Evolved people give thanks for life, for the intelligence within the body temple, within nature, for what most people don’t even notice as they navigate through their day.
Rev. Michael Bernard Beckwith
First, we are taught to list what we are grateful for with specificity and detail: Sipping herbal tea by a hot fire on a cold night. My cat curled in my lap. Sunset at the ocean on a slightly cloudy day, bursting with color.
To start in gratitude shifts our focus out of any sense of lack or hurt into appreciation, which expands our hearts, opens and softens us to our own inner spacious loving aware sense of self.
Gradually, we expand on the journey—listening more deeply and opening to whatever is happening now—this here is what I am grateful for. This pain in my side, that causes me to do stretches, breathe more deeply, sit with myself, eat more healthily, take a walk. This feeling I have: sad, hurt, angry, scared. I am grateful for this deepening, expanding, growing, for where I was closed is asking for more awareness.
In those moments when what is appearing is not at all what we want from our personal self sense —resisting and demanding things be different—means we are closing off some part of life and saying this is not worthy of love. When truly, love is the essence and first cause of all that is.
As the shift to accepting what is happens, even what we don’t prefer, all becomes grace. Because the power and the presence and the love that is our true nature is unlimited. When we embrace everything with our loving gaze—even our resistance to what is, we open to the spaciousness of an open loving heart that preexists the outside situations needing to change at all.
Here is the true heart. Here is the advanced gratitude training. Grace takes over. Grace—in which we are grateful for everything exactly as it is.
Affirmation:
Today I am grateful for my life exactly as it is. I see all the beauty, all the love, all the wonder in everything. My growth becomes my flow in grace.
From Gratitude to Grace