Reiki Principle Number 4 - Just for Today I will Live a Life Filled with Gratitude.

The art of gratitude starts by recognizing everything that we have which may include material possessions, health, support from love ones and memories. Some of us are even grateful for blessings already on the way acknowledging and trusting the unknown circumstances that will continue to shape our lives and ourselves.

It is each of us who understands their place in the world. No matter how much someone expresses their pain or happiness no one else will truly understand it. We own the path that is to be lived by each of us and no matter what has happened or what our present situation is like it is only each of us strong and capable of experiencing our situation.  When we see and express challenges in our daily life in a negative way, we bring awareness of everything that goes wrong and others eventually learn to see us as unhappy. As we fall into the tendency of complaining, we feel tired much easier because the heaviness of our problems increases when we pay our undivided attention to them. By considering the goods that challenge bring into our experience we learn to appreciate our personality. With the word appreciation what I mean is that we add more to what we are and so we benefit the world with our enhanced talents and skills. 

The fourth Reiki principle teaches to be grateful for what life brings and that includes challenge because it is through challenge that we shape our identity.   

Let’s take the game Monopoly or the Game of life as an example. Would this game be fun if you start the game with all the money and the success? What would be the point of playing the game? It is by losing and winning that the game becomes exciting and that is the reason why one will decide to play the game. 

 

Winning gives you satisfaction and losing gives you experience and that is what makes one prosperous.  Life offers you everything you need to be successful in your individual path.

One can practice the act of gratitude by witnessing the present moment and say ‘for the next hour I will look at the good in everything I encounter even if it is just a little detail’ You may meet someone whom feels unpleasant to you but you may focus your awareness on something nice about them like their voice, their writing their clothing. 

As you practice gratitude the energy that forms with every meeting will be different until one day you will be able to recognize worth in everyone’s presence. Little by little you can extend the time to witness the present moment to two hours and so forth. As you get used to be grateful you will experience life at ease not because you don’t come across challenge but because you look at it with gratitude and learn to have fun with it.