Attitude Of Appreciation
How to Create an Attitude of Appreciation:
To be grateful means to be simple. To be grateful means to be joyful. To be grateful means to be content.
Unfortunately, most people have been conditioned to live in discontentment. In our competitive, materialistic, consumption-driven society, we’ve been programmed to always want more than we have and to strive to be different than who we are. No wonder life seems like a constant struggle, not allowing us to enjoy ourselves and find inner fulfillment.
If we want to change this way of living, we first need a shift in our consciousness. We need to realize that we are living in an incredibly beautiful world of abundance, and that we’re an important and inseparable part of it.
Expressing gratitude improves your physical, mental and spiritual well being.
A good first step to achieving this is to cultivate an attitude of gratitude, and the benefits you reap from doing so are tremendous. Here are some of them:
Improved physical health
Improved psychological health
Enhanced empathy
Better relationships
Improved self-esteem
Improved decision making
But how can you cultivate an attitude of gratitude? Here’s a little guide with gratitude-inducing insights and tips that you might find helpful along your journey.
Recognize the Precious Gift of Life:
Life is a wonderful gift, but few of us seem to appreciate it. In fact, we usually don’t realize how precious life is, unless we are faced with misfortune.
Life is a wonderful gift in so many ways and we need to appreciate it.
But even in our misfortunes, life still has a lot to offer us, if we pay better attention to it and savor what we’ve been given. This is well-illustrated by a beautiful story from India, showing in a vivid way that we have more than we tend to think, even at times when life gets rough:
One man was complaining to another, “I am a very poor man, I don’t have anything.” So the second man said, “If you are that poor you can do one thing: I want your right eye. I will give you five thousand rupees for it. Take these five thousand rupees and give me your right eye.” And the first man said, “That is very difficult. I cannot give my right eye.” So then the other man offered, “I will give you ten thousand rupees for both of your eyes.” Again the first man replied, “Ten thousand rupees! But still, I cannot give my eyes.” At which point the other man offered, “I will give you fifty thousand rupees if you will give me your life.” At this the first man said, “But that is impossible! I cannot give my life.” The first man said, “This shows you have many valuable things. You have two eyes which you will not sell for ten thousand rupees, and you have your life – and you were saying that you don’t have anything!”
Gratitude lies in the way you look at the world around you.
