The Gift of Gratitude
By Michele Laub
- Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009
It has been said that to experience joy is our purpose in life. If you want to know if you’re going in the right direction, follow your bliss, do what feels good to you. And when you feel joy and happiness, whether you go searching for it or stumble upon it inadvertently, delight in it. Like attracts like. Joy multiplies quickly if given attention. Focus on gratitude and the abundance of things to be grateful for will deepen and multiply. Sounds good, but is it possible?
Even when we are focusing on joy and feeling gratitude for life, sometimes stuff happens, and we are thrown off our joyful course into fear, anxiety, tension, and stress. (FATS) The events that create this shift in feeling can be as temporary as the failure of the computer’s operating system, as constricting as the economy going deeper into the red, or as permanent as the loss of a cherished relationship through death.
And yet aren’t these feelings that billions of people share— emotion (energy in motion). Isn’t it wonderful that human beings throughout the planet, though often misguided by their conditioning and mind-chatter, can connect through the experience of “feel good” and “don’t feel good.”? From powerless to un-conditional love, each of us knows the truth of how we feel. When we have gratitude for that unity of the human experience, we have gratitude for life itself.
In The Circle of Fire Prayer, don Miguel Ruiz writes “… I will live my life with gratitude, love, loyalty and justice/ beginning with myself and continuing with my brothers and sisters…” Ruiz begins with gratitude because gratitude, he writes, is one of the most beautiful expressions of love. When we live our lives with love, we will love ourselves unconditionally no matter what, no matter what! We will live our lives with loyalty—loyalty to ourselves —we will never go against ourselves or betray ourselves again. When we live our lives with justice, we will no longer judge ourselves– creating shame, guilt and self- abuse. Of course, we must begin with ourselves so we know how living this way feels, and then we will choose to “continue with our brothers and sisters. ”
I remember a Toltec Dreaming Retreat when forty people repeated The Circle of Fire Prayer at three-minute intervals from midnight till dawn. Needless to say it was a very long night. In retrospect, however, since that night, my outlook has progressively shifted from fear and worry to faith and gratitude. The words of The Circle of Fire Prayer are tattooed in my cells. Practice makes the master.
The more we practice gratitude beginning with ourselves, the more we see and experience more to be grateful for. Live with gratitude, just for being alive; embrace and give gratitude for the richness of being human—especially for human feeling. Have gratitude for the breath of life itself. To master gratitude is the blue-print for a joy-filled life in which there is always so much to be grateful for.
To learn about Toltec Dreaming go to click here. To purchase Prayers by don Miguel Ruiz go to Amazon
To join a Gratitude Call at 7 AM Eastern M-F call 641-715-3625 pin 938854
To join a Gratitude Call at 10 AM Eastern Wednesday only call 712-775-7300 pin 404-459-1592.
To create your own daily Gratitude Practice listen to these Gratitude Meditations.
» Comments (0)