Transform Your World with Gratitude

Ready to transform your life with the power of gratitude?  Utilizing your senses gatekeeper, the Reticular Activating System (RAS) can be the key to noticing, experiencing, and attracting positivity and abundance. I reveal how a simple shift in perception can spotlight the beauty around us, turning the ordinary into extraordinary. You'll learn how a consistent gratitude practice not only enriches our awareness but also trains our minds to seek out the good, helping us live a life filled with joy and appreciation.

Ever noticed how you suddenly start seeing more of something once it catches your interest? That’s your RAS at work, and I’m here to show you how to harness its power to manifest positivity. By starting each day with clear intentions, you can direct your focus towards opportunities that align with your desires. We’ll explore the neutrality of external events and the art of choosing our responses wisely. With examples ranging from spotting wildlife to managing everyday frustrations, I’ll guide you through disrupting negative patterns and embracing a proactive mindset. Let’s rise above our conditioning and cultivate a world of gratitude and positivity together.

Find out about holiday specials on my website.

Connect with me on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube!

Chapters

• 0:00 The Power of Gratitude and RAS
• 14:48 Manifesting Positivity Through Awareness

Transcript

Susan: 0:00

Rise and shine everybody. It's time to wake up with Susan. Spiritual awakening can be a beautiful, messy and sometimes lonely journey, so let's do it together. I'm your host, susan Sutherland. I'm an intuitive healer and spiritual mentor. We are all called to rise up above our conditioning and limiting beliefs and shine our light on ourselves and others. So let's get to it. Hello, my beautiful family, thanks for joining me today. If you are in the US, then happy Thanksgiving.

Susan: 0:35

It is Thanksgiving week for us, and I especially love a week where our focus and our intention is truly on gratitude and thankfulness. If you are listening anywhere else, then use this as a week for you too, to really focus on cultivating not the words of gratitude but the genuine feeling of gratitude. Not only is it a good feeling, but it is of the one of the highest vibrations, and we create our life from our octave. What octave are you playing in? And gratitude is a high octave. It is right on up there. Only thing surpassed is authenticity and perhaps love, but not often as love. We know it in the human form, because our human love is so very conditional, and so if you are able to achieve unconditional love, then that is a very high vibration, but often we've got a lot of conditions on the love as we know it here, and so when you have gratitude, you are holding such a high vibration and we do not call into our co-creation, into our manifestation. We do not call in what we want. We do not call in what we want, we call in what we are. And so when you are able to hold a vibration of gratitude, you call in more things to be grateful for, and that is why a gratitude practice is so important.

Susan: 2:21

It is so important to live in a state of gratefulness and appreciation of all the little things, to be mesmerized by the sunrise and to like just be in awe of the flowers growing, like, even if you are struggling in your personal existence, there are so many things that you can relish in this life. I mean, we live on a freaking beautiful planet. I am overwhelmed all the time at how marvelous the planet is, and so I could be focused on the climate change and questioning why most of my trees still have a lot of leaves as we are approaching December, but instead I am going to focus on the beautiful colors. They are gorgeous, and I get to enjoy them even longer these days because those leaves have not fallen.

Susan: 3:28

Anyway, today, not only do I want to talk about the importance of gratitude, of living in a state of appreciation, not just because it feels good, but because that is a way to cultivate into your life more of what you would like to have, but I also want to talk about the reticular activating system, or the RAS, which. The RAS is a network of neurons in your brainstem that controls a lot of things, including your sleep and wake cycles, your attention, your consciousness and your awareness, but it is also the gatekeeper. Okay, so, as you are living your life, there are billions of sources of data all the time that your senses could bring into your awareness. The RAS acts as a gatekeeper to say, no, don't bring that up. Bring this up, this is our focus. No, bring this up, this is our focus. It's the guard that sits between your brain and your five senses and filters what information gets through and what doesn't.

Susan: 4:44

Okay, so I can also think of it when I am channeling. Sometimes I can even be in a conversation and I kind of space out because the information is coming through and it's like a showerhead when it's on, like the really soft, floaty section of a shower head or a hose head and it's not controlled and it's not defined and I have to switch the nozzle over so that it's like the one jet stream, and for me, a lot of times it is noise. It can be noise until I pick up a pen and the pen offers me a channel device to get the information through. And that's why automatic writing is so important in practice excuse me is because it allows the controlled point for the information to come through for me and that makes it so much easier. And otherwise sometimes it's noise, it's conversation, but I can't pick up what I need to. And the pin acts as my reticulating access, activating my reticular activating system. It allows you know this is what we want to come through.

