About Gratitude and You

Gratitude is ALWAYS Available

Yes, it’s always possible to find something to be grateful for in each moment. AND you can always find ‘fault’ with this moment, too, should that be what your thinking has convinced you to do. And that’s why gratitude is your way of knowing how ‘true’ you see life, as I’ll attempt to reveal in the next 400 or so words… 

About Gratitude

Gratitude opens the door to…  the power, the wisdom, the  creativity of the Universe. You open the door through  gratitude.
– Deepak Chopra

Gratefulness is one of those things that really feels like a good idea. But, somehow, you just don’t feel like it. Somehow all you can think about is what’s gone wrong, what’s going to go wrong, or what IS wrong right now.

So whilst gratitude – feeling grateful – really is a lovely feeling, an openness to life and all it has to offer, if it don’t make sense to be grateful it don’t make sense.

I get it, I do. And that’s why, for the most part, I don’t really care to be encouraged to be grateful; and I definitely don’t care for gratitude affirmations. There’s something about forced gratitude that seems like a denial of my present experience.

And, like smiling when you don’t feel like it sometimes reminds you that smiling actually feels nice (and so you become ‘smiley’), being grateful when you don’t feel like it might work.

But it all feels like a bit of an effort, really, and maybe approaching things from the wrong way round – from Outside In…

Gratitude: An Inside-Out Understanding

An Inside-Out understanding of gratitude, on the other hand, simply notices how natural feeling grateful is WHEN you are clear thinking in a good state of mind and not too tired.

There really is everything to be grateful at all times, really.

But this is of no use to you if you can’t see that.

And, sometimes, you can’t. Sometimes you’re too busy thinking, too busy working things out, too busy believing that all your efforts are going to lead you to a happy feeling (oh oh, that’s not how it works!).

Once you stop working everything out – when you stop wanting to control, to to know what isn’t known – once you start relaxing, feeling yourself again, you naturally start to feel grateful for this present moment and all it contains.

Gratitude, then, is quite simply a form of measuring how present you are to this moment, how unbothered you are by your thinking (and the meanings you give to it).

Gratitude is your way of knowing how truly you see life.

For there is alwasy something to be grateful for, especially when you don’t think there is.

3 Minute Heroes Video

Here’s what came to me as I shared my thoughts on this topic during a 3 Minute Heroes video I recorded in December, 2014: