Gratitude

In our human experience there is a feeling that encompasses everything else and it is called gratitude. But full and sincere gratitude is an experience that is achieved only by letting go of a lot of things, especially expectations and the poorly concealed sense of "having the right" to receive based on what you have done. True gratitude does not depend on any result; it is instead an experience of alignment and resonance with an order much greater than you. In other words, it is a synchronisation to an understanding that eluded you and now appears so lucid, to the point of arousing a visceral emotion of appreciation and gratitude. That feeling arises spontaneously when you suddenly understand the meaning of something that has tormented you for a long time, or when you see the perfection hidden in a detail or in a synchronistic event. It is amazement, wonder and joy combined because in that moment your consciousness expands to a broader level and you see what you were unable to grasp before.

In your life you have become accustomed to living a reduced version of gratitude, a version that is rather dull compared to the true power of this feeling. You are usually grateful when someone appreciates you or does something of value for you, when you are recognised and rewarded, when you receive what you desired or expected to receive. So you allow yourself to be grateful only when the things that happen to you are “positive”, but it is unnatural for you to feel gratitude towards those who criticise or hurt you, or for things that seem to make your life worse or cause you pain. In fact, your reaction in these cases is usually the opposite: you feel resentment, contempt, a sense of injustice and a desire for revenge… This happens because you are simply unable to see the full picture and the value of that “negative fragment” of experience in the full context of your life. You are simply missing important information that your conscious mind does not collect due to your subconscious programming.

I am sure that, at least once in your life, you have undergone a complete re-evaluation of an event that you had originally labelled as profoundly negative, such as a dismissal, a separation, the breakup of a friendship, a family move. You discovered that, in reality, that situation was the necessary turning point for your life to move in a new direction and for you to experience something that would have been impossible or difficult to live if that event hadn’t occurred.

In the precise moment in which you understand the value and the positive meaning of that difficult event, all pain disappears and only gratitude remains.

But the real secret of a fulfilled and serene life is linked to your ability to perceive the balance between resentment and gratitude in everything that happens and in real time. It is your ability to understand the perfection of life in every moment. The human mind is unable to do this because it feeds on filtered and polarised perceptions and projections; the human mind sees only one side of the coin and rejects the other immediately and completely. It is a natural mechanism linked to the design of a mind whose main agenda is the protection of your survival. The mind does what it has to do. But you are not your mind.

You are the consciousness that uses this mind and body to have a physical experience. And when you understand that everything has an evolutionary meaning for you, and life in every moment is only proposing something that allows you to expand your consciousness and your wisdom, then you stop fighting what you consider negative and you stop creating only positive expectations. Then you simply welcome and study what comes to you because you are hungry for the understanding and gratitude that let you reach a higher level of awareness. I know it’s not obvious or easy to understand what I have shared with you today, because we have become accustomed to identifying ourselves with our mind and our thoughts and we live in the presumption of believing that which we perceive individually to be the absolute truth. And this presumption is one of the greatest reasons for human suffering because it leads us to reject or fight the truth of others.

But each and every one of us possesses only a fragment of the truth and, like a puzzle of cosmic dimensions, everything becomes clear and appears perfect only when all the pieces fall into place.

The intention of this reflection is simply to encourage you to become more curious about yourself and your life. I would like to push you to question your beliefs and expectations in order to broaden your gaze and see what has always been before your eyes, which has the power to dissolve every stress, every anxiety and worry: the true awareness of who you really are.

(Pic courtesy Kiy Turk for Unsplash)