The best way to truly live an intentional life is to live expressing the fullness of your eternal Self. Almost all of us find this difficult because we have accrued layer upon layer of resistance over the years. We have had experiences we did not like and our Selves begin to slowly get covered by anger, fear, guilt, insecurity, suffering, and many other resistant emotions. Every now and then, everyone experiences a crack in those layers and we have a momentary feeling of connection. We feel all is right with the world. We feel the Divine touch. Our nature of Love, Joy, Wellbeing, and Awareness is clear and obvious. Do you remember having that kind of experience? Perhaps you fell in love, or you were overwhelmed by the beauty of nature. Perhaps you were seeing the reflection of your Self in the clear and open smile of a baby. Think of one time when everything seemed to have shaken loose and you were you, purely you and nothing else, experiencing the fullness of a moment. How did you feel? What did things around you look like? Were there any odors or flavors associated with that feeling? How did things sound? There is a fullness to experience that we can only perceive when we are expressing Self completely. But there are those layers of accretion. How can we shed or slough off all of that stuff?
Meditation helps, to be sure. I have a regular meditation practice, and I have found that it keeps my awareness attuned so that I am more conscious of my experience. So much of our daily lives passes us by while we are on automatic pilot. Much of our emotional life is also not fully experienced or recognized. Meditation helps to bring more of our lives into awareness.I find that my meditation practice also helps keep me open to opportunities of experiencing the fullness of my eternal Self. So meditation is very helpful, but there are some other tools that can help as well. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if there were some kind of chisel that could help to create fissures in the layers of resistance covering up our Selves? Wouldn’t it also be helpful to have a steering wheel that could help us to veer out of the way when we feel new resistance coming to wrap itself around us? The most effective tool that I have found is gratitude. I have found that gratitude can be both a path in to a fuller experience of Self and a pair of reins that can shift us out of the way of resistant thoughts and emotions. It is a laser that can penetrate our accrued resistance and a jetpack that will move us out of the way of approaching habitual emotions like anger, fear, and suffering.
I have a regular gratitude practice. I sit down at the beginning of each day and spend fifteen minutes writing down what I am grateful for. I think of the previous day and everything that happened both great and small all the way down to the kind smile of a stranger or someone holding the door open for me, and I write the most memorable things in my gratitude journal in complete sentences which include the reason that I am grateful for these things. I find that including the reason for the feeling of gratitude helps to both crystallize the memory and augment the feeling. The basic pattern of the sentence is, “I am grateful for X because Y.” A recent entry in my journal was, “I am so happy and grateful for the very fresh organic vegetables at the market and for all of the people who participated in bringing them there because I am looking forward to creating a delicious, nutritious, and healthful batch of kimchi from them.” As I write and remember things to be grateful for. I see in my mind’s eye all of the people and things that I am grateful for. I also try to expand the scope of the experience to include the people that may have contributed to the experience. I reach for the feeling of gratitude as I write. It is the feeling, not the words, that brings us closer to the fullness of our Selves.
The more that I have practiced this discipline of keeping a gratitude journal the more I have realized there are many things that summon a feeling of gratitude. Take a moment to think of your day today. What comes to mind that you are grateful for? Did you think of a spouse, family member, or friend? Did you think of your health or the place where you live? You may have thought of a nice list, but if you didn’t that’s alright. Even people who can think of a hundred things to feel grateful for will have times when some of their inspiration seems to dry up. You may have spent a mostly quiet day doing household chores without much inspiring contact with anyone. Those are the times when I have found I can reach for nature. I can be grateful for clean and drinkable water flowing into my home. I am grateful for the air that supports all life on the surface of the planet. I remember the sun, and how it warms us even on the coldest of days. Once I realized that my gratitude can extend to the farthest reaches of the universe and beyond, I knew my practice of gratitude would last me for ever. I often find myself going through the day looking for and taking mental note of things to write in my list the next morning. And so, my gratitude practice can extend to encompass the entire day.
If I can sustain a very focused practice of gratitude, and have a strong habit of turning to gratitude throughout the day, reaching for the feeling of gratitude and finding opportunities to express it, I find it much easier to access my essential core of Love, Joy, Wellbeing, and Awareness. In two of her books, Rhonda Byrne called gratitude The Magic and love The Power, and I think she is right. Gratitude is the magic that gives us easier access to the power of our love. I know that Love is powerful and gratitude is the magic door to it.
