State Of Being
Gratefulness is a state of being. It is not necessarily an action, or visible. It is a private feeling, not something that you can produce. In fact, it is all the time there. Without gratefulness we would not be able to live for long.
There is gratefulness in each action, because in any action there is an exchange. You can feel right now that in your present life there is always gratefulness. It makes you move, it makes you act.
Gratefulness comes to you and makes you soft and sweetens you. It makes your life tender, it takes the pain out of the body.
Gratefulness in many forms: gratefulness that was received, gratefulness that was given. Both forms are equally valuable. There is a grace in it, of being there and giving gratefulness, but equally important is to receive it.
Why is it so important?
Gratefulness is important because it is related to trust, relaxation and receptivity. All qualities that are essential for living life in a loving, creative and meditative way.
But it is not so easy not to fight with life and to surrender to what comes. We are often too busy trying hard to get where we think we should be, or isolating ourselves because we cannot trust life any more. This inner pressure, this stress, often comes from childhood.
As kids, we all had to learn to say “thank you” to what was given to us by our parents, the good and the bad. We could not select what we wanted from them and what we did not want: we felt obliged to take it all, including their hidden pain and burdens. We tried in every possible way to make our parents happy, at the cost of our true nature.
Later, in our adult life, this sense of obligation and pressure becomes a solid wall that prevents us from being receptive and trusting. It becomes an inner tension, a stress, that blocks our capacity to recognize and receive the nourishment and blessings that life sends us in many different ways.
The first step is to understand and express all the feelings that we accumulated as kids. But once our unhealthy bonding with the parents is dissolved, we are bound to feel empty and vulnerable. The child in us needs its parents… This is the right opening for true gratefulness.
When we understand that there is no price to pay and no burden to carry for our parents, we can look at them differently. Like human beings, with a dark and a light side. It becomes much easier to recognize then what are their true gifts to us. We can finally open up to receive them.
The moment of gratefulness is nourishing for us to see how everyone rediscovers what they really received from their mother and father, and how they can accept their gift and bring it into their lives. Mother and father become vehicles of existence: even if their personal gifts were not so many, through them life in all its wonders came to us…
