Gratitude is an alchemic emotion. When a person is experiencing gratitude i.e., feeling thankful for something; it is impossible for the person to be angry or bitter at the same time. Usually, a human’s emotional body is quite complex and many emotions can exist side-by-side. But, when a human charges their emotional body with gratitude – no negative emotions can exist along with gratitude for the time being. Fear can soon come in after a human is done feeling gratitude, but not along side it. To make sure that ‘fear’ doesn’t come after gratitude, the other emotion needed is ‘faith’ – but that’s a whole different story.
Healing with gratitude is a very ‘feminine energy’ way of healing. It does not specifically look at a wound or hurt, try to analyse it and then try to find ways of healing the issue – this process is very ‘masculine energy’ based – logical, analytical. Healing with gratitude, does not go into the depth of a particular issue, it is more holistic. It is healing by surrender and alchemy – very magical, just like the feminine energies. For a person like me, and I think most of us nowadays – who are used to being more in their masculine energy of being logical, analytical and deep diving into issues – it requires some patience and practice to cultivate the act of being grateful. Because masculine energy is always out to fix problems and issues, it becomes a natural habit for people in this energy to always strive to improve – which in turn means looking at short-comings and trying to overcome them.
This itself is against the emotion of gratitude in which there is an inherent element of being content in the current condition. The true emotion actually even goes beyond being content – it goes to the extent of bowing your head to the event/person/entity which is causing this feeling of being thankful. The very moment a person experiences this, the ego dissolves for how many ever moments gratitude is experienced and with this ego dissolution – all the ego-based emotions (coming from the Manipur chakra i.e., Solar plexus chakra) disappear. In Buddhism this can be described as when the cause is removed, it’s effect gets removed too. That is why, the emotions of fear, hatred, jealousy, envy, anger, bitterness, etc. which are ego-based cannot exist along with gratitude. Gratitude alchemizes these lower vibration emotions and converts them to love. Love toward the event/person/entity that we feel grateful for. This love also is an ego-free love, a devotional love.
How then can one cultivate gratitude? Here are some ways :
- Make a list of things you are grateful for. Keep it with you in your phone. Read it multiple times in a day.
- Doing something that ignites your passion. This will make you a magnet for gratitude.
- Helping those less fortunate than you are.
- Being open about asking for help and making it a point to thank whoever helped you.
- Make a list of the tough situations in your life and list all the people who helped you out from it. If something else helped you come out of it – music, books, spirituality, exercise, art, adventure – you can make a list of these. Thank each of them again, if you haven’t already.
- Go out in nature and admire whichever aspect of nature you like.
- Look at a thing of beauty – this maybe a person, a mountain, a tree, anything – and try to get lost in it’s details. The moment you are completely lost in its beauty is the the moment gratitude will automatically flood your heart.
- Say ‘thank you’ whenever you get the chance to.
Once you start magnetizing your being with gratitude, you will start attracting more things to be grateful for. Little by little, your life will start moving from a materialistic realm to a more spiritual realm – where magical synchronicities will fill your life – giving you more and more events/persons/entities to be thankful for.
Here are some songs which I think are the same frequency as gratitude. They talk of different religions, but I find their vibrations to be very similar (P.S.: Not my intention to endorse any of these religions)
- My everything – Owl City
- Aaqa – Abida Parveen, Ali Sethi
- Bolava Vitthal – Mahesh Kale
