World gratitude day
World Gratitude Day was conceived at a Thanksgiving Dinner at the UN in 1965 by spiritual leader Sri Chinmoy. He states that: ‘The ideal of World Gratitude Day is to give people the opportunity to offer personal gratitude, but also to remember gratitude is an essential emotion that should be universally shared.’ The day was first recognised as an annual observance in 1977 and intended to be ‘a day of celebration for all humanity, united by knowledge of simultaneously shared emotion, a day when triumph of the spirit can make a world community’.
Gratitude is one of the ultimate counterbalances to negativity. Whilst we may be motivated by bad things we want to change, gratitude is about the good things we want to protect.
Gratitude is a great guide for showing us a positive vision of what the world could be like. We live in a world obsessed with what Buddhist’s would call ‘grasping’ or ‘attachment - e.g. needing constant gratification, over-consumption and over-expansion. Contrary to this, gratitude helps to slow us down, it focuses us on what really matters, and helps us to enjoy the little things in life.
A beautiful point I often use in my treatments is called Spirit Deficiency. I use it when a patient can’t access their own positive thinking and it lifts a person’s spirits. In conjunction with this, I ask them to write a gratitude list and this combination can bring about a real change in perspective resulting in healing on many levels.
““The more you practice the art of thankfulness, the more you have to be thankful for.” ”