The missing piece to wellbeing: gratitude
Gratitude is the essential key to cultivating peace, fostering contentment, promoting harmony, enhancing well-being, and experiencing true ecstasy. Most people are generally aware of its importance, yet few truly understand what gratitude really encompasses and how to effectively incorporate it into their lives. This can be achieved not only through heartfelt prayers but also through day-to-day activities and meaningful communication with others. Thanksgiving is, without a doubt, a major holiday celebrated in the United States. While it is a time for reflecting on the pilgrims' arrival to America, the act of giving thanks goes much deeper and holds profound significance in our lives.
On the Smart Sustainability show we had Gerald Auger, spiritual leader of Woodland Cree Descent and discussed celebrating Thanksgiving in the old — and a new, an expanded — context. A wider context that integrates the arrival of the pilgrims and their gratitude for coming into a new land as well as gratitude for your life, no matter where you are.
When taking a different approach to gratitude -like giving thanks for life, freedom, joy and the love that surrounds us daily - it takes the human mind to a different plane that not only impacts our health and week-being, but also our outlook on life. In the age of growing depression around the world, being able to experience gratitude is not only an essential piece to consciously creating abundance - it’s also a key to healing the epidemic of depression that is going on in our societies.
Gratitude is a key to abundance and well-being; it can unlock healing the big wave of depression that is having the world in its grip
What is Gratitude?
Gratitude is thanking the Creator for loaning us another day in this beautiful world. Giving thanks for everything that sustains us and our human being, our human experience in a physical reality. Including our emotional, mental and spiritual being.
Teaching kids to be grateful is more than just a word. It’s an attitude. An embrace of life as it is. For the air we breathe and the water we drink. The love we feel and the love we can give. The movements of our arms and legs and the feeling of being alive.
Gratitude is a thought pattern of seeing the world filled with energy and beauty all around us. A focus on the good things we experience in the smallest particle. It can be felt in a gesture a neighbor gives you, a surprise smile someone shares with you or the scent of fresh flowers. Gratitude of what IS, is what really shapes our world. Instead of focusing on all the things that are chaotic, crazy, perceived as “negative” and uncertain.
A piece to a puzzle the Western World struggles with
Living in gratitude for Creation is a piece to a puzzle that the Western World with all its scientific progress and technology has literally tuned out.
Few people can answer what gratitude means to them; even fewer greet the Sun in the morning; appreciate the whisper of the wind or the stars in the sky at night.
Gratitude has a lot to do with the Creator.
Seeing the Creator in everything that exists is a skill the Western world has mostly lost. We seem to have forgotten that without source, God, the Creator, none of us would be sitting here; the world would not exist.
What it comes down to is the struggle of worldviews: one that sees creation not as a chance product, but as an intentional act of Creation. Another that it’s not really sure what it sees. Because, anyone who takes a closer look at how incredibly well every particle, every atom, every piece in the world are interconnected - cannot do other than see that anything could have been created by chance.
There’s a spirit behind the word
As Gerald Auger put it: “there’s a spirit behind the word”. In his Native American tradition, children are taught to speak gratitude into existence. Not just as a word in the dictionary, but as medicine. Words speak the spirit behind the word into existence. “If you speak good things, good things will come; if you speak bad things, bad things will come.” Being mindful of what we say and how we say things has clearly become a lost art. Gratitude beholds a spirit of love, kindness, compassion, contentment, ecstasy. Feeling really at peace with everything theater is. It’s feeling that doesn’t just fall on the ground empty, but that lifts up the air around you. It’s a spirit that gently enlivens and waters Earth as well as our very soul.
When people speak with one another — it is our spirit that speaks; our spirit that receives and our spirit who understands. We connect with each other through spirit, even if few people are aware of it. If you ever experienced someone or an animal die, you know what we mean. As soon as the spirit leaves the body, the body feels like an empty shell, because all life comes through spirit. The body is the house. So gratitude is an expression that comes to life through spirit. Perhaps this lost art of speaking words into existence is the missing piece to gratitude and thus the key to experiencing a healthy, abundant, joyful world.