Post by Blu on Mar 17, 2008 1:22:23 GMT -5
ATTITUDES of GRATITUDE – How to Give and Receive Joy Every Day of Your Life. Authored by M.J. Ryan
The Simple Joy of Living From a Grateful Heart
If you look to others for fulfillment, you will never truly be fulfilled.
If your happiness depend on money, you will never be happy with yourself.
Be content with what you have; rejoice in the way things are.
When you realize there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you. ~~ Leo Tzu
Yesterday, while putting the final touches on this book, I went to lunch at a Chinese restaurant with my friend Annette to talk about gratitude. When I opened my fortune cookie at the end of the meal, the message was, “Stop searching. Happiness is just next to you.” Talk about perfect timing! For that is exactly what this book is all about. Happiness, the sheer joy of being alive, is within our reach. All we need is an attitude of gratitude. Gratitude creates happiness because it makes us feel full, complete, gratitude is the realization that we have everything we need, at least in this moment.
There is a saying that people teach what they most need to learn, and nowhere is that more true than with me and gratitude. I wrote this book not only because I think gratitude is vitally important to our world, but because I want to become more consciously grateful myself. I do not set myself up as an “expert”, but rather a person on a path like the rest of us, each of us becoming the fullness of who he or she is meant to be.
Like so many of us, I spent a great deal of my life, in my twenties and early thirties, cataloging all the ways I had been injured and abused. In therapy and out, with friends and loved ones, I analyzed and cat3gorized the whos, whats, and wheres of my misery. I was a confirmed pessimist, always able to see the dark side of anything and everything. My belief was that life was hard and disaster was looming around every corner. If things were going well, it was only a matter of time before they would take a turn for the worse. Despite life’s difficulties, it was my responsibility to do all the good I could and become the best person I could be. If I thought about gratitude at all, it was only to take a moment to give thanks for a few people in my life who had helped me feel loved.
Gradually, things changed for me. I can’t point to a single event, a life-changing moment, when my attitudes suddenly transformed. Rather, slowly, as I came to understand my wounding better and began to heal, I started to notice the dearth of positive emotions in my life. I wasn’t so miserable, worried, or alone anymore, but I knew precious little about joy, happiness, optimism, faith, and trust. So I began to study these emotions.
I adopted certain people who seemed to naturally radiate happiness as my teachers of optimism and joyfulness. One of the things I noticed is that these people all had a profound sense of gratitude that seemed to flow uninhibitedly from them. Investigating further, I discovered that each of them had experienced at least as difficult an early life, if not more challenging, as I had. But my teachers consciously chose to adopt certain attitudes, such as gratitude, that led them to great happiness.
That’s when I learned that you don’t have to be saddled for life with the mental attitudes you adopted in early childhood. All of us are free to change our minds, and as we change our minds, our experiences will also change. So I set out on a course to be more grateful, joyful, and hopeful.
A few of my basic assumptions: I’ve learned over time that it helps to take the long view, to choose to see our lives from a spiritual perspective. I know we are here to “grow our souls”, to heal our wounds ~~ or at least bless our woundedness ~~ and become more loving, kind, fearless, and hopeful. The longer I live, the more I recognize that cultivating an attitude of gratitude is the key to living from an open heart, that is, living in a spirit of joyful expectation.
Gratitude is not just the key. It’s a magic key ~~ all you need is to use it, and the world is suddenly transformed into a beautiful wonderland, in which you are invited to play. That’s because, like most of the great spiritual truths, gratitude is stunningly simple. This is not to say however, that an attitude of gratitude is necessarily easy to practice. All kinds of distractions, obfuscation, and negative attitudes from our upbringings may get in the way. But all you really have to do is make a commitment to do it, and the magic will be yours.
One of the incredible truths about gratitude is that it is impossible to feel both the positive emotion of thankfulness and a negative emotion such as anger or fear at the same time. Gratitude births only positive feelings ~~ love, compassion, joy, and hope. As we focus on what we are thankful for, fear, anger, and bitterness simply melt away, seemingly without effort.
