t know, right? Miracles happen. Healing happens. Like we don’t know what we don’t know. So, let’s focus on the things that we can control. And heart-centered gratitude is something you can focus on every single day. And so, here’s the exercise I would give you. I’ll give you kind of like some journal prompts if you will.

Here’s how I do it. So, the way that I do my journaling, there are three things. Number one is I ask myself, what in my life feels difficult right now? And I ask that in a few different ways. Sometimes I’ll ask, is there anything I’m resisting right now? Is there anything that’s causing me emotional turmoil, fear, anxiety, stress, resentment, regret? Like, any emotions that I feel like aren’t really serving me to live in those unconscious states? So, that’s where I start. I write down what’s going on inside of me that I might need to accept, let go of, process, learn from, or otherwise integrate into my consciousness. That’s step one.

And the power of that is you think about our ego, and when I say ego, I’m not talking about like that person’s an egomaniac. They’re conceited. I don’t mean ego in that context. I mean ego as our identity. Our ego is our identity, right? All of our limiting beliefs, I am good at this, I am not good at this. That is our ego that we are speaking from. There is a higher state of consciousness, right, which you are born with. You think about when you’re born as a child, as an infant, you don’t have an ego yet. You don’t have limiting beliefs. You don’t even have a language. Think about when you’re born as a baby. You’re born into this state of pure consciousness. And I think that is our true state of consciousness. It’s the one we’re born into.

And elevating your consciousness really is about, okay, now you’ve got all this language that you’ve learned, all these words and these phrases and these limitations that are all perpetuated through language, right? And they’ve been taught to you by other people. All of our beliefs are in the form of language. And so, when we come from a place of ego, right, we create all sorts of emotional turmoil and pain and judgment, and you name it, self-judgment, judgment of others. If we can get back to that state of consciousness that we were born from, which was really pure, and this process of journaling, for me, when I write down what it is that’s causing me pain, which is always sourced from my ego, I then kind of imagine myself raising up and seeing that thing. And the beauty of putting it in writing in your journal, whether you’re journaling digitally in the Miracle Morning App or you’re writing by hand, it doesn’t matter, but once it’s in writing, then now you’re free. You create separation where you’re like, oh, that’s the thing my ego is struggling with right now. Interesting. Right? Versus I am struggling with that. I is the little I that’s your ego. I’m struggling with that. No, no, no, no. You wrote it down. Now, you’re like, oh, I see it on paper. And I can recognize that’s what my ego is struggling with.

And then for me, that separation, I go, okay, what do I want to do with that? Is that a belief that serves me? Is that stress that serves me? Is that thing I’m resisting? Should I keep resisting it and self-creating emotional pain, or should I accept it and move on, right? So, that is step one. And that’s a whole, I mean, there’s a masterclass that we could go into on that, and for sake of the podcast time, I don’t want to go into that right now. We’ll save that for another time. But that’s step one. What do I need to let go of my life? What my life feels difficult right now, et cetera?

The second thing is, what am I grateful for? And sometimes, by the way, if there is something that I write down in step one is like, ooh, this is really difficult for me and I’m struggling with it, like when I had cancer, for example, then it’s the specific gratitude that I ask myself is not just what am I grateful for, it’s what can I find to be grateful for within the difficulty or because of this difficulty, right? So, now, I’m actually looking for gratitude specific to the thing that’s causing me pain. And wow, how that transforms, how you relate to it, because now, you’re finding a benefit. You’re finding a benefit in the thing that’s causing you stress or causing you pain.

And then the third step isn’t what you write down, it’s what you do next, which is when you write down what you’re grateful for, and again, let me share this in two contexts. One context, which I’ve been leaning into is this difficult thing in my life because I know that all of us or most of us, I should say, there are things in our life that we are dealing with that are challenging, that are difficult, that we are struggling with, personally, professionally, financially, relationally, you name it. And so, I want you to understand that gratitude is not just for when things are going good. It is arguably even more important to practice heart-centered gratitude each day when things are not going good, when you’re facing challenges. So, that’s one context.

But let’s just say you’re writing down the things that you’re grateful for that are going great in your life. And that’s usually what I’m writing down on a daily basis, like to be clear, I’m not every day going, what sucks in my life? How can I be grateful for it? Nothing wrong with that. It’s a powerful practice. But on a daily basis, I’m like, oh, I’m grateful that my daughter and I connected so deeply yesterday. That was so fun, that experience we had, or my son or my wife. And most of my gratitude centers around my family, they’re my first. They’re like, they’re the first thing I think about when I wake up and the last thing before bed. Actually, God is the first thing, but they’re right up there.

And so, here’s the difference. I’m going to circle back to where we started and that’s how we’re going to close this out, which is the difference between intellectual gratitude and heart-centered gratitude. So, when I write down what I’m grateful for on a piece of paper, that kind of is intellectual gratitude because I’m literally thinking with my mind, what am I grateful for? And I’m maybe running through the list in my head of what am I grateful? Oh, yeah, oh, that thing. Write it down.

