Tapping into Your Inner Gratitude

Millions of people around the world start or end their day writing down what they’re grateful for. You may be one of them. And, as our world looks these days, you may also experience times when feeling grateful is very difficult.

When Gratefulness Seems Impossible, Gratitude Is Still There

It’s neither in our nature nor in our culture to feel grateful for the tragedies that we experience. Yet it is our nature (even though we often forget it) to feel gratitude. So what’s the difference?

To feel grateful is by definition the warm and deep appreciation for kindness received; the quality or feeling of being grateful or thankful for something specific. Gratitude is a similar feeling, but it is also an energy, a state of being that is not dependent on our circumstances.

In other words, the source of gratefulness is typically to be found outside of us, whereas the source of gratitude is always within us. And so, choosing gratitude as a way of being liberates us from our circumstances; it empowers us.

Gratitude lives deep within us and you can learn how to access it at any time. The simple practice for accessing unconditional gratitude (and thus joy) is described in the free Finding Joy ebook.

Can Gratitude Be Wrong?

Even though finding gratitude and joy is in our power, sometimes the very thought of opening to gratitude can feel almost unethical. Should we really feel gratitude when facing human suffering, wars, famine and the horrifying consequences the climate crisis has on Earth and life itself?

First of all, there is no should intended here. There is only a could, a potential to be explored. And, while that potential can be hard to see in the moment, we have our own experiences to support us in the process.

What Our Life Experience Tell Us About Hardship

We discover the truth of it when we look back at our life, when we are no longer immersed in what has happened and how we felt about it as it happened, but can contemplate it from the bigger perspective or time and life lived. Now, we can see how difficult experiences came with gifts and led to good things, later if not immediately, internally and/or externally.

A simple and sweet example was given to me the other day in a conversation with my poetry mentor who lives in Greece, and who shared how they just had a week of cold and harsh rain. And how a few days later it resulted in an unusual abundance of beautiful flowers.

Here’s another, more profound example from my life: When I was 16 we left my home country as political refugees. To me it meant the loss of everything that had any significance in my life, including my language, a sense of belonging, citizenship, friends, teachers and everything I knew. It led me to the deepest depression of my entire life and it took quite a few years to overcome that. But when I did and to this day (I’m 70 now) it led me to feel immense gratefulness, because I realized how uprooting and then having to grow roots somewhere else enabled a wonderful life that I couldn't even imagine otherwise. More about that (and 20+ other stories of unexpected gifts) can be found in Magic And Miracles: 21 Real Life Experiences from the Edges of Logic and Science.

As we contemplate our past experiences, it becomes easier to have faith in the fact that whatever difficulties may be arising now will eventually result in something to be grateful for.

What We Know From Inner Experience

In our gradual awakening to our true nature as the proverbial spirit having a human experience, faith arises from within.

As our faith in life grows, so does our gratitude. It becomes easier and easier to trust that even if we may not be able to see the gifts in a difficult situation, they are there, waiting for us to discover them. In fact, gratitude helps us to discover them faster.

Gratitude Empowers And Connects Us

Gratitude changes not only our perspective but the way we live. When we’re willing to meet life with gratitude regardless of circumstances it becomes easier to accept whatever life brings our way, to live with joy, to let our energy flow more freely and ultimately to move through difficulties and allow transformations to happen faster and with less effort.

Also, in bringing gratitude to our relationship with life and each other, we realize how we’re all connected.

Take a moment to think of everything (even the smallest things) that you have experienced on this day. So many people around the world contributed to your life on this day. Send them all your gratitude and know you are connected with all of them, even though most of them you will never meet in person. Similarly, you yourself contribute to countless people’s lives, directly and indirectly, in small and big ways, whether you’re aware of it or not. Send them your gratitude as well, and know you are connected in an invisible network of gratitude and thus joy.

And then there are the visible networks where you can share gratitude and joy with each other directly, such as the Soulivity Community Hub and the Joy Keepers Network.

How To Grow Your Sense Of Gratitude

Ultimately, there is no limit to gratitude, just like there’s no limit to love and joy. And like with love and joy, gratitude expands in amazing ways when we open to it for no reason, without conditions. When, in other words, we’re willing to contemplate the possibility that everything in life has been and is a gift.

That said, neither gratefulness or  gratitude can be faked or forced. Start where you feel comfortable, and then keep expanding it, through the resources mentioned above. Also, let yourself be inspired by people who exude gratitude and gratefulness. Here’s one:

(VIDEO) Want to be Happpy? Be Grateful | David Steindl-Rast

There are more keys to gratitude and joy in difficult times in the free book, How Do You Live In A World Of Crisis: Ideas For Finding Joy, Clarity & Connection.