Susan: 6:09

And so, because you are at every moment in the day exposed to billions of pieces of data, we are constantly surrounded by information that is out there and you couldn't function if you were paying attention to all of it. Your RAS tells you what to bring into your awareness. It says, hey, she really was interested in this, let's make her aware of this. And so if you've ever gone to shop for a car and you never really paid attention to Subaru Outbacks and then you go and look at a Subaru Outback and leaving the dealership, you see 42 Subaru Outbacks on your way home. The reason is is because you're paying attention to them. You have drawn your awareness to a Subaru Outback. They are not an increased number on the road. They were there the day before, and the day before that it was not a piece of data that your gatekeeper thought you needed to be aware of, and so it just passed on through. Maybe instead, you were looking at, you know specific trees in bloom or you know whatever else had been in your attention field. That is, at that moment, when the Subaru Outback was passing, you were looking at something else, because it had been your primary area of focus. And so we are able to train our RAS. What would you like to bring into your focus? What do you want to be aware of? And so, when we cultivate that sense of gratitude, that feeling of thankfulness, that positive mindset, we are training our RAS to bring into our awareness the things we want to be thankful for, the things we want to appreciate, the things that we perceive as positive. That is the data we are given, and so I've used this example on the podcast before.

Susan: 8:28

But if you go to eat at a restaurant with someone who has trained their RAS to find the fault, to find the problem, and you have a positive mindset. Y'all can go to the very same restaurant with the same table, the same waiter, the same food order and have an extremely different experience, because where you are admiring the decor and how friendly the waiter is and what a big smile he has, your friend may be checking out you know the fluorescent lighting that he thinks are I'm actually using that from Mark. I shouldn't use things that he could hear and know it's from him. But he designs restaurants and we have canceled reservations because he sees the picture online and is like I will not have a good experience there because of the lighting, can't even make the stuff up, but in all fairness, he does do that for a living and so it has trained his Raz to find flaws in the decor, also find things he appreciates in a decor. We are the weirdos who walk through stores and restaurants taking pictures of how things are displayed or lights that he likes. So I shouldn't have used a restaurant as the experience, because mine is very weird being with somebody who designs restaurants like that's what his company does, being with somebody who designs restaurants, like that's what his company does. Anyway, if you are with negative Nelly, they can also complain about one thing not tasting exactly perfect, whereas you might notice something that is the best you've ever had. It's just going to be a very different experience because of all the data available. Different experience because of all the data available.

Susan: 10:24

You have trained your RAS what to bring into your awareness, what to really focus on, and the good thing about that is is you can change it. You can change what you choose to focus on. You can switch the nozzle head and say no, no, I want to focus on this, I want to dial into the positive things. And if you are a long-term negative nelly, I I can see it right now. We have a rug at the patio door and it's got a corner that's up, and this freaking corner, you know, is waiting to trip people and it didn't come that way, right? We are all born into a loving body and we learn how to find the fault and we end up programming ourself into finding the negative, into seeing what's wrong, and that's our corner being tipped up and it's going to be up and one day you can pass by and you notice it's up and you're like I don't want to be this way anymore and you press it down. Well, before you get to the couch, it's back up.

Susan: 11:35

It's going to require intention and catching those negative thoughts, that negative patterning, and disrupting it and just saying nope, not anymore, that's not what I'm focused on. And find something, be intentional and find something in your space, in your life, in whatever you're looking upon, that would be like no, I focus on this and this is really beautiful to me and that is going to disrupt that pattern and after enough disruption, the corner will lay back down. So we have to be really intentional about it. But this is, this is not woo, woo y'all, it is. It is how your freaking body works. Because we would be in a corner, in a fetal position, you know, tucked away, if we had to pay attention to all of the information, all of the data that's available to us at all at all times. It's just much.

Susan: 12:38

But knowing that you have the choice of how to train your RAS to call into your awareness that which you would like to be aware of, then it makes doing these little steps so important, because you are part of the solution, you are part of the scientific building of your gateway. You get to choose the code for what gets to allowed in, and it might take multiple steps and a lot of time, but how worth it is it to to live with rose tented glasses, because that's what people was like. Oh okay, I imagine you can find the good thing in this. Yes, because there's always something good to be found, and I have let my razz know that that is what I am intent on finding, and so that is what comes into my awareness is whoa, this song is really freaking good. This you know the. The weather feels amazing today, even in this freaking pissing down rain. Oh, what a great day to read a book like whatever it is. And I'm not saying, once you have done this work, you're not going to have a bad day or a low day or whatever. That's not it. But what your RAS will bring into your awareness will be the glass half full part of life, and you get to train your, you get to train your system to do this for you all right. So how do you train it? How do you train what is to come into your awareness? Because we want to be grateful, but isn't it much easier to be grateful if that which is coming into your perception, into your awareness, into your consciousness, is stuff that you already like, right? So we're getting ahead of the gratitude. We're getting ahead of the gratitude by training our RAS to make us aware of the existence of things that we, like my kids, think.

