Being Grateful Under Trying Circumstances
In my last post I spoke about gratitude and I had a comment from a reader that "Sometimes it is so hard to feel grateful when things seem to be going wrong!"
I agree but would like to add that "It is exactly when things seem to be going wrong that we need to exercise our gratitude muscles!" To illustrate what I mean, let’s imagine the following worst-case scenario of a thirty-year-old male named Alex. (This story is excerpted from my book Daily Happy Living.)
Alex's Worst Day
Alex has just arrived at his office late after struggling through one of the worst traffic jams. When he gets to his desk he sees the pink slip that says he has been retrenched!
He also receives a notice saying his car will be repossessed within fourteen days. Then there is a call from his credit card company politely reminding him that he is behind in the monthly payment.
He checks his e-mails, and there is a “Dear John” letter waiting from his longtime girlfriend, announcing that she is breaking up with him! What a day!
Now if at that time I were to tell Alex to count his blessings, he would be excused for trying to strangle me! After he calms down, I would say to him:
“Alex, I know you have had a lousy day. But think about this for a minute. You can hear me when I talk, can’t you? (You are not deaf.) You can see me. (You are not blind.) You can walk over to me and try to strangle me. (You are not crippled). Your mental faculties are intact, and you are also healthy, aren’t you? So you are so much better off than the millions of people who are not as lucky as you!
"Therfore, you do have so much to be grateful for. But because you are now totally focussed on your problems, you feel life is intolerable!
“For all you know this retrenchment might be a fabulous chance for you to go after your dreams rather than struggle daily in a frustrating job. In a couple of months you would have settled all your outstanding bills and be looking forward to life! Perhaps you will meet your soul mate now that you are free of your old girlfriend.
“But all these can only happen if you are in a happy frame of mind. If you are in a dejected or depressed state and go about with a black cloud hanging over your head, you will not be able to see or grasp any new opportunities that can come up!
“Worrying and complaining will only make you feel worse, and you will attract a miserable future as a self-fulfilling prophecy! So when things seem to be at their worst, that is often the best time to start thinking of things to be grateful for.”Feeling gratitude for things that you do have and enjoy is one of the best ways to feel happy. It is when we focus only on the negatives in our life that we become unhappy. Often I am shocked to read that a student had committed suicide just because she did poorly in a school exam!
She could not focus on all the good that was in her life - like loving parents, siblings and friends. She forgot that life is much more than passing or failing exams. In life there was so much more to be experienced, so many more accomplishments to be made! She did not know how to count her blessings.
Counting Our Blessings:
All of us are trained from childhood to look out for faults, for what is wrong in people, what is wrong in the world etc. We do not know how to count our blesings, to see what is going right with us, right now.
If you think about it, we in Malaysia have so much to be thankful for compared to so many other places in the world. As a country we are blessed - we are spared the hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis and so on. Of course we do have some floods (mostly flash-floods caused by our drains suffocating with the rubbish we throw so casually) - but nothing like those terrible floods experienced in nearby countries.
We have great infrastructure, we don't have regular cuts in electricity, and have reasonably clean running water in our pipes. Our medical facilities are great and our people are sensible when it comes to cooperating with the government measures on Covid 19 containment. This is why we are able to contain the Coronovirus from spreading like the plague as in other 'more-developed' countries. But we take all these for granted!
Similarly in our own person, we take all our working faculties for granted. It is only when we lose some of our faculties that we begin to appreciate it. I too am guilty of taking things for granted.
When I was working as a Technical Writer for nearly 20 years, I spent hours on the computer writing up thousands of pages of Operating and Maintenance Procedures for power plants. I never appreciated all the help my eyes were givng me, until about two years ago when cataracts caused me to have my eyes operated on.
Nowadays I am grateful to my eyes if I can sit even for an hour or two at the computer without feeling eyestrain!
I remember another occasion several years ago when I had a fall in the bathroom, hit my head and landed up in the ICU with vertigo. I could not move my head without feeling the whole room spinning around.
Effect of Vertigo
I was told that when I hit my head it had affected my inner-ear balancing or 'vestibular system' which caused me to have vertigo.
For more than sixty years I had been taking my ears for granted without realizing just how vital they were in helping me keep my balance. I had never given it a thought, until I had problems with it.
I am now grateful that I had to spend 5 days in ICU, without which I would have never learned to appreciate my body. During those 5 days I needed the help of nurses to lie down, to sit up, to eat, and to get up, etc. One day I felt cramps in my feet as the airconditioner was very cold and the nurses kindly brought me a couple of blankets to cover them.
I remember thinking then: "During my lifetime, these feet have taken me over thousands of miles, and helped me climb so many steps - perhaps several times the height of Mount Everest, and yet I have never felt thankful to them even once!"
Only then did I realize what a wonderful job my body has been doing all these years without any thanks from me. Now I have learned to feel grateful for everything that my body does for me, without waiting for something to go wrong first.
So for those who say it is hard to feel grateful, I say: "For a start, look to your own body and see how much you have to be thankful for!"
One easy way to practice gratitude is to take time every day to think of the all the ways our body is taking care of us - without any fuss, without any expectation! Don't wait until you lose some of your bodily functions before you decide to be grateful.
Also, it is even more important to feel grateful to your family and friends and to show some appreciation for their being in your life now! This is another thing I am guilty of - not being demonstratively affectionate to family and not keeping in touch with friends, only to regret after they are gone!
Feeling gratitude for our body is okay because it keeps us from complaining. But taking the time and trouble to show appreciation to people warms our heart and theirs as well. Just try it. Today call up an old friend you have been meaning to contact but kept putting off, and see how elated you and your friend feel.
Gratitude and Manifesting:
Why am I spending so much time talking about 'gratitude' when I was supposed to talk about Manifesting Prayer? Because gratitude leads to being able to manifest easier.
In fact, gratitude is the first step to feeling happy in spite of challenging circumstances. And learning how to respond reasonably using our mind rather than react inappropriately with our emotion is the First part of the Joycentrix Way to being Happy.
Once we are able to respond correctly instead of reacting blindly to circumstances, then we can go to the second part of the Joycentrix Way. The Second part shows how we can use our mind (together with the Universal Mind) to change our circumstances to what we prefer - in other words to manifest what we do want.
So, nowadays, this is how I go about with my prayers. I begin with the Gratitude Prayer which puts me in a happier mood and a higher vibration. This higher vibration helps me when I start my Manifesting Prayer to attract, thereby manifesting the circumstances I really want.
Since this post is already too long, I shall discuss my Manifesting Prayer in the next post.
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