How can this be? The answer is that gratitude helps us track success, to notice what is right in our lived, and the brain naturally works to track success. If you have ever watched a baby learn something, you’ll know what I mean. Learning to walk, for example, she stands and puts out one foot. Boom! Down she goes because her balance wasn’t right. Instead of castigating herself for blowing it, getting angry, or blaming the floor or her shoe, she just registers that it didn’t work because her foot was too far out and tries again. She just keeps trying and trying, discarding that doesn’t work without obsessing on it, and incorporating what’s right until she can walk. Fall, fall, fall, walk, fall, fall, walk, walk, walk!
As we get older, however, we get schooled in our mistakes, and learn to focus on what’s not right, what is lacking, missing, inadequate, and painful. That’s why gratitude is so powerful. It helps us to return to our natural state of joyfulness where we notice what’s right instead of what’s wrong. Gratitude reminds us to be like plants, which turn toward, not away, from the light.
Because of the simple power of gratitude, it’s easy to make all kinds of Pollyanna-ish generalities, which slide off into meaninglessness and are boring to read about. My hope is that within these pages you’ll find true inspiration and some solid ideas for making the practice of living from a grateful heart real and meaningful.
To entice, encourage, and support you in your commitment, begin with ‘The Gifts of Gratitude’, which look at what happens in our lives when we begin to practice gratitude. Do ‘t worry if you don’t know how to do it yet. Right now, we are focusing on the wonderful effects your new attitudes will create. We then go to ‘The Attitudes of Gratitude’, which are the outlooks or stances we need to take in cultivating gratefulness. Finally we move to ‘The Practices of Gratitude’, which are the practical ways we can develop and maintain thankfulness in our daily lives.
In a sense, each of the sixty chapters is a meditation in and of itself. This is not to be done at one sitting. Rather, reading one chapter and let it sink in for a while ~~ a day, two days, even a week or longer ~~ before moving onto the next. Since gratitude is both an attitude and a practice, you need time to integrate the learning so they can become truly yours, and not something you just read, put away and forgets.
To get started, take a few minutes right now to reflect on a happy moment in your own life that stands out for you, a moment that stays with you, even if it happened ten, twenty or forty years ago. Experience it again: see the scene, hear the sounds that were around you, feel the sensations.
What was it about that moment that stays with you? Was gratitude a part of it? What was going on for you that allowed you to feel grateful?
[For me it is tiny kittens crawling down my back when I was about two. I can feel the tiny claws, hear their little mewls, and see the gray wispy baby fur. It is the prickle of the tiny claws against my skin ~~ the sensation so deliciously startling ~~ that makes me smile even now. It’s the first memory I have of the wonder of being alive in a body. It was the newness, the ‘first everness’ that allowed me in that moment to feel grateful for being alive, and it is why that minute of my life continues to be one of most powerful memories.]
It has been a great joy for me to write this book, for its creation has been an act of gratitude in an of itself, for those who have so unselfishly taught and inspired me throughout my life, for those who shared specific idea, stories, and practices with me; for my mind’s ability to put it together; and for you for being interested and willing to enter into the experience.
That’s the most wonderful thing I’ve discovered so far about gratitude ~~ it makes you feel full, bursting with delight, just to remember the gifts you have received. Thus are we doubly blessed when we receive something, for the gift itself, and later, in recall, for the miracle of having been given it.
THE GIFTS of GRATITUDE~~Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos into order, confusion to clarity . . . Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow. Melody Beattie
Consciously cultivating thankfulness is a journey of the soul, one that begins when we look around us and see the positive effects that gratitude creates. We do this by noticing those around us to whom gratefulness comes easily and realize how much we enjoy being around these people. We also tap into these gifts as we think about times in the past when we felt particularly grateful. Remember the peacefulness and the delight that accompanied those times? As we come to understand the gifts of gratitude, we realize that being grateful is not something remote or foreign, but part of the natural joyful expression of our full humanness.
