What is gratitude? I just finished listening to Abraham-Hicks video on YouTube and although I don’t particularly agree with their view that The Law of Attraction is the only law that governs our lives, they made a couple of interesting points I’d like to discuss. The first point is to ask yourself, can you appreciate what you don’t want? We easily see the value in appreciating what comes into our lives when it is something that we wanted but what do we tell ourselves about all of the rest? When you stop to reflect on this, you may find that behind each event or happening in your life you have created a story. For example, with almost everything in my life that happens that I don’t desire, I will find a way to add it to my “story” of abandonment. Whether it is on a friendship, intimate relationship or my relationship to money, it is added to my story in some manner. It can be different words, like being unsupported or feeling separate and alone, but it always adds to my experience of abandonment. So what effect does this type of storytelling have on our well-being?
So, back to my
original questions, can we be grateful for everything in our lives and what is
gratitude? Gratitude is primarily an emotional response to our life
experiences, something we experience inside of ourselves that is a state of
“BEing” and it is a way to show reverence for what we hold sacred. Often we are
trying to control even gratitude by manipulating a situation, by dissecting it
to figure out why we responded the way we did. This brings me to the other
interesting point that I wanted to bring your attention to from the video.
Abraham-Hicks used the analogy of laying new pipes instead of getting stuck in
the endless cycle of dissecting every thought and belief we have (at 28min into
video). I wonder if our decision to understand why, keeps us always searching
for deeper meanings in all of our experiences. This exploration will never end,
as it will lead us into deeper and darker areas of our lives. For those of you
who have tried, first you look for it in this life then continue your search
for understanding in your past lives. This becomes an endless cycle of
searching, which prevents us from letting go and moving into a state or emotion
of gratitude.
I think that even
when something happens that we do not want, the secret often lies in seeing the
benefit or to not analyze it all by allowing acceptance and faith that things
just are. We try to manipulate everything to our definition of what we want.
Instead of just BEing with what happens to us in a state of true acceptance and
surrender. Gratitude has the ability to transform us and our situations to the
ever elusive “surrendering” that we have been told needs to happen for us to
move forward. If we can be grateful, regardless of whether is something we
desire or don’t want, then we can truly let it go and lay new pipes instead of
trying to figure out what is wrong with us or what we need to fix. (Please
listen to the video if you want to understand this deeper.)
So, what are you
grateful for, and can you be grateful not just as a mental exercise, but as an
emotional response from the heart and also with your gut whose job it is to
protect you? What tends to trip us up is that we often understand something
mentally, but we don’t integrate it into the rest of our BEing. (mBraining
coaching can assist you to fully embrace and come from a higher expression.)
Gratitude at the very least needs to be felt in the heart!
