Start with Gratitude

When we are looking for causes, when problems start to arise, the instruction is simple: Start with gratitude. Not a performative “gratitude list” type of gratitude that motivates us or helps us feel better about our lives.

We express gratitude to empty what is full and complete a cycle, not manufacture one. We track various moments of unexpressed gratitude.

The list for most of us will be both overwhelming and nearly endless as all discomfort is the result of unexpressed gratitude and love.

Unless gratitude is our organically arising state, we are living on top of unexpressed gratitude and the whole drama of life is playing out on top of that. Gratitude is our natural state, not something we need to manufacture in any way.

That would be putting another layer on top, which prevents us from the open, spacious, clear-mind version that allows us to be touched and moved by life.

We get there instead by removing the plaque of experience that comes in the form of resentment, which at the foundation is based in a fear of not getting what we want or losing what we have and a lack of acknowledgement for all that we do have. This is how discontent plays out. Instead, we track back the moments of unexpressed gratitude, then to go back and begin to express them. This is not for anyone other than us. This is to get our minds free of the unexpressed gratitude that has become the noose of our experience.

The expression will burn away the threads in the noose: pride, withholding, superiority and separation. We cannot genuinely express gratitude and remain separate.

There will be a seed that has branches. We must go to the seed moment and let it have us, let it melt us and then from that melted place allow it to express again and again. We should do this especially
when times are good in order to stay with the process and not be exiled from it.

Chances are if all day everyday were spent in this process of converting gratitude to fuel, we would have more than enough to live for the rest of our lives.

Where we once merely thought we were condemned to pretending over an experience of being mildly bitter, performing gratitude to cover for the discontent, we will now not be able stop the flood and expression of good.