gratitude, something very special and important to me... i love the feeling i get when i'm grateful an thankful for my friends, family, girlfriend, dogs, house, job, nurses at work... anything at all really.  and the more frequently i am grateful, the more things to be grateful for show up.  according to the movie The Secret, we attract to us the predominant thoughts and feelings we have.  so the more often i'm grateful, the more things to be grateful for will appear in my life :).  what a thought!

according to the law of attraction, to change what always has been, we need to change our thoughts off of what we always have been thinking.  if we think and feel the same as we always have, we'll keep attracting the same results.

recently i went to church with my mom and girlfriend, and one of the things that really stuck out to me was when the pastor said you don't always need to feel a certain way first before you act, but the act of acting will make us feel the way we are acting.  this goes hand in hand with the movie the secret, wayne dyer, and other teachings of spiritual nature - they say think a certain way, or of what you want to attract, and the feelings will follow.  a simple test will show how true this statement is....

try it, right now.  think of a really sad moment in your life (perhaps when a pet died) for 10 seconds or so.  do it now.

how do you feel?  ok now PICTURE something that really makes you happy, (a family pet for instance) in your mind.
do this now.

how do you feel?  thoughts control our feelings, this is the basic message of the secret.  when we know this, we can have more control of our thoughts and therefore our emotions.  in my class, we got a handout that talked about how actors have this ability down. they can milk their emotions by thinking of certain thoughts and the feelings come on very strongly, they call this emotional intelligence, or EQ (opposed to IQ).