Gratitude is a transformational virtue that can bring GOOD even out of BAD.

10 min read


Life is hard and, no matter how much we try to make it simple and beautiful, it can bring forth many of its complex and ugly realities all around, which can just shatter all our lifelong hopes in a moment.

We all go through different sets of good and bad situations in our life. Based on our capacity, we try to handle them as much as possible. But sometimes we may encounter few tragic situations which can be so bad that all the knowledge, intelligence, and resources that we have may seem utterly insignificant even to comprehend such situations, and resolving them seems like a far-fetched reality. Consequently, our mind sinks into a darkness that can make our life appear empty and meaningless. Further, unavoidable resentment seeps into our consciousness and we practically find ourselves helpless and disempowered to the core.

Resentment is, often, such a state wherein our minds blind us by magnifying all our troubles and tribulations in a concentrated form; so much so that we simply forget all the good that we have had in our lives and all the good opportunities that can be a part of our life in future. The reality is that resentment has never done any significant good to anyone, and yet we so easily and subconsciously become its slaves.

Gratitude is something that can release us from the slavery of resentment. Unlike resentment, gratitude is a conscious effort to see the good even in an all-bad situation. Resentment makes us count all the wrong and bad things in our lives, whereas gratitude enables us to recognize the right and good ones in it.

Chaitanya Charan Das says “Even if we can’t be grateful for all situations, we can be grateful in all situations”.

In general, we all practice gratitude very selectively. When things go well and we have achieved a substantial amount of success, we express our gratitude to some of those who had been instrumental in the journey of our success. Very often, on a personal level, gratitude is underrated in our life. We don’t feel the need to be grateful because we hardly see anyone being grateful to us. Somehow, we give least importance to gratitude; that is why most of the time we forget to feel grateful and thus succumb to the reversals of life.

If at all we want to be aloof from resentment, gratitude should be a constant companion of our life. We should not wait for significant blessings to take place in our lives to be grateful but we should start being grateful for all the good that has already happened, or is happening, in our life.

For many of us, being grateful may seem like it would require a special effort or sometimes an impossible effort because we are too busy focusing on what we don’t have in our life. Let’s think as to why we can’t focus on “what we have”. This creates a kind of stress on our minds that makes us to, gradually, get convinced that we lack too much in our lives, and we start believing that to live happily we must earn more, buy more, and consume more.  Thus, in the irresistible chase for accumulating what we don’t have, we leave ourselves with very little or no space to absorb the priceless blessings that we already have in our life.

If we are sincerely seeking real happiness then, along with our aspirations and endeavors, we also have to cultivate the habit of being grateful in all situations. There can be many methodologies to transform ourselves into a person with an attitude of gratitude. However, for starters, let’s consider the following points as the basis for cultivating a grateful attitude.

Enriching through horizontal awareness: Gratitude cannot be just sentimental; it needs a real impetus to be felt. Thus, facts and figures serve greatly in creating a constructive impetus to feel grateful. Let us some statistics/facts* and try to relate with them.

Photo by Gayatri Malhotra on Unsplash
  • If you woke up today with no pain, you are luckier than the millions who live with chronic disease and pain.
  • If you have never known the dangers of war, the loneliness of prison, then you are better off than over 500 million people in the world.
  • If you have enough food on your table then you are far fortunate than around 821 million people who do not have enough of the food they need to live an active and healthy life. One in every nine people goes to bed hungry each night.
  • If your basic needs are covered, you must know that almost half the world’s population (3.4 billion people) are still struggling to meet basic needs. Thus, you are richer than 50% of the rest of the world.
  • If you have some savings, then you are among the top 10% prosperous people in the world.
  • If you can read this, then you are blessed. Globally the number of people of all ages visually impaired is estimated to be 285 million, of whom 39 million are blind.

*(statistics and facts based on WHO and word bank, etc.).

When we expand our awareness by looking at the condition of millions of others, it will become easy to realize how blessed we are in comparison to them and, thus, we get a natural tendency to feel grateful.

