Cultivating Gratitude

Gratitude is something that is easily overlooked and yet it is a very important part of our development as human beings. There are so many things to be grateful for and by focusing on those areas of our lives that we are grateful for will enrich our lives tremendously.

I came across some material by Anthony Robbins in which he suggests taking a daily walk each morning and making positive affirmations. I decided to try this and found the effects to be very rewarding. I would be begin by stating all the obvious things that I was grateful for, but over time I began to discover many simple things that I was profoundly grateful for. These included things that we would readily take for granted such as colors. It's so easy to take such an everyday experience and not have some feeling of thanks for it. This strategy I employed produced many different nuances of feelings about so many surprising aspects of 'normality' that lead to genuine feelings of pleasure.

Quite often, it was the cultivation of these new and subtler experiences that started to gain momentum and produce more quality feelings. There were so many hidden pleasures that I simply accepted as the norm. I started to find an amazing array of pleasure from focusing only on sounds. From this I would move to tactile experiences. There are so many different materials that we touch but are hardly aware of. I would extend this to closing my eyes to try and get still more of a feeling for them.

I guess there are so many layers of pleasure that people can find if we only choose to look for them. The simplest of things such as breathing air can be a great joy if we choose. I'm thinking now of Bach's sublime composition entitled Air. Surely, that composition was born out of the simple experience of deriding joy for breathing.

The more you engage in this activity the more and more you will build upon your gratitude stocks and these in turn will have some impact on your life. At least that was my experience.

Just recently I came across a website that was encouraging gratitude as a means to overcoming infidelity. Clearly, this was aimed at turning negative feelings back toward the positive. Here we see how there is at least the possibility for improving how we feel by concentrating on aspects of our lives that we take for granted.

I’m not exactly sure why our everyday experiences become in some ways mundane, or rather that we fail to appreciate them to the full extent, but either way it does seem to happen.

However, I'm sure if you try to encourage these feelings then you will likely discover many hidden gems of feeling that may have lay dormant for a very long time. Not only that but once you begin you will also discover that these feeling grow and increase. Try it out and I'm sure you'll be grateful for it.