Please forgive me! I just realized it has been a full month since my last blog post. Life has been “having me”, rather than me having it! I’m sure you can relate.
Today’s post is all about feeling gratitude. With the Holidays upon us, we are accustomed to the meme of being grateful for everything – great or small. But there’s a higher level of gratitude that comes from deep inside. That gratitude is a feeling we have all the time – not just one season out of the year. Instead of being grateful FOR something, we are grateful IN many things. Allow me to explain . . .
Being grateful is an active spiritual practice. It’s fairly easy to feel gratitude in good times. That is a response to something positive happening in our lives. It’s a healthy response, but it is still only a response. The spiritual practice of being grateful puts you at a higher amplified magnitude that is evolutionary and transcendent. When we come from that place of gratitude, we invoke the law of attraction to the very things that we wish for.
“Being grateful IN” means being grateful no matter what has happened or is happening around us or to us. This type of gratitude is possible even in challenging times. We shift our perspective so that we are able to see things differently.
You may have heard of Victor Frankel. He wrote about being in a prison camp in Nazi Germany. He wrote about his experiences on a daily basis. He hid the manuscript from the guards, until one day they found it and took him in front of the tribunal.
By now, everyone he loved had been murdered. He was only allowed to stay alive because he was a doctor and they needed his expertise. The tribunal stripped him naked and, as he stood there, they burned the one copy of his manuscript. One of the guards happened to notice that he still had a very thin gold wedding band and they demanded that he give it to them. This ring was the very last vestige of the life he had known prior to the Nazi take over.
When Frankl went to pull off that wedding band, something profound shifted inside him. He recognized that they could take everything away from him except the freedom to make a decision about how to respond in that moment. He called it his last “authentic freedom”. He said to himself, “No matter what you do to me, you cannot make me live in hatred. I refuse to live in hatred.” That choice established him on a path in life in which he would touch thousands and thousands of people once he was released from prison.
The book he wrote about his prison experience is titled, “Man’s Search for Meaning”.
In the book, he wrote these words:
We are always co-creators of our lives. We can always choose how to respond to any circumstance. We can choose to be grateful, even in the worst situation we can imagine.
The feeling of gratitude is linked closely to the feeling of deserving. We must be willing to receive in order to receive! If we are ungrateful, we have positioned ourselves to experience lack and limitation. In that frame of mind, we have given away our power, our strength. We see ourselves as victims rather than as co-creators of our lives. We can no longer invoke the law of attraction.
You see, feeling gratitude and feeling that we are deserving raises the magnitude of our vibration. The law of attraction only functions at that level. You will become a magnet for good if you are grateful in whatever happens and feel deserving. Notice when you have thoughts of resentment or anger. Notice when you have thoughts that you don’t deserve something you really want. Then make a conscious choice to respond in an authentic way. Please comment below! And if you are not already receiving the Authentic Living E-newsletter, click on the link below.