Here’s where it becomes heart-centered. I look at the thing I wrote down that I’m grateful for, and then I close my eyes. I put my hand on my heart. Sometimes I’ll set a timer for 60 seconds. Usually though, I just kind of generally do it for 30, 60 seconds, sometimes longer. Hand goes on the heart, and I just imagine, I picture, like if I use the example of me and my daughter hanging out yesterday and how much fun we had and we were laughing and smiling and that, by the way, if you have followed me for a while, my daughter and I had a really difficult, I mean just the teenage years, if you will. She’s 16 now, and from like 13 and a half-ish to 14 and a half or 15, it was really challenging for us. And I tried so hard and I felt like I was failing as a dad and I was losing connection. So, that’s part of why, that contrast of, wow, now, I’ve worked so hard on our relationship, and so has she, and it’s going so well and that feels so good.

And so, I put my hand on my heart, I close my eyes and I smile and I just feel gratitude. I don’t think it. It goes from my head. And if you can literally picture it going from your head as a thought, like down your head through your throat, into your chest, right into your heart, right where you’re holding your hand on, and then you just feel it, like, what’s the word I’m looking for? Not vibrate, not revert. I’m at a loss. You feel it throughout your entire body, right? Like, oh, wow, I feel that gratitude and that love I have for my daughter. And you can apply this, of course, to anything in your life that you’re grateful for. I’m picking one as an example, which is my daughter. And I just feel that gratitude and I sit in it for 30 seconds.

And what am I doing? I’m literally, I’m creating neural pathways in my brain. I’m reprogramming my nervous system. I’m elevating my consciousness to a state of gratitude. I’m harnessing this inner bliss, if you will, this inner peace, the doorway that gratitude gives you into these higher states, these deeper states of love and appreciation and thankfulness. To me, it’s taking gratitude. I call it heart centered, but it’s a spiritual experience. And so, again, like I said, the whole difference here is you’re going from thinking about gratitude to experiencing it with your heart, mind, body, soul, like every fiber of your being. And so, that’s it. That’s the essence of what I’m inviting you. And try that for the next seven days, and I would say for the next rest of your life, start practicing heartfelt gratitude. And it’s the simplest way. Let me simplify this. Write down what you’re grateful for, and then spend 30 to 60 seconds. I like 60, at least, with your hand on your heart, with your eyes closed. You can keep them open if you want. But looking at the thing you wrote down, and not just thinking it, but feeling it.

And by the way, thinking is the doorway to feeling, right? Thinking is the bridge. So, I will often think things like thinking about why am I grateful for that thing. What about it am I grateful for? What would it be like if I didn’t have that? Oh, my God, that’d be terrible. Woo, I do. Oh, God, that helps thinking of that contrast of not having it, like when my relationship with my daughter was not good. Being able to just glance at that for a minute or for a few seconds, I go, woo. Thank God I have the relationship that I have now. I’m so blessed. Thank you, God.

And by the way, those are the three words. I almost forgot that. Thank goodness. Thank God I didn’t. Thank you, God. With my hands on my heart, thank you, God, just amplifies that heart-centered gratitude that I feel. And if you were with me right now in my office, you’d see my hand on my heart. You’d see my eyes closed. You’d see me just literally experiencing heartfelt gratitude while I am teaching or sharing with you how to get there yourself. So, I hope this is helpful for you. With Thanksgiving here in the US, whether you’re in the US or around the world, gratitude is obviously an ongoing daily practice, heartfelt gratitude, heart-centered gratitude, and so, I hope this has been helpful for you. I’m grateful for you genuinely.

I have done this podcast now for 12 years. That’s crazy. 12 years I’ve done this podcast for, on episode 600 and, I don’t know, 13 or 14. Thank you for being a listener. It’s so cool. I just spoke at an event the other day. And I speak usually two to three times a month at all sorts of events, real estate investors, doctors, teachers, you name it. And I was actually speaking to real estate investors yesterday in Dallas. And I had somebody come up and they’re like, I listen to your pod– Hal, I’ve read your books, I listen to your podcast every week. And that’s always so cool because, like when I record the podcast, there is no audience. I mean, yes, this will eventually get published and people will listen, but like no one is giving me immediate feedback like they do when I’m giving a speech and the audience is smiling or laughing or they tell you right after how it impacted them. So, it’s always so cool to meet a listener of the podcast. And he said he had been a long-time listener.

So, thank you for listening. I love you so much. Have a great Thanksgiving here in the United States and around the world. Just may you experience more heart-centered gratitude for everything in your life, even the difficult times, and especially the blessings that you have in this one life that you have been blessed to live and may we all experience more gratitude every day, in every moment, in everything, with everyone because I believe it is one of the higher, if not, maybe the highest state of consciousness. I love you so much and I’ll talk to you next week.