Welcome to my blog! This is my first entry into writing about some ideas that have been important to me over the years. As a retired psychotherapist and university teacher, I have had the opportunity over the years of listening to the stories of many people about all sorts of topics. I would like to share some of these with you. My areas of interests in my teaching and writing has been the connection between psychology and spirituality. And so, generally speaking, my blogs will try to address these with you. Finally, I would certainly like to invite you to respond to my writing with your own ideas, so that we might help each other grow spiritually and psychologically.
“NOTHING TAKEN FOR GRANTED; EVERYTHING RECEIVED WITH GRATITUDE; EVERYTHING PASSED ON WITH GRACE”
G.K. Chesterton
One of our neighbors has a sticker on the back of their car that says choose to be grateful. As I pass by this car every day walking our dog, Sadie, it is a constant reminder to me of how important gratitude is in our lives. But gratitude can be difficult to cultivate. It’s not that we are ungrateful. I think most people want to be grateful. But how do we cultivate an “attitude of gratitude?” How do we develop a grateful heart, where we are not simply grateful for one thing or another, but find that our entire life is permeated with gratitude?
It’s interesting to see that gratitude was clearly important to Jesus. Remember the well known story of Jesus curing the ten lepers in chapter 17 of Luke’s Gospel? But only one comes back to thank Him. It seems as though we are not the only ones who struggle with gratitude. In some ways, it seems hard to believe that all the lepers who had been cured would not have come back to thank the Lord. In the time of Jesus, leprosy was such a dreaded disease with so many social implications. To not come back and say “thanks” is almost unthinkable! And you can almost hear the disappointment in the words of Jesus, “were not all ten made clean? The other nine, where are they?”
The well known English writer G.K. Chesterton once wrote: “Nothing taken for granted; everything received with gratitude; everything passed on with grace.” So, how can we receive everything with gratitude so that each of us can pass it on with grace in our own way? This is what I mean by cultivating a grateful heart.
It seems to me that growing in a life of gratitude and cultivating a grateful heart requires us to deepen our awareness of life. For most of us, this is not easy. It requires work. But the effort we put into this endeavor can bear tremendous fruit. There are numerous practical ways of doing this. One of the ways I have found helpful over the years is to suggest to people that they review the events of their day for fifteen minutes every evening, asking themselves three questions and writing down the answers to these questions in a journal. The three questions are: 1) what surprised me today? 2) What moved me or touched me today? 3) What inspired me today? Often, these are busy people, and I tell them that they do not need to write a great deal; the key thing is in reliving their day from a new perspective and not the amount that they write about it. Naturally, people have varying degrees of success with this process. But if they stay with it, I have seen it have a tremendous impact on a person’s life. It will deepen their awareness of life, and lead to cultivating a grateful heart where you begin to see everything as a gift.
Most of us lead far more meaningful lives than we know. Often, finding meaning and cultivating a grateful heart is not about doing things differently. It’s about seeing familiar things in new ways. It’s about changing our attitudes. When we find new eyes, the unsuspected blessing in our work that we have done for many years may take us completely by surprise. We will then find ourselves growing in a life of gratitude. We can see life in many ways: with our eyes, with our mind, with our intuition. But perhaps it is only those who have remembered how to see with the heart, that life is ever deeply known or served.
I hope that you have a wonderful Thanksgiving!!
–Peter
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