When problems arise and we begin looking for causes, the instruction is simple: Start with gratitude. This is not a performative gratitude list that motivates us or helps us feel better about our lives. We express gratitude to empty what is full and complete a cycle, not manufacture a new one. We track various moments of unexpressed gratitude. The list for most of us will be both overwhelming and nearly endless as all discomfort is the result of unexpressed gratitude and love.
Unless gratitude is our organically arising state, we are living on top of unexpressed gratitude and the whole drama of life is playing out on top of that. Gratitude is our natural state, not something we need to manufacture in any way. That would be adding another layer that blocks the open, spacious, clear-mind version allowing us to be touched and moved by life.
We get there instead by removing the plaque of experience that comes in the form of resentment, which at its foundation is based in a fear of not getting what we want, or losing what we have, and a lack of acknowledgment for all we do have. This is how discontent plays out.
The process of expressing gratitude is not for anyone else’s benefit, but for our own. It is to get our minds free of the unexpressed gratitude that has become the noose of our experience. The expression will burn away the threads in the noose: pride, withholding, superiority, and separation. We cannot genuinely express gratitude and remain separate. There will be a seed that has branches. We must go to the seed moment and let it melt us, and then from that melted place allow it to express again and again. We should do this especially when times are good in order to stay with the process and not be exiled from it.
Chances are, if all day everyday were spent in this process of converting gratitude to fuel, we would have more than enough to live on for the rest of our lives. Where we once merely thought we were condemned to pretending over an experience of being mildly bitter, performing gratitude to cover for the discontent, we will now not be able stop the flood and expression of good.