Susan: 14:48

It's pretty crazy that I can drive down the road and I will know when to slow down. I always slow down in my neighborhood anyway, but I can sense when deer are nearby. I freaking love deer. I love them so much and it's like I sense them before I see them because I focus on them way too much. I just love the deer. But the more and more attention you give to something, you will be able to spot it from afar. You'll be able to find it anywhere.

Susan: 15:24

So one of my signs from my guides is a hummingbird. You might think that you don't ever see hummingbirds. Well, I will tell you they are everywhere. They're everywhere because I'm focused on them, because it is a message for me, but I am trained that I can find a hummingbird tattoo or a print in home goods. That's so small and you may never see it, but my RAS knows to draw my eyes there. I am drawn to where the hummingbirds are, and it's not that I go out looking saying I'm going to find hummingbirds. My eyes are drawn to where they are because my gateway knows that I like to see them, and so when they are available on a bumper sticker or wherever on a shirt that someone's wearing, my eyes will find it because I have trained my RAS to show me hummingbirds Like it lives me up. Show me where the hummingbirds are, and I find them absolutely everywhere.

Susan: 16:36

All right, so how do we train the RAS to show us what we want to have? Well, very similar with a lot of these other practices, but now you will know what you're doing in them. If you start the day by proclaiming that it's going to be a good day, it's going to be a fantastic day, you are going to create opportunities for your RAS to show you that it is. But what we want to do when we start our day is say our goals. If you're using your RAS to elevate your business or elevate your life or elevate your health, make sure you have your goals, write them down, but each day, say them out loud. Say your goals out loud and it's almost like a memo to your gateway. Like Raz. This is what we're working on today. Reminder, help me find the people, the places, the opportunities, the experiences that will move me closer to this goal. And you don't have to say all that. Repeat your goal out loud Hello, this is what we're working on. Please bring this into my awareness. So do that each day when you start having a negative thought and you choose no longer to be negative. Nelly, just be like. I see you. I see you finding fault in that driver. I see you complaining about what's going on here. I see you.

Susan: 18:16

We give everything that's out there. We give it its definition of being positive or negative. Everything out there is neutral. It's our perception of it that allows it to be either positive or negative. Derek, when we were at DG Mindset I'm going to have to ask for this link so that I can share it too he showed us a video, and you see the video in segments, and it's a man running and a car pulls up and the man starts running and so it looks like he is running from this car. So you know, you make your interpretation based on what you're seeing. You see what's happened and then he pushes a girl. You know there's all these things that happen in it and and when you watch the video in its totality, when you zoom out, you see that he was running to push the girl before something fell on her. He's in everything he's doing, he's helping.

Susan: 19:23

But in that moment, when we're dialed into it, you only see the negative connotation of what is going on and we don't see the full picture. And so even when you're going to assign value to something and you could say you know pushing a woman, that is negative, that's just reality, that's negative. Well, just assume always you don't see the big picture. Just make that assumption and that'll help you dial back your negative connotations, your judgment of an event. But person, just know you don't know the full picture and that'll help you check it. When you start drawing into your awareness things to complain about, things to be negative about anything that be negative, about anything that's out there, just know I don't see the big picture. So that's not so. And when you start being that disruptor, you'll start breaking the pattern of thinking it negative but also calling in things to feel negative about.

Susan: 20:25

So there's a difficult left turn coming out of the gym to get us home. There's no stoplight there and so sometimes you wait a very long period of time before somebody's generous enough to wait five seconds so you can make that left turn before they go and continue sitting in more traffic. How you experience that part of your day is based on your choice. So I can either see it First of all. I always plan for there not to be traffic and a lot of times I can get through there without waiting a long time. And if I do wait, I'm probably with my husband, because that is not his plan. He thinks it's awful and that we're gonna get sit there. But also I know if I'm sitting there then maybe I've been enjoying a song, maybe there was an accident that could have happened if I got out 10 seconds earlier. I just am not gonna sit there complaining about it, because, first of all, what's the extra two minutes in my day? Was it going to make that big of a difference? I'm going to go home two minutes earlier. It's not, and so I can either choose to sit and stew about how much traffic there is and how many houses they put up and all of this kind of stuff, or I can just like.

Susan: 21:43

How I experience that situation is my choice. I am choosing to either have it be a neutral situation or assume I'm being favored in waiting or to complain about it. But those are our choices, and when you can start catching those so that you can be a disruptor when it is something that you don't want, the more and more the corner of your rug is going to get flattened. Wires that that constant pushback, constant pushback like, oh, here's the automatic rolling up and then you have to say, oh, no, you're going to go back down. Thank you very much. Also, look at images of what you want. Thank you so much for joining me this week. Be sure to not miss any upcoming episodes by subscribing to the podcast. That way, it's available automatically in your RSS feed. This is a crazy journey. Let's do it together.