You can read a lot about the practice of gratitude on the internet. There are special mantras, memes and gratitude journals you can download in which to write your expressions. I’ve always felt grateful for the blessings I have in my life but never actually included a gratitude practice in my daily life.

This week a friend suggested I include it in my morning routine as not only a good way to start the day, but as an intentional action to raise my energetic vibration.

I have a fairly consistent morning routine already: I wake up, write my “morning pages” for 10 minutes, then do some stretching or a simple yoga routine before leaving the bedroom. Then I have a lemon and ginger tea (I squeeze my own lemon) and if the weather is fine, I get on my bike and go to the beach for 40 minutes, returning home to coffee and breakfast before starting the day at 9ish.

It’s a self imposed structure I put on myself when I finished up my “real job” ie working for someone else. It helped me navigate time and kept me focused on creating art and an online business, especially through the pandemic lockdowns.

I consider all these routines and structures as relatively good things in my life. Without these I know I can easily become depressed or feel purposeless. So adding in another ‘mindfulness’ practice seemed achievable, one I could add into a ‘before sleep’ routine as well.

The surprising upside of this is I review even the tiniest of actions I make in the course of a day; something as simple as being grateful for arriving home safe after driving in the rain, or being grateful for an interesting conversation that came about when someone arrived to collect some furniture I was selling off.

This gratitude practise is an active, conscious way to look at not just what I have and what happened but also who I am and what surrounds me in my immediate environment.

I love being around water (I live near the beach and a small creek) but it was the water in the bird bath outside my bedroom window that reminded me of the Japanese scientist Dr. Masaru Emoto, (1943 –2014) whose experiments revealed that our thoughts and intentions carry visible vibrations in water.

I’m amazed that I have never looked into his work before. It was only through recently mentoring an artist to have her first solo exhibition, The Ripple Effect, that Dr. Emoto’s name began to register on my consciousness. In the lead up to her exhibition, Andia Cally wrote about water and how the ripple effect is a metaphor a metaphor of interconnection.

“As beings that are largely made up of water, this work highlights the importance of being impeccable with our thoughts, words and deeds, lest we muddy our own inner waters and the waters of those around us. This is the ripple effect in action.” Andia Cally

I was only vaguely aware of Dr. Emoto’s book  The Hidden Messages in Water when I did my experiments with cymatics and water vibrations for my Visual Arts Honours project, Paper/Song in 2016.

I wanted to make visible the sounds made during the process of creating handmade paper. The fractal patterns I observed and created art about were created from the sounds made from water falling from a mould and deckle when a sheet of paper was being “pulled” from a bath of paper pulp.

This led me to more sonic experiments, but at the time, I did not go down the research path of looking at the work of Dr. Emoto. Now it seems I am being drawn into this world from another angle, that of gratitude.

A google search revealed a YouTube video of his experiments with Tokyo tap water and the crystal formations which formed as a group of students sent out prayers of gratitude. It was the same idea as cymatics, vibrational pictures forming in water.

Now when I activate my gratitude practise,  I can start visualising beautiful crystal patterns forming in water, knowing that I am sending out conscious ripples of high vibrational energy into the world. Perhaps that is the value and practise of prayer, everyday expressions of goodness we can send out into the world to aid in creating good things to happen. And why not? As is often quoted, you are what you believe…