Gratitude

The classic example is of a preacher who began his prayer with an expression of gratitude. It was a cold and rainy day. When asked to explain his ill timed comment he explained that days were always not like today.If you prepare a list you will find hundreds of things for which you have to be grateful.This leaves a contented and happy feeling.

 

Totally agree. Your emotions can be understood well by anyone who has come across such experiences. Like I had posted in an earlier thread, ' Do You Feel Happy? it is with gratitude I am happy feel blessed to be even writing this post this minute. But it is only or mostly when one comes up from an abyss of negative issues we feel more grateful for all the things we have, which normally taken for granted. I think nature takes care of that periodically with everyone.
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@Abivenu,

What a wonderful snippet this is! Your words of wisdom are profound and can have a significant impact in everyone's life. I always consider it is a magic of how our body works. I divide our mind into 3 categories such as Conscious Mind, Subconscious Mind, and Unconscious Mind. Conscious Mind is the one that process information we receive through our senses and convert that into temporary understanding of the world. This memory is short-term as it deals with only unreal things. Subconscious Mind is one that has incredible insight into where we need to go and anything that we store in that will create a roadmap for our future. Affirmations that we tell to ourselves are one of them even if it is a simple thing like, "I am happy". Unconscious Mind is what I call as operating system of our body and mind which includes automated things in our system such as Breathing, Blood-circulation, Cells remaking itself non-stop, Immune system, Reflex, non-stop functioning of our organs, etc. They are not consciously operated by our mind in real world and they are autonomous and I call that as Unconscious Mind and in spiritual parlance known as Consciousness or Atma or Spirit. It is a class of its own to function flawlessly as long as we live in this world.

Imagine of each one of us are able to tap into this Unconscious Mind every minute of our lives, how well we can function in our day to day life. This is possible when we go into deep meditation merging ourselves into our breathing, when we remain in the present moment for a prolonged period of time basking in the beauty of this planet whether by walking through trees that are 2000 years old or watching the ocean and the horizon where the sky meets the planet. This expands our Consciousness into something that is not confined to ourselves.

Knowing all these things, how can we not be grateful? In my view, Gratitude, Acceptance, and Prayer ("GAP") are three important elements of our lives. A man who is drowning in the body of water cries for help and similarly, the mind that has disproportionate thought beyond a certain level, it cries for help and that is colloquially called as "depression". If we need a cure for something, we need to understand the problem better. When the mind gets infected by a troubling thought, it loses its capacity to analyze the problem. Acceptance let this thought go quickly or heal the brain to handle it better. Lastly, the prayer is a constant effort to be grateful for everything we have to the souce of everything we are.

Gratitude, Acceptance, and Prayer together make the life beautiful. I will stop here as my response is becoming too large.

 

That is a very helpful snippet.
The basic question we should ask ourselves is, what makes us restless and desperate? I think we expect a lot from others. We also ignore others if we do not like them for whatever reason. The basic reason for this is that we are judgemental. The moment we stop being judgemental, we will stop expecting from others and ignoring others.
We will feel gratitude only when we do this.

 

So I can vouch for the fact that vedanta is the 'shrink' for such people, since it advocates that we are puranaha, do not lack anything and we dont have to., so likes & dislikes etc...Sw. Dayananda used to joke, '.....they go to this doctor, that psychiatrist and then goes to a swamiji..."