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Daily Gratitude Make sure to stop in here and share what you are grateful/thankful for today. No matter how bad our day is, there is always something to be thankful for. |
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Join Date: Aug 2013
Posts: 72,744
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YOUR ATTITUDE OF GRATITUDE
Nobel laureate, Hans Seyle, spent his life studying the effects of stress on human physiology. He reported that the attitude of "vengeance" had the most stressful impact on the human body. He also declared that "gratitude" was the least stressful emotion anyone could experience. If you strengthened your level of gratitude, you'd lower your stress level...something each of us could well afford to do. Sachiko Mirata, a scholar of Islam, calls gratitude the first character trait that people owe Allah. He writes, "Ingratitude is to shut our eyes to the obvious." When we open our eyes to all that is around us, and we contemplate all with a grateful heart, then even the common articles made for daily use become endowed with beauty. To paraphrase George Washington Carver, "when you love [appreciate] it enough, anything will talk with you." How can your daily actions display your growing gratitude? Here are some helpful hints. ---Express your thankfulness by doing the necessary, but menial tasks around your home, so that other family members don't have to do them. Become like the Franciscan, Brother Lawrence when he prayed, "Lord, make me a saint through my washing the pots and pans." ---Make the words, "Thank you for..." a habitual part of your working vocabulary. Kahlil Gibran once wrote, "I have learned silence from the talkative, tolerance from the intolerant and kindness from the unkind. I should not be ungrateful to those teachers." The medieval Christian mystic Meister Eckhart suggests that if the only prayer we say in our lifetime is "thank you," that would suffice ---Learn to appreciate who you are. Another Nobel Prize winner, Albert Schweitzer cautions that "Your soul suffers if you live superficially and ungratefully." ---Regard all things, all events, all living beings with gratefulness. Take, for example a pencil, a dish, anything, and hold it before you in both hands. Regard it for a while. Forgetting its use and name, continue to regard it with appreciation. Ask yourself seriously, "What is it really?" Joseph Campbell writes that when you do this, "Its dimension of wonder opens; for the mystery of the being of that being is identical with the mystery of the being of the universe---and yourself." ---Gratitude paid to all around us becomes a spiritual exercise. Daily, show your gratitude to the music that enchants you, to your shoes that protect your feet form the wear and tear of the elements of the earth, to the movie that brings tears to your eyes and joy to your heart, to the warmth of the sun upon which all life depends. Finally, strengthen your gratitude for the relationships you have with everyone around you. Appreciate how people have touched your life, however briefly. The value of personal relationships to other living beings creates intimacy. Intimacy creates understanding. Understanding creates love. And love after all, is that for which we need to be most grateful. Take your life for grateful, not for granted, and you may indeed find joy in your being alive. "A good time is a taste of Gratefulness.." By Lloyd J. Thomas, Ph.D.
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![]() "No matter what you have done up to this moment, you get 24 brand-new hours to spend every single day." --Brian Tracy
AA gives us an opportunity to recreate ourselves, with God's help, one day at a time. --Rufus K. When you get to the end of your rope, tie a knot and hang on. --Franklin D. Roosevelt We stay sober and clean together - one day at a time! God says that each of us is worth loving. |
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