By Beth Outtrim
Gratitude is the basis to making everything else work. The first rule to getting what you want is to be grateful for what you already have. The trick to that – we must be grateful for all of it; the flu bugs and the flowers, the tears and the laughter, the humility and the triumph. Every bit of it is for us. Being grateful for the lessons in our lives is a bit more difficult to envision and to practice than being grateful for the gifts, the blessings.
First, that’s a fine distinction. When a situation that appears as an obstacle first comes into our lives, it may seem to us to be a lesson that we have to “get through”. Only later in retrospect, do we see that as a blessing. These authors are suggesting that everything is something for which to be grateful from the very start.
Even if all we are grateful for is the awareness that what we have been focusing on is contrary to our stated goals. This in itself can be a wonderful gift. To quote from Louise Hay's prayer of gratitude, “I am grateful for all my past experience, for I know that they were part of my soul’s growth."
Secondly, we grow through our challenges and our acceptance of and gratitude for those challenges. As Dr. Bernie Siegel says, “We all have our problems. The key is to learn how to live with them and even how to use them.” Some of the most difficult people I’ve worked with are the people that helped me to raise and then live up to my own standards of excellence. In The Power of Intention that we read last month the section entitled Making Your Intentions Your Reality, Wayne Dyer has Step 10: As always, remain in a state of eternal gratitude. "Even be grateful for those whose presence may have caused you pain and suffering.”
Lastly, these authors remind us to be grateful for all of the things that we tend to take for granted. The abilities to hear, see, touch, smell, taste, breathe, laugh, love, cry – all the everyday things that we never think about – they’re all gifts given worthy of gratitude.