The Simple Joy of Living From a Grateful Heart
If you look to others for fulfillment, you will never truly be fulfilled.
If your happiness depend on money, you will never be happy with yourself.
Be content with what you have; rejoice in the way things are.
When you realize there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you. ~~ Leo Tzu
Yesterday, while putting the final touches on this book, I went to lunch at a Chinese restaurant with my friend Annette to talk about gratitude. When I opened my fortune cookie at the end of the meal, the message was, “Stop searching. Happiness is just next to you.” Talk about perfect timing! For that is exactly what this book is all about. Happiness, the sheer joy of being alive, is within our reach. All we need is an attitude of gratitude. Gratitude creates happiness because it makes us feel full, complete, gratitude is the realization that we have everything we need, at least in this moment.
There is a saying that people teach what they most need to learn, and nowhere is that more true than with me and gratitude. I wrote this book not only because I think gratitude is vitally important to our world, but because I want to become more consciously grateful myself. I do not set myself up as an “expert”, but rather a person on a path like the rest of us, each of us becoming the fullness of who he or she is meant to be.
Like so many of us, I spent a great deal of my life, in my twenties and early thirties, cataloging all the ways I had been injured and abused. In therapy and out, with friends and loved ones, I analyzed and cat3gorized the whos, whats, and wheres of my misery. I was a confirmed pessimist, always able to see the dark side of anything and everything. My belief was that life was hard and disaster was looming around every corner. If things were going well, it was only a matter of time before they would take a turn for the worse. Despite life’s difficulties, it was my responsibility to do all the good I could and become the best person I could be. If I thought about gratitude at all, it was only to take a moment to give thanks for a few people in my life who had helped me feel loved.
Gradually, things changed for me. I can’t point to a single event, a life-changing moment, when my attitudes suddenly transformed. Rather, slowly, as I came to understand my wounding better and began to heal, I started to notice the dearth of positive emotions in my life. I wasn’t so miserable, worried, or alone anymore, but I knew precious little about joy, happiness, optimism, faith, and trust. So I began to study these emotions.
I adopted certain people who seemed to naturally radiate happiness as my teachers of optimism and joyfulness. One of the things I noticed is that these people all had a profound sense of gratitude that seemed to flow uninhibitedly from them. Investigating further, I discovered that each of them had experienced at least as difficult an early life, if not more challenging, as I had. But my teachers consciously chose to adopt certain attitudes, such as gratitude, that led them to great happiness.
That’s when I learned that you don’t have to be saddled for life with the mental attitudes you adopted in early childhood. All of us are free to change our minds, and as we change our minds, our experiences will also change. So I set out on a course to be more grateful, joyful, and hopeful.
A few of my basic assumptions: I’ve learned over time that it helps to take the long view, to choose to see our lives from a spiritual perspective. I know we are here to “grow our souls”, to heal our wounds ~~ or at least bless our woundedness ~~ and become more loving, kind, fearless, and hopeful. The longer I live, the more I recognize that cultivating an attitude of gratitude is the key to living from an open heart, that is, living in a spirit of joyful expectation.
Gratitude is not just the key. It’s a magic key ~~ all you need is to use it, and the world is suddenly transformed into a beautiful wonderland, in which you are invited to play. That’s because, like most of the great spiritual truths, gratitude is stunningly simple. This is not to say however, that an attitude of gratitude is necessarily easy to practice. All kinds of distractions, obfuscation, and negative attitudes from our upbringings may get in the way. But all you really have to do is make a commitment to do it, and the magic will be yours.
One of the incredible truths about gratitude is that it is impossible to feel both the positive emotion of thankfulness and a negative emotion such as anger or fear at the same time. Gratitude births only positive feelings ~~ love, compassion, joy, and hope. As we focus on what we are thankful for, fear, anger, and bitterness simply melt away, seemingly without effort.
