Gratitude — The Doorway to Happiness, Success and Contentment
Gratitude is truly an underrated practice. It has been limited to just saying ‘Thank You’ to one another as a formality. But, the practice of being grateful, for all that we already have, can change our lives in million positive ways. It also cuts down the mental clutter and brings in better decision-making capability, an optimistic approach, a happy mind and a healthy body. By understanding what gratitude can do for us and how we can be more grateful, we can happily possess the best possible attitude — the attitude of gratitude.
My journey towards true happiness and freedom has been about going within and facing myself with integrity. I am deeply grateful that I have a spiritual teacher who keeps nudging me to look at what is distorted within me and use different techniques to work through it. This helps me to free myself from that which is keeping me from being happy. Gratitude is one such lesson that I learnt from her. I must admit that it has not been an easy lesson. I still have to constantly and consciously keep practicing it. But, when I am in the gratitude mode, I am satiated at all levels. It is like there is a sudden shift of perspective…like I have noticed the treasure that has all the while been in my hands.
I have also observed that when I am grateful for something, I get more of it. For example, when I am grateful for all the money that I have, I get more of it. When I am grateful for the support I receive from my parents, they support me in unexpected ways. When I am grateful for the spiritual lessons that I am learning, I experience healing and transformation. Contrary to this, when I feel dissatisfied and anxious about something, my mind slips into a state of lack; everything depletes and gets complicated. In short, when I am grateful, life gives me more reasons to be grateful. When I am complaining, life promptly delivers more reasons to complain.
The practice of gratitude seems simple, but it is extremely powerful. My teacher has made me experience the benefits of gratitude firsthand. I know for sure that it can make a person truly happy and satisfied. This is the reason I am sharing all that I have learnt about gratitude with you.
The Root Cause of Dissatisfaction — A Sense of Entitlement
I, like many people, felt discontented and ungrateful for all that I had because deep inside I had a sense of entitlement. I used to think that I SHOULD have gotten a long list of things in life, but haven’t and so God has been unfair to me. I have also seen many people constantly complain this way. What helped me wake up was this reflective article https://mynavati.com/gratitude-the-greatest-wealth/. It changed my perspective, and I started questioning…really, who am I to decide what the Divine must or must not give me? Am I so big that my orders must be (quickly) catered to by this huge Universe? Is my ego so inflated that I have forgotten that only God’s will (and not mine) is what matters? Have I somehow believed the lie that I know better than the Divine Intelligence…the Divine Intelligence that has created everything, including the tiny-little-micro-nano specs that me and you are? Every time my mind is frustrated about certain things in my life, I ask myself these questions so that the sense of entitlement doesn’t engulf me.
To become grateful, we must first shatter the sense of entitlement. We need to remind ourselves that it is only because of God’s kindness that we have all that we have (including the breath we take). We can then come to realize how arrogant and greedy we are to be submitting unending lists of demands to the Divine, without the slightest reverence to what we have already been given. By practicing gratitude, we start trusting God’s plan for our lives because we happily accept and appreciate all that we have. This in turn helps in breaking thought patterns like, “I should get this” or “I should not have got this”. We thus become mentally flexible, joyful, positive and contented.
Enjoying the Now
Gratitude is a perfect way to silence the never-ending desires one has. If we quietly observe our attitude in life and our cumbersome thoughts, there is mostly no satisfaction in the present moment. We want to badly achieve something. Once we get that, there is desire for something else…and then something more. If we don’t stop and appreciate what we have in the present moment, we can never be happy in our lives, because we think that our happiness is in the fulfillment of our next desire. So the time to be happy never arrives, because the next desire is always fluttering its shiny wings right at our face. We feel we can catch it and then be happy, only to find a pair of new shiny wings enticing us again. Gratitude lets us enjoy what we have in this moment and not rush to the next desire like the current blessing doesn’t matter at all. Gratitude is the best way to respect our own efforts, life and the Divine. It brings in (a lot of) peace and stability. The restlessness and the feeling of being scattered stops when we are in gratitude.
A Way Out of the Comparison Trap
Many families and schools successfully plant the thoughts of comparison into children’s minds in an attempt to improve or motivate them. We are often compared to our friends, peers, siblings and cousins. This mentality remains with us as we grow and it becomes a suffocating prison. No matter how much we have, we constantly find reasons to be unhappy with our lives because we feel somehow someone else has better things, better home, better job, better partner, better clothes and better life than us. The best way to free ourselves from this prison is practicing gratitude. When we become grateful for all that we have, there is no room for discontentment and jealousy. It is like when we have eaten full stomach, there is no way we want to have the food on someone else’s plate. We would rather wish that they have a good time eating it and not want a single bite of it. Gratitude can give this full-stomach experience to our hearts.
