Gratitude Dispels Fear, by Lynne Forrest.

I was toss­ing and turn­ing dur­ing the wee hours of the night a while back. (I’ve found that the early AM hours are the time when the ego does its worst work.) This sort of sleep­less­ness has assailed me before. I awaken abruptly and lie there for hours com­pletely over­run with thoughts like, “what if this hap­pens or what if that doesn’t work?” –the kind of thoughts that don’t even occur dur­ing day time hours but feel over­whelm­ing at night. My habit in the past has been to lie awake feel­ing com­pletely at the mercy of such thoughts and pray for day­light so that I can escape them into my busy schedule.
But this time was different.
This time when the ego voice awoke me at 3 AM and started in on its pre­dictable rant I rec­og­nized its voice and didn’t take it quite so seri­ously. It still held sway for awhile, going on about about how dire my life sit­u­a­tion is, but this time I didn’t lose sight of who it was in me that was car­ry­ing on with such nay-saying. I decided to ask for help.
I sat up in bed, turned on my bed­side lamp and reached for the bible which hap­pened to be lying on a table near by. I sat with the bible on my lap a few min­utes and asked to be guided with words that would help me deal with the neg­a­tive fear-mongering ego that lives in my own head. I closed my eyes and opened the bible.
When I opened my eyes the first words I saw was the begin­ning of a psalm that said, “Praise the Lord.“I felt an imme­di­ate relief upon read­ing the words and thought, “OF COURSE that’s the answer to ego’s ranting!”
Praise gen­er­ates grat­i­tude; it uplifts the spir­its and raises our vibra­tional fre­quency to a higher vibra­tory level that attracts love and abun­dance. Grat­i­tude defeats ego com­pletely because it is of a much higher fre­quency. Ego can­not thrive in the high vibra­tional fre­quency gen­er­ated by prais­ing Source.
With that aware­ness in mind, I started whis­per­ing an impro­vised song of thanks­giv­ing for the over flow­ing abun­dance in my life. Peace and quiet joy descended. I did not go back to sleep. I did not need to. I was so filled with grat­i­tude that I felt eager to start my day. And it turned into a won­der­ful day — as days gen­er­ally are when I start out in an atti­tude of gratitude.
What is the les­son? Sim­ply this; grat­i­tude is the anti­dote for fear or any stress­ful feel­ing. Use it ceaselessly.
The next time anx­i­ety pro­duc­ing thoughts threaten to take you down, remem­ber that it is the ego that pro­duces fear — always. and turn to thoughts of grat­i­tude imme­di­ately. Find rea­sons to be grate­ful in every­thing you do and in every­thing that hap­pens. Refuse to hang out with the dark thoughts of an angst pro­duc­ing ego and you will find your­self held in the hands of an abun­dant universe.
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