Secrets of Spiritual Happiness
Secret #12 -- Count Your Blessings
By Sharon Janis
Secrets of Spiritual Happiness
Secret #12 -- Count Your Blessings
By Sharon Janis
If the only prayer you said in your whole life was, "thank you," that would suffice.
-Meister Eckhart
Count your blessings, every one of them. Count and relish all your big and small blessings. You know that great feeling of contemplating what you're thankful for on Thanksgiving (in the U.S.), or of praising God during other Holidays? Well, thanking God is free, and not limited to any country or to any particular day of the year.
Make every day Thanksgiving Day. When you wake up in the morning, open your eyes and thank God for whatever you see before you. As you step into each moment, allow your heart to leap with "Thank you God." Gratitude is the inner blessing that also waters all our flowers of outer blessings.
One reason many don't recognize or appreciate their blessings is because we human beings have certain engrained psychological tendencies toward comparison and relativity. These tendencies seem to be inherent in the wiring of our brains. Many of us have a tendency to judge what we have by comparing it with what others have -- most often with those who have more than we do. We get stuck in comparing this with that, me with you, him with her, this job with that job, this car with that car, this career with that one, and this family with that family. I'm sure that every unique person has his or her own list of comparison-minded tendencies.
By observing children, we can see that this tendency can enter the picture quite early, as these young ones clamor and cry to get a toy just because another child has one. The good news is that our tendencies toward comparison and jealousy can be healed and replaced, at least to a great degree, with other qualities from the palette of human colors - such as freedom, service, inner strength, gratitude, generosity, and profound contentment. One of the best steps we can take toward freeing ourselves from these comparison-based causes of unhappiness is to always count our blessings.
Learn to focus on your blessings, regardless of whether others have more or less than you. If you want to turn around a habit of comparing yourself to those who have more than you do, you may want to start by first comparing yourself to those who have less than you do. This can help bring you into a greater sense of gratitude and peacefulness about your own lot. Then you can eventually move into a view of life that stops comparing altogether, and simply be grateful as a natural way of life.
Imagine that your entire life is a big, personally designed, packaged gift from God. Maybe you have a lot of fun toys in your gift, or maybe some bits of challenging coal here and there. Maybe the percentages of toys to coal really do depend on whether you've been naughty or nice in the past, or perhaps it's just the luck of the draw. Maybe some items that appear as lumps of coal are really the best gifts, and vice versa.
Regardless of how many blessings you are able to count in your life, the truth is that if you are able to read or hear this book, then you already have much to be thankful for. If you have education, along with freedom of thought, speech, and religion, if you have shelter and enough food to eat for the next several days, then you are far more blessed than many who live right here, on our planet, today.
Regardless of all that we have, unless we find independent contentment inside ourselves, we may discover that more and more outer blessings will never be enough. Without steady gratitude and contentment, we may receive one outer blessing, then as soon as the excitement of that wears off, we'll need to create yet another blast of relative happiness, again and again.
People can become hooked on this cycle to the point where the ante of outer pleasures has to continuously be upped just to achieve a few small morsels of peace and contentment. Like a drug, they may need more and more dosage of outer blessings just to get the same, temporary experience of happiness. Gratitude, on the other hand, releases an ever-fresh stream of unending contentment and spiritual happiness.
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