HOLISTIC - Gratitude

by Jamie Milne

“Wear gratitude like a cloak and it will feed every area of your life” ~ Rumi

Gratitude, appreciation, gratefulness are all synonyms of the wonderful state of mind and trait of what in behavioral science we like to call “objective reasoning”, where we stop and bring our perceptions back into balance and see both sides of things.

At its core, gratitude is a perfectly balanced equation.There are two types of appreciation or gratitude. There's superficial gratitude when people support what you want and it’s so easy to say, “thank you”.

Then there’s another type of gratitude when you actually see the hidden order and the balance of nature that is trying to keep you authentically you. You're grateful for the challenges, the adversity, the pain, the struggle, as you can see that there is something special on the other side of this.

It's far easier to be grateful when things are going your way though. It’s not as easy to go in and find something to be grateful for when you perceive that things are not going your way.

But if you take the time to go in and find it, and find the hidden order in the apparent chaos in your life, then that is taking gratitude to the deepest level, as the quality of your life is purely dependent on the quality of the questions you ask of yourself or others.

I’ve spent many years studying Psychology, Hypnotherapy, NLP, TLT, CBT, Behavioural Science and  many other fields, and there’s one thing that I've seen consistently and been taught, that there is a homeostatic mechanism or feedback mechanism designed to bring about homeostasis, to bring balance, the dichotomy of the universe (the synthesis of complementary opposites) - man/woman, dark/light, up/down, open/close, Yin/Yang, positive/negative.

These mechanisms inside our bodies, our intuition, our mind, and in all the events in our life, are all trying to get us to be authentic – in other words, where we have a balanced perspective of ourselves.

If we puff ourselves up with pride or put ourselves down in shame, we're not being ourselves, we are being subjective, and are at the mercy of viewing our world through a one-sided lens 

So, a daily gratitude mechanism helps us to get back into the centre, so we can appreciate and love ourselves, enhance our self worth, support our self image, and also be in a place where it's easier to appreciate and love other people.

Gratitude is a perfectly equilibrated mind where you see the balance, the calm in the storm, the lining of perfect sliver in the dark cloud and you realise there's nothing to change in you relative to others, nothing to change in others relative to you, and you are now just grateful for the fact that it is what it is.