How can this be? The answer is that gratitude helps us track success, to notice what is right in our lived, and the brain naturally works to track success. If you have ever watched a baby learn something, you’ll know what I mean. Learning to walk, for example, she stands and puts out one foot. Boom! Down she goes because her balance wasn’t right. Instead of castigating herself for blowing it, getting angry, or blaming the floor or her shoe, she just registers that it didn’t work because her foot was too far out and tries again. She just keeps trying and trying, discarding that doesn’t work without obsessing on it, and incorporating what’s right until she can walk. Fall, fall, fall, walk, fall, fall, walk, walk, walk!
As we get older, however, we get schooled in our mistakes, and learn to focus on what’s not right, what is lacking, missing, inadequate, and painful. That’s why gratitude is so powerful. It helps us to return to our natural state of joyfulness where we notice what’s right instead of what’s wrong. Gratitude reminds us to be like plants, which turn toward, not away, from the light.
Because of the simple power of gratitude, it’s easy to make all kinds of Pollyanna-ish generalities, which slide off into meaninglessness and are boring to read about. My hope is that within these pages you’ll find true inspiration and some solid ideas for making the practice of living from a grateful heart real and meaningful.
To entice, encourage, and support you in your commitment, begin with ‘The Gifts of Gratitude’, which look at what happens in our lives when we begin to practice gratitude. Do ‘t worry if you don’t know how to do it yet. Right now, we are focusing on the wonderful effects your new attitudes will create. We then go to ‘The Attitudes of Gratitude’, which are the outlooks or stances we need to take in cultivating gratefulness. Finally we move to ‘The Practices of Gratitude’, which are the practical ways we can develop and maintain thankfulness in our daily lives.
In a sense, each of the sixty chapters is a meditation in and of itself. This is not to be done at one sitting. Rather, reading one chapter and let it sink in for a while ~~ a day, two days, even a week or longer ~~ before moving onto the next. Since gratitude is both an attitude and a practice, you need time to integrate the learning so they can become truly yours, and not something you just read, put away and forgets.
To get started, take a few minutes right now to reflect on a happy moment in your own life that stands out for you, a moment that stays with you, even if it happened ten, twenty or forty years ago. Experience it again: see the scene, hear the sounds that were around you, feel the sensations.
What was it about that moment that stays with you? Was gratitude a part of it? What was going on for you that allowed you to feel grateful?
[For me it is tiny kittens crawling down my back when I was about two. I can feel the tiny claws, hear their little mewls, and see the gray wispy baby fur. It is the prickle of the tiny claws against my skin ~~ the sensation so deliciously startling ~~ that makes me smile even now. It’s the first memory I have of the wonder of being alive in a body. It was the newness, the ‘first everness’ that allowed me in that moment to feel grateful for being alive, and it is why that minute of my life continues to be one of most powerful memories.]
It has been a great joy for me to write this book, for its creation has been an act of gratitude in an of itself, for those who have so unselfishly taught and inspired me throughout my life, for those who shared specific idea, stories, and practices with me; for my mind’s ability to put it together; and for you for being interested and willing to enter into the experience.
That’s the most wonderful thing I’ve discovered so far about gratitude ~~ it makes you feel full, bursting with delight, just to remember the gifts you have received. Thus are we doubly blessed when we receive something, for the gift itself, and later, in recall, for the miracle of having been given it.
THE GIFTS of GRATITUDE~~Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos into order, confusion to clarity . . . Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow. Melody Beattie
Consciously cultivating thankfulness is a journey of the soul, one that begins when we look around us and see the positive effects that gratitude creates. We do this by noticing those around us to whom gratefulness comes easily and realize how much we enjoy being around these people. We also tap into these gifts as we think about times in the past when we felt particularly grateful. Remember the peacefulness and the delight that accompanied those times? As we come to understand the gifts of gratitude, we realize that being grateful is not something remote or foreign, but part of the natural joyful expression of our full humanness.