  • Enlightening through vertical awareness: Comparing ourselves with other human beings around us, especially those who are less fortunate than us, may initiate and sustain our gratefulness for a while. But to deepen our gratitude we must enlighten ourselves by living a God-Conscious life. If not, we will miss the opportunity to understand the essence of our material and spiritual existence in a profound way. To learn more, we must take shelter of the ancient Vedic scriptures. Let us consider three very important verses from one of such ancient scriptures, the Bhagavad Gita, in which Lord Krishna addresses his friend and disciple, Arjuna, to dispel his ignorance and illuminates him with transcendental wisdom. To appreciate the meaning of these verses, let us consider their translations as given by one of the visionary spiritual leaders’ Sri A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupāda.

यदादित्यगतं तेजो जगद्भ‍ासयतेऽखिलम् ।
यच्च‍न्द्रमसि यच्च‍ाग्न‍ौ तत्तेजो विद्धि मामकम् ॥ BG.15.12 ॥

yad āditya-gataṁ tejo, jagad bhāsayate ’khilam
yac candramasi yac cāgnau, tat tejo viddhi māmakam

Translation: The splendor of the sun, which dissipates the darkness of this whole world, comes from Me. And the splendor of the moon and the splendor of fire are also from Me.

अहं वैश्वानरो भूत्वा प्राणिनां देहमाश्रित: ।
प्राणापानसमायुक्त: पचाम्यन्नं चतुर्विधम् ॥ BG 15.14 ॥

ahaṁ vaiśvānaro bhūtvā, prāṇināṁ deham āśritaḥ
prāṇāpāna-samāyuktaḥ, pacāmy annaṁ catur-vidham

Translation: I am the fire of digestion in the bodies of all living entities, and I join with the air of life, outgoing and incoming, to digest the four kinds of foodstuff.

सर्वस्य चाहं हृदि सन्निविष्टो, मत्त: स्मृतिर्ज्ञानमपोहनं च ।
वेदैश्च सर्वैरहमेव वेद्यो, वेदान्तकृद्वेदविदेव चाहम् ॥ BG 15.15॥

sarvasya cāhaṁ hṛdi sanniviṣṭo, mattaḥ smṛtir jñānam apohanaṁ ca
vedaiś ca sarvair aham eva vedyo, vedānta-kṛd veda-vid eva cāham

Translation: I am seated in everyone’s heart, and from Me come remembrance, knowledge, and forgetfulness. By all the Vedas, I am to be known. Indeed, I am the compiler of Vedānta, and I am the knower of the Vedas.

There is a lot that can be learned from the above three verses, however by keeping the context of gratitude let us ask ourselves the following questions to cultivate the mood of gratitude.

  • How often do we feel grateful for getting the sunlight, moonlight, and fire which are most essential for our functioning in the world?
  • How often do we feel grateful for getting the food on our table and getting it digested without our conscious efforts?
  • How often do we feel grateful for getting the knowledge to conduct our life and remembrance so that we can retain the needed and save ourselves from repeating mistakes?
  • How often do we feel grateful for being able to forget the things that can hold us back from moving on in life?
  • How often do we feel grateful for the intuition/higher guidance that we get in making better choices in our life?

The vertical awareness is about consciously remembering that “we don’t produce the air that we breathe, we didn’t create the earth that we are living on, we don’t alone produce the food that we eat and we literally cannot and do not function independently even for a fraction of a moment”.

Once we are aware of this, gradually we can realize that “yes, there are many things which are not right in my life but still there are millions of things which are going well in it, and I must be immensely grateful to God for all that”.

If we get too absorbed in our problems without being aware of all such fundamental truths then our mind will make us take all our blessings for granted, and gives us little or no space for gratitude.

Cultivation of gratitude is not a small-time public campaign; rather, it is an everyday personal activity which is to be done as aggressively as possible. It is something like swimming against the current because the world outside is super-aggressive to suppress all our gratitude. If we make sincere efforts, then very soon we will experience that gratitude empowers us to deal with our problems. It can eradicate immature feelings such as worry and scarcity and instill the mature ones such as fulfillment and abundance. Thus, eventually we can find ourselves capable to bring out good even out of the bad situations that we face in our life.

Thank you.

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Author

Sriharsh Vaidya

(Pranic Psychotherapist and Licensed Practitioner of NLP)


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One Comment

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  1. Amazing… I think I should read this often inorder to make it a practice of being grateful in all situations. It is very easy to complain but tough to be grateful with whatever we have. You have put a light on very small things which will help a person to understand what exactly he/she needs to do to show gratitude.
    All your writings are so amazing. Thank you !!!