Looking for the Good in the Bad
Undoubtedly, many circumstances in life challenge us, bog us down and burn-up our inner enthusiasm. Gratitude can work miracles in such situations. The trick here is to see what good this seemingly bad thing has brought to us. For example, the challenges and disappointments that I had in my relationships pushed me straight into spirituality. It felt like God wanted me to be in the best place possible (i.e. with him) so he scared me away from the mediocre space where my mind wished to settle. Now, the relationship that I have with the Divine has completely transformed me and my life for good. This relationship makes me feel unconditionally loved, protected and looked after…something that no (ego-based) human relationship can ever give me. So, there is always a boon hidden behind the bane. When we recognize and become grateful for the boon, the bane hardly matters. We actually start feeling grateful for the bane because without it we wouldn’t have had the boon. Finding the good in the bad helps us to shift from complaining-mode to contented-mode. This can be achieved through gratitude.
Building the Habit of Being Grateful
As I mentioned earlier, being grateful has not been the easiest of the practices for me. When my teacher first spoke about gratitude, I did not actually understand much nor did I truly believe in the practice. However, my faith in my teacher pushed me to practice gratitude step-by-step and it has been a valuable and on-going lesson. She taught me some ways to inculcate the habit of gratitude that I have listed below. Every time I feel negative, stuck, frustrated and discontented, I do these activities and in the process, I experience a shift of perspective…from lack to abundance, from mistrust to unwavering faith, from dissatisfaction to complete contentment, from anger to peace…and so on.
(1) Provide Positive Evidence to Your Mind
We cannot inculcate gratitude by just saying ‘Thank You God’ mechanically. We need to induce emotion and honesty into it. So, instead of indulging in the negativity of our minds or fighting with it, we can provide it with evidence, that there is a positive side to the matter at hand. This is to kindly maneuver our minds towards an optimistic perspective. When we catch ourselves complaining about something in life, we can use this kind of self-talk to become connected to gratitude rather than negativity. In this way, every problem-oriented thought can be changed to blessing-oriented thought.
For example,
- If my mind complains that something is not working in my life in spite of my sincere efforts, I reply to it, “good, God is steering me towards something better, so I am grateful that this is not working. Remember, when that thing in the past did not work, something better came up? It will be the same now.” (Using past positive experience as evidence)
- If my mind says that someone else has a good life and I don’t, I tell it, “you must be joking…look, I have this, this, this and this in my life…I have a great life! I am so grateful for all that I have.” (Using the list of things that are already present as evidence)
- If my mind becomes anxious about future and starts thinking of the things that might go wrong, I tell it, “but at this moment you have the following things and there is nothing to worry. If God has taken care of you till now, He will in the future also. Relax and enjoy all that you have now. ” (Using current blessings as evidence)
(2) Making a Gratitude List
Sometimes it is difficult to just talk ourselves out of negativity. At such times, we must express ourselves through writing, drawing, coloring, etc. This gives a more concrete proof to our minds that we truly have a lot. We can easily slide into gratitude as we can clearly see, on paper, all that we have. A simple way to become grateful is to list out things, people and situations in our lives that we are grateful for. The list can have anything, starting from materialistic possessions to personal qualities to spiritual gifts. We need to mention the thing that we are grateful for, followed by why we are grateful for it. This helps in reinforcing, on to our minds, the value of this thing that we are mentioning.
A sample gratitude list looks like this,
Dear God/Universe/Life/Divine Intelligence/any label that you want to give,
- Thank you for the connection I have with you. I feel deeply fulfilled and unconditionally loved.
- Thank you for all the support my parents give me. I feel looked after and protected.
- Thank you for the job. It makes me financially independent and happy.
- Thank you for the challenges in relationships. I am becoming stronger and wiser through them.
- Thank you for the health challenges. I am learning to prioritize myself over other things, be self-responsible and love myself more.
…and so on.
The language, sentence formation, style of writing, etc. don’t matter, as long as we have a positive tone and honest intention to thank. Initially, it might be difficult to feel thankful and it may feel like plain words. However, if we keep up the practice, gradually we will start feeling grateful.
(3) Drawing and Coloring a Gratitude Tree
Using colors can have a great effect on our minds and energy systems. A gratitude tree is a playful and creative way to connect to gratitude. All we need to do is draw a simple tree or print out a tree’s outline from the internet. We then need to fill the leaves and fruits of the trees with things that we are grateful for. For example, we can write the names of important people in our lives, things that we own, qualities that we posses, good practices that we have, activities that fill us with joy and so on. We can use all our creativity to design and color the tree as we like. I personally like this method the most as it brings in playfulness. I also feel a sense of emotional release when I use colors. For me, this works as the fastest way to shift to the gratitude-mode.
There are many other ways using which we can become grateful. These are the ones that I have learnt and have worked well for me. You may find more such techniques that resonate with you or you may even create a bunch of them. Irrespective of the technique you use, the intention to shift to a grateful mindset is important because it will certainly bring in more happiness, success and abundance into your life.
Thank you for reading my article. Do comment below and let me know your thoughts on this subject :).
