By Christelle Chopard
With the New Year upon us, we have an opportunity to adopt gratitude as a state of being, broadening our perspective to explore it in our everyday lives through expanded consciousness. When we are thankful, we feel a vibration of relief and nurturing energy. Gratitude allows us to receive and then embrace our experiences.
We can receive food. However, we receive more nourishment when we take it in with gratitude. If we receive many gifts but take them for granted, we will feel lack and emptiness regardless of how much we are given. When we receive even just a little and fully appreciate it, a sense of fulfillment and contentment awakens.
There are many aspects of daily life that can be easily taken for granted: the air we breathe, the food we eat, even our long-term love partner and close family members. Why do we notice how much these people mean to us only when they are not with us anymore?
I invite you to practice gratitude for all that you have, especially those closest to your heart and most intimate with your day-to-day existence.
Gratitude is liberating. It is the key to helping us release our negative cycles of repetition. If we cannot be thankful for our past experiences, we may live with resentment. All that we do not appreciate from our past is part of our reality today. Our past influences us karmically as long as we haven’t acknowledged it and completed the cycles to move on with integrity.
When we face our shadow side with gratitude, we release a field of resistance that can cause constant stress and struggle within and around us. Fears and stress vanish, giving us more space within ourselves for harmony and contentment. We can then accept that our shadow, or ego, may have been the only tool we knew how to use. Maybe our ego served us at different times in our lives and, if so, we need to recognize it to grow beyond a self-centered perspective.
Observe if you can be thankful to this part of yourself, the aspect that has been triggered over and over again. Acknowledge any core beliefs or behaviors that your ego or shadow has been grasping onto. Open to the idea that your ego has tried to do its best, even if it is not as helpful for you now. Through acceptance, you have the opportunity to transcend and navigate through life with wisdom and grace.
Make 2013 the year in which you add a practice of gratitude to your daily routine. It will have a healing and nurturing effect on your entire being.
Through gratitude you make peace with who you are, so that you can flow with more ease and confidence.
Christelle Chopard is the founder of the Map of Transcendence and director of the DHARMI Institute (www.dharmi.com). She is also a member of the International Coaching Federation (ICF), and provides a CCEU Program accredited by ICF. She founded the DHARMI-Yoga School (RYS_200), which is accredited by Yoga Alliance; and trains Yoga Teachers (RYT_200) and DHARMI Mentors internationally. She can be reached at 786-529-5588 or email info@dharmi.com.