Before you see where this article is heading, maybe you would like to take a short quiz on Harry Potter.

To all Harry Potter’s fans and foes out there, please give your best shot at answering the following question. What would you call Harry Potter’s grandfather? Any success yet, no? Come on, surely you can think harder than that? You’ve read it at least three times in the books before! Ok, here’s the answer, Harry Potter’s grandpa is’ Mr Potter!

Isn’t it funny? I apologize if the answer has left any unforeseen mental traumas or bodily bruises from falling off the seats. But the question that I really want to ask is more important than Harry Potter’s ancestry. The question is: what were you doing, when you were reading the joke?

Were you glancing through the words to get the answer straight away, just like what the other 90% of the people did and react with indifference? Or did you contemplate about the answer while looking for it, and welcome it with a smile or a look of disbelief? Truth be told, as long as you smile or jest at the joke, you are showing appreciation for the joke, you are showing gratitude for it. Do you want to know why?

Because you are living in the moment, that’s why. You are paying attention to life’s mini surprises and you are showing gratitude for them by responding accordingly. Only by ‘living in the moment’, you can find yourself giving the most sincere gratitude. In fact, showing gratitude should be a way of life!

‘So, if I am still alive and kicking, doesn’t it mean I’m living in the moment?’ And thus you are showing gratitude 24/7? Nope, most people never did live in the moment. A Zen parable illustrates this point perfectly:

Young Monk: Master, how do I practise The Way?
Old Master: When hungry, eat; when tired, sleep.
Young monk: Is it not what most people do?
Old Master: (Shaking his head in disapproval) No, no, no. Most people are not like this. Most people, when eating, are full of thoughts and desire, and when sleeping, are full of cares.
-AsiaPac, The book of Zen

Attention deficit is no longer an ingrained disorder; it can be picked up and learnt as we follow the pace of the society, the result is what the parable mentioned; core activities such as eating and sleeping are now congruent with the TV or work desk. One can’t help but wonder, is it really vital to work while eating? Multitasking is meant for tasks only, if eating has become a ‘task’ for you, you have lost a gift, the gift of appreciation and showing gratitude for the simple things in life.

It would be pointless if I had told you a step-by-step process for showing gratitude or living in the moment. I strongly believe in the maxim that; when the student is ready, the teacher will appear. Once you understood the significance of bringing gratitude into your life, you will have no problems understanding gratitude itself.

I’ll end with a quote, ‘Yesterday is gone, that’s why it is called the past. Tomorrow never comes, that’s why it’s called the future. Today is a gift, and that’s why it’s called the present’

Truly I tell you, gratitude is the key to abundance. For if you are grateful, surely you will experience an increase in all the good things you feel you are deserving in Life.

Gratitude does not come from a “this is too good to be true” feeling. Nor does it come from feelings of lack and desperation, such that you are dependent upon external factors as if the world owes you anything. Gratitude comes from a realisation, a proper understanding of things, that goes as deep and as true as that of a mother’s love for her child.

Thankfulness cannot be faked or forced. You can train a child to say “Thank You” when he is given something good, but you cannot cause him to truly experience deep feelings of gratitude and appreciation in his heart.

Perhaps this is why grateful people have always been in short supply. I am referring to the truly grateful, not the masses that only profess gratefulness by the tongue but do not possess it in the depths of their hearts. However, like any other tendencies, true gratefulness can be slowly and steadily instilled in one’s being by consistent and diligent observation and practice.

How does abundance come into the picture of gratitude?

To give a weird but vivid analogy, imagine a person living in a dark, claustrophobic and almost airtight pod. Let’s say, for the sake of this analogy, she is able to live solely on air. Her only supply of air streams in from tiny almost imperceptible holes puncturing the surface of the pod. These holes also happen to bring in a little light into her pod.

Abundance is the virtually infinite supply of air that exists as a plenum outside her pod.

Gratitude is the hole that punctures the pod, allowing some air and some light to enter it.

As she lives and breathes in the pod, she is able to notice the tiny holes that have been sustaining her throughout her life. As she has been paying attention to only a fixed area of tiny holes, she thinks those are the only holes that exist to nourish her with much needed air, when in truth, tiny holes dot the entire surface area of the pod.

Every day, she lives a life of struggle, constantly panting and heaving and gasping for air, punctuated only occasionally when she musters the courage and effort to place herself close to an area of holes and really suck in the air from outside the pod.

Let’s say she is not likely to suffer from asphyxiation because she is able to survive on very minimal amounts of air.

One day, she experiences a breakthrough. During one of those rare moments in which she gets the strength to really suck in air from one of the holes on the pod, she notices that her suction had caused the hole to expand in size, thus, the amount of air that streams in increases.

At first, she ignores this phenomenon. But when the effect happens for a second, and a third time, she sets out to turn her hypothesis into a fact. Soon she discovers that there are actually more holes dotting the surface of the pod than she had realised, because of the increased amount of light that enters due to the increasing size of the hole. So she experiments with the other holes dotting the pod, sucking in the outside air with all her might, until eventually, she has a couple of big holes on her pod that bring in really huge amounts of air and light.

