Gratitude did not come naturally to me. I experienced periods of unhappiness in my life, and often did not feel that anything that came to me was a particular gift that I should feel grateful for. And even if I did feel glad about some circumstance in my life, who was I supposed to feel grateful towards? Gratitude was usually presented to me in terms of a guilt trip—that I should feel grateful either because there were others who had less than me, or alternatively that I should feel grateful obsequiously to the person who was claiming that they gave me something.
Having since experienced true gratitude, I can now see that guilt and shame are not the most helpful supports for gratitude. Those who give with a jealous heart, expecting to be showered with praise in return, distort their gift and cannot expect an unsullied gratitude in return. Similarly, shame isn’t a helpful support for gratitude. It is true that seeing those who have less can be a powerful spur for feeling gratitude in your own life; however, this recognition has to come about organically, not through having that fact forced upon you. For those who have had their experiences of gratitude tainted by guilt and shame, the best path forward is to let gratitude come easily and naturally where it shows up in life.
Our experiences with gratitude on the human level are helpful for understanding true spiritual gratitude. In reality, it is God who has given us everything, and therefore he is the one we should ultimately feel grateful towards; but the human experience of gratitude is the starting point for understanding this. When another person gives you a gift you love, it is easy to feel appreciative of the gift and their thought and effort that went into obtaining it. It is possible to feel towards everything in our lives—the good things and even the bad things.
It may not feel easy to feel grateful at times. When it’s not actively difficult, it may seem like there is no particular reason to be grateful for anything—after all, the world is as it is with or without our gratitude. But again, the human example serves us well. Someone who does not feel gratitude for a gift they received is seen to be ungrateful, or entitled; these are not positive qualities. We don’t want to be marked with these qualities ourselves. So it is with the spiritual gifts we’ve been given; it is not good for us not to be grateful; if we are not grateful, we risk a display of spiritual ingratitude.
We are thus warned off the possibility of ingratitude, even as we have been advised not to be shamed into gratitude. So how are we to start, knowing that gratitude is good but not when it is shamed or forced? The easiest place to start is with what you genuinely feel gratitude for. You can start with the most positive things in your life. There is no point trying to feel grateful for those things which genuinely feel like burdens; it would be perverse to try to do that. But the secret is that once you can feel grateful for the things you naturally feel grateful for, you begin to see why you could feel grateful for those things which were more difficult—the painful experiences, the uninteresting experiences, the challenging experiences. For everything in life offers its wisdom to the one who seeks to know it.
The vibration of gratitude changes us. There are those who will advise you to be grateful because it increases your ability to receive things. This is true at a certain level, as vibrations perpetuate themselves—if you are appreciative of the things in your life, then more will come that there is to appreciate. But that is not the real reason to be grateful from the point of view of the spiritual life. For the spiritual seeker, gratitude is good because it brings us closer to God. God is the ultimate source of all that we feel grateful for. When we are grateful to Him we draw nearer to him, as the giver, the gift, and the recipient are seen and appreciated for what they are. In the human case, when we are ungrateful, the giver of the gift sees that we don’t appreciate the gift, which brings a distance between the giver and the recipient. Ingratitude is therefore a distance from God; and gratitude is seen to be a form of devotion.
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