What is Gratitude?

Dictionary.com defines gratitude as “the quality or feeling of being grateful or thankful.”  But in my humble opinion, gratitude is so much more than that simple definition.  Yes, it’s a good place to start, but as you move forward in you journey, I hope you will find that it is much more to you as well.  Even just a quick google search of the word gratitude yields over 183,000,000 results.

Gratitude and your practice of gratitude will become or perhaps already is a very personalized journey and/or practice.  But today’s focus will be understanding the essence of gratitude.  Yes, gratitude involves being thankful for family, friends, items, careers, etc.  Those items are quite easy to feel the essence of gratitude. And we should absolutely be feeling gratitude for all of those.  But is that all?

What about the downsides to life?  They inevitably happen.  No amount of positive thinking and gratefulness is going to change some things.  Life continues to move forward.  We have to be able to be grateful for everything in our lives or perhaps at the very least to accept what comes our way.  Last week I talked about turning disappointment into gratitude.  But this week is more of a focus on letting gratitude pervade every essence of our life. 

No matter what the situation, sometimes we need to just sit for a moment and just allow ourselves to feel that gratitude.  Have you done week 1 of the six-week challenge?  This would be a good time to use the mantra you developed to focus on that positive and just allowing gratitude to fill your thoughts. Feeling gratitude does not have to focus on one single thought, event of item. 

Ralph Waldo Emerson said “Cultivate the habit of being grateful for every good thing that comes to you, and to give thanks continuously. And because all things have contributed to your advancement, you should include all things in your gratitude.”

I like to focus on the “all things have contributed” portion of the quote.  All things that happen in our life contribute to who we are as a person.  So, shouldn’t we be grateful for all of those things? Good or Bad?  Yes!  We should all be grateful for who we are and what we represent and that means being grateful for everything that makes us who we are. 

The more you are able to just focus on being grateful, the more you will realize that your life is just downright groovy.  It does not need to be perfect.  The more you are able to surround yourself with general feelings of gratitude, the stronger of a forcefield you create against those negative forces.  As I say and will continue to say, the more we improve our output, the more our input improves. 

I hope you are enjoying these short Saturday morning musings.  Please do feel free to share a comment on your journey.  Or even hop on over to the six-week challenge and if you have been following that challenge, let us know how that is going in the comments!