Day by day, she continues this new hole-expanding effort of hers. One day, because of the increasing sizes of the holes and the number of holes that have expanded, the structural integrity of the once solid pod diminishes, and she finds that she can easily, almost effortlessly, rip apart the pod as if it were made of paper – hence, finally liberating herself and transcending into a whole new world of abundance.

Bizarre as this analogy might seem, most of us live like the girl in the pod. There are tiny streams of abundance entering our self-imposed imprisoned life. All it takes is our awareness of these sources of sustenance and abundance and to expand our awareness of them, thus increasing our prosperity in all areas of Life.

Everything is an asset. Are you sitting on them or are you finding ways and means of fashioning those assets into materials that you would use to design the life of your dreams?

In the 1980s, I started a daily practice that I still maintain today. I was attending an intense personal growth workshop at Deerwood, Minnesota. One night, as I lay on the top bunk in a rustic dorm room filled with a dozen women, someone mentioned her practice of gratitude.

Aware of my natural tendency to focus on the half-empty cup, I decided to try it that night. I did it again the next night and the next. Now, more than 20 years later, I still continue with a gratitude practice each day.

Why? It helps me shift my attention to the positive, improve my perspective, and appreciate what is working well in my life. This, in turn, increases my energy and my happiness. Not a bad outcome for an investment of five minutes or less a day!

Could Gratitude Help You?

It’s easy to drift into focusing on the negative, on problems, and on what isn’t working in your life. But what you focus on expands. So focusing on the negative and on problems gets you more of that, not the enjoyment and fulfillment in life you long for.

If you could use a little improvement in your attitude (and who couldn’t!) gratitude could be very helpful.

Robert Emmons, Professor of Psychology at University of California, Davis, says gratitude is “an attitude we can choose that makes life better for ourselves and for other people. I think about it as the best approach to life. . .When things go well gratitude enables us to savor things going well. When things go poorly gratitude enables us to get over those situations and realize they are temporary.”

Psychologists, spiritual teachers, writers, and researchers say that gratitude can:

** Increase your energy and optimism
** Shift your focus to what has gone well or delighted you
** Help you not take things for granted
** Make you more resilient to life’s hassles and stress
** Encourage your satisfaction with life
** Increase your compassion
** Enrich your experience of life
** Increase your happiness and well being
** Improve your health

Who doesn’t want some or all of this?

A Gratitude Practice

So how do you incorporate more gratitude into your life? I recommend a daily practice of some kind. For instance, you could:

– Keep a gratitude journal. Each night write five things for which you are grateful.

Or

– Before you go to bed, give thanks for one thing for which you’ve never before been consciously grateful.

Making the practice a part of your daily routine will regularly focus your attention on gratitude. Knowing you’ll be doing this each evening will raise your awareness and attention throughout the day. “Oh, I need to remember that tonight.” “What am I going to be grateful for this evening?”

Grateful to Whom?

Charles Fillmore, co-founder of Unity church, wrote “It has been found by experience that a person increases his blessings by being grateful for what he has. Gratitude even on the mental plane is a great magnet. When gratitude is expressed from the spiritual standpoint it is powerfully augmented.”

If you believe in God, a Supreme Being, the Universe, or a Higher Power, send your gratitude in those directions. If you don’t believe or aren’t sure what you believe in, focus more on what you’re grateful for and don’t worry about to what or whom you are grateful. It will still work!

Grateful for What?

In my initial gratitude practice, each night as I brushed my teeth (I couldn’t miss the opportunity to double task!) I’d think of three things for which I was grateful. In the last 10 years or so, I write each night in my journal five things for which I’m grateful.

I’d be lying if I said it was easy every night. When I’m feeling low, it’s tough to think of anything for which I truly feel grateful. Still I persist and eventually come up with five things. Many nights I have so much I feel grateful for that I can’t write fast enough.

Brother David Steindl-Rast says “We go through life in a daze. A power failure makes us aware of what a gift electricity is, a sprained ankle lets us appreciate walking as a gift, a sleepless night, sleep. How much we are missing in life by noticing gifts only when we are suddenly deprived of them!”

To get you thinking about what you’re grateful for, here are a few ideas taken from my own gratitude journal. Cozy shelter in the storm. My health. Skagit Valley raspberries. My husband. Fragrant lilacs. Driving with the convertible top down. Hummingbirds. Books. Work I love. Toddlers. Samish Island. Feeling peaceful. (Wow, just listing these makes me feel great! I could go on for pages — and I won’t.)

What you are grateful for will differ from me. The gifts and the abundance in each of our lives are so vast that the possibilities are limitless.

In Your Life

To begin playing with the practice of gratitude, here are two suggestions.

1) Start with a big infusion of gratitude. Take 5 or 10 or even 30 minutes right now. Write as many things as you can think of for which you are grateful. Notice how writing this list changes your energy.

2) Choose a daily practice (see ‘A Gratitude Practice’ above) and play with it for two weeks. Notice how this practice affects you. See if this is a practice you’d like to continue or if you’d like to try another one.

Practice gratitude and see how it changes your life.

Enjoy!