My Experiment With Gratitude

We live in a world where everyone is chasing some or the other thing in life. In this journey of moving from point A to B we act upon our emotions, needs, greed, aspirations and a lot of other things, in consequence, we produce joy, happiness, stress, sorrow, pressure, anger, peace, blame, gratitude and so on. When I was reading Vivekananda a few years ago, he mentioned somewhere in one of his speeches that instead of playing blame games we can take a pause and look inside to find the source of everything going out from us. This thought becomes dear to me when I was crossing boundaries and meeting people for personal development of mine by listening to their stories. Two years ago during a residential program, I have realized the power of gratitude, how it can create magic in the world we are dealing with! 

                     Since one and a half year, I am practising exercises of gratitude to which I become familiar while walking on the streets, reading books and having food with friends. Yes! Every life-long learning comes from these kinds of incidents. When I pushed myself to become more open and vulnerable, it dawned upon me that it requires a lot of patience and courage to hold and to be like this. My bag of questions was increasing in size as I was not knowing a lot of answers for a lot of questions but someone made me learn how to live the questions with total comfort! I am grateful for every entity who made me learn one or the other things by just being. 

As I have experienced while doing my gratitude practices when gratitude is being expressed it creates a space for deeper connection and also for becoming more vulnerable and trustworthy. It inculcates a feeling of humble when we speak it out and it also enables one to be courageous enough to face the other side of the scene which can be anything. I found it as a way to connect with people at a different level as it was capable enough to vanish all the negative aspects of mine with which I was operating to connect with a few people in life. Expression of gratitude brought me happiness, satisfaction and a deeper sense of reflection through which I become aware of those aspects of mine which are being ignored before that. 

7 months ago, I started writing gratitude letters to the people who are close to me by recalling the latest and happiest memories of them. I used to wake up in the morning and write this letter once a day, with time I realized that I was becoming lighter when I was accepting and expressing the gratitude because of such people in my life journey. When I was doing all these a lots of people with whom I lost connect, were returned and I was exploring the newness and the oldness in these relations at the same time.

I have written around 70 letters of gratitude in that span and it dawned upon me that if I continue this, may the days fall short but not the number of people in life. Eventually due to other work and things it stopped one day but this time of writing a letter a day, made me more sensible about me. I got to know one thing by expressing my gratitude to the person who made me learn, unlearn something or who was there for me whenever I sought or who made me feel blessed with her presence or in whatever way she was part of life journey; that when I express the gratitude I feel light, calm, peaceful, hopeful and last but not the least I feel grounded with all these feelings of mine. There are people who brought me to the ground whenever my feet were becoming distant from the ground, I am extremely grateful for all those people, who made me learnt the power of gratitude. 

I don’t know, what can be done with these kinds of things in this world but I am sure about one thing that these are changing me day by day and I am becoming freer than I was yesterday. Life for me opened like a gift-pack full of blessings with lovable people all around. I love reading one line which goes like this: whenever you are unable to know what is going just change the way of looking at it. People take birth, people live their lives and people dies but what is being left here from many years is their stories. I too will vanish soon to break my physical limits, in this beloved cosmos but I don’t know what will be my legacy for the years to come! I got to know the meaning of only three words in their fullest essence through this process called life and these words are LOVE, TRUST AND SURRENDER and I am grateful to the whole cosmos for supporting me and preparing me for this journey! Hey You! Who is reading this at this moment, go and write your story on your own, my story has nothing to tell you or make you learn, and it’s just life!

By - Kamlesh, Co-Founder - Mera Gaon Meri Dunia