Credit: Jillconyers.com
I wrote the following for the “reader’s question” section of The Culture of Awareness Weekly Newsletter.
Our question this week comes from a reader who wants to know about the role gratitude plays in finding wisdom and enlightenment.
“Isn’t unconditional gratitude the state that allows all ‘wisdom’ or ‘enlightenment’ to come through?”
Absolutely! There are a lot of helpful qualities that allow us to raise our vibration and connect with spirit, but out of all of them, gratitude is arguably the most potent. A lot of people have said that gratitude carries a great power that can help us enjoy life, and it obviously increases our positive manifestations.
I order to understand why it’s so potent, we’ll have to take a look at how it affects us for the better. When we’re grateful for something, we temporarily wipe away all of our pain, fear and insecurity in favor of appreciating our existence.
When we’re in a state of gratitude, we aren’t thinking about the things in life we don’t prefer. We aren’t thinking about the things that bring us down or the things we’d rather not deal with, but when we do think about them (and especially when we stress about them) we create our reality based on those thoughts.
We create our reality no matter where our thoughts are, and this is the main reason gratitude is so helpful. If we constantly think about things we don’t like or things that make us unhappy, we essentially communicate to the universe that those are the things we want more of.
The more energy or attention we give to something, the more it’ll appear throughout life, and finding things to be grateful for will increase our positive manifestations and give us a life we can really enjoy; a life we don’t feel like we have to run or hide from.
Since we create what we focus on, it stands to reason that being grateful for the good things we have will increase those good things, thereby increasing our gratitude and eventually catapulting us into a life where we don’t feel anything but uplifted and grateful.
Constantly focusing on negativity will give us more of it to focus on, because we create our reality with every thought we think and every word we say. I think mindfulness is important, and we’ll want to be mindful of our thoughts, words and actions if we want to create a life worth living.
There’s another component to gratitude too. Not only can it help us create more things to be grateful for – it can also open the channel for love, enlightenment and even more gratitude to come flowing in (like our reader said).
Gratitude opens us up and allows us to explore our spiritual potential, and I think it’s one of the best paths to enlightenment.
I’m sure there’s some kind of gratitude-based lifestyle we can use to enlighten ourselves.
Similar to the path of devotion or the path of selfless service, the path of gratitude will help us elevate our consciousness and explore the largely unknown etheric abyss that sits beyond our conscious understanding and waits for us to open up to it.
I’m sure it’s one of the most helpful paths, and if you think about it, we can mix it with all the other paths that lead to enlightenment.
While we can travel down a specific path, like gratitude or selfless service, it might help to create a path that embraces every quality that nourishes the soul. We can travel a path of gratitude, creativity, selfless service and devotion if we want, and all of these qualities will increase our positive manifestations and give us more to live for.
I think we’d all benefit from finding big and small things each day to be grateful for. When we wake up in the morning, we can say a little prayer of thanks to Source for the wonderful life we get to live.
We can especially be thankful that we’re here on this planet at this amazing time in our collective evolution, and if you’re willing to entertain a slightly new agey perspective, you could say that a lot of higher-dimensional souls wanted to be here at this time but couldn’t for one reason or another.
A lot of them might not have been strong enough to handle the pain and heartbreak that can come with living on earth, but somehow, we made it here. We were able to incarnate on this evolving planet at this amazing time, and we can now contribute to what’s shaping up to be a solid conscious revolution.
This is reason enough to be grateful, and if we’re continuously thankful and satisfied, life will open up and give us more to be satisfied with. Whether or not life currently dazzles us with amazing manifestations, we have every reason to be grateful for our existence here and all we have to do to realize it is open up and look around.
Everything about life on earth presents a unique challenge and a reason to be happy for our existence. The beautiful flowers that bloom during springtime and impress us with their color and beauty give us plentiful reasons to be thankful.
The little acts of kindness we sometimes witness show us that there’s good in humanity, despite all of the awful things that happen every day.
Every breath of clean air we take (provided the sky is being cloaked with nasty chemtrails), is a reason to be happy we’re alive. Every fresh, juicy fruit we eat is a reason to be grateful for our planet and the things she offers us.
Every exchange we have with someone who’s also awakened is a reason to be grateful that we aren’t the only conscious ones. I can give plenty of reasons to be grateful for our life and our spiritual evolution, and every bit of gratitude we express inches us closer to true alignment with our Christ consciousness.
I definitely agree with our reader’s statement, and I think we’d all benefit from finding things to be grateful for. We’ll increase our spiritual reception when we willingly embrace gratitude or any other uplifting quality, and something tells me we’ll find a lot more to be grateful for as our spiritual evolution picks up pace.
I’m sure we’ll manifest the things we’ll be grateful for, and life will respond to our gratitude in all kinds of interesting ways. We have to express it in order for life to respond, however, so let’s take every opportunity to do just that. It couldn’t hurt, but it’ll definitely help.
This concludes this week’s reader’s question.
By Wes Annac, The Culture of Awareness, March 29, 2015 – https://tinyurl.com/pff4obo