Do you remember the moment you were born?
Probably not, but maybe you’ve heard stories. Chances are the first thing you did was cry, and not from gratitude. Most likely, you received the gift of life with a loud WAH!
And no one thought the worse of you, even though you’d just received the BIGGEST GIFT EVER. You were, after all, a baby, and the gift of life was so much bigger than you were. Everyone knows babies live in reaction.
Has anything changed since then?
The gifts of gratitude
Now you are an adult. Do you still receive the gifts of life with a yelp? Do you still live in reaction mode, or have you discovered gratitude?
Gratitude is an experience that brings many gifts, gifts we give and gifts we receive.
Experiencing gratitude opens the heart. Not thinking you should be grateful, but actually feeling gratitude.
Let’s give it a try. Bring to mind someone or some opportunity or something in your life for which you are grateful. Please take a few moments to do this now.
[Pause]
Did you notice what happened in your heart?
Does it feel more spacious, as if an inner door just opened, as if there were room to explore instead of react, to explore and to mindfully create?
Did feeling gratitude motivate you to share the goodness? You might not yet know precisely where to direct that motivation, but do you feel even the glimmer of a desire to make something uplifting happen — and the confidence that you actually can?
Gratitude changes everything
We treat people, opportunities and things we are grateful for differently. We do this simply because we’ve taken the time to recognize their value, to feel the impact they have on us.
Imagine experiencing such profound gratitude that it snowballed and you became grateful for your life overall, for this unique opportunity simply to be — yourself?
What if gratitude touched every moment, and your entire life became an expression of gratitude?
Then, each action would arise from the spaciousness of your heart.
And no matter what life threw at you, you would receive it in the spaciousness of your heart.
Which would transform your experience of life, and of yourself.
Practicing gratitude
What inspires the experience of gratitude in you? What’s a reliable gratitude trigger for you?
Will you dedicate a few moments every day, at the same time each day — perhaps on awakening or just before going to sleep — to reconnect with your gratitude trigger viscerally enough to enter the spaciousness of your heart? It might take some discipline to start your gratitude practice, but the goodness and steadiness you invite into your life will soon fuel your practice — and your life.
How would your life be different if your entire life were an expression of gratitude?
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Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful. I have been going through a tough time and I really needed to read this! Being grateful can change our reality, this I am well aware of. Sometimes, though we get amensia and need a friendly reminder of our amazing ability to create. Thank you for this <3
I simply love this post. Thank you. The exercise to bring a loved one to mind was wonderful. I felt it was easier to breathe and as if my chest opened up. I do practice gratitude on a daily basis and have found another nice addition to just saying what I am grateful for. I do what you suggest with this exercise- I feel it. What does each gratitude make me feel? It creates more and more love. Thank you for sharing this article!