Watch time - 15 minutes
This beautifully simple and inspiring Ted-Talk by the most gentle man, David Steinl-Rast, on the power of gratefulness to transform your life and the world we live in through non-violent revolution.
Precis:
The most basic and shared human goal is the quest for happiness - all of us want to be happy – we might have different visions of what that looks like and how we achieve it, but it is the common pursuit of man since time began.
David’s message is simple and invites us to shift our thinking from feeling, if we’re happy we’ll be grateful, to the simple tenet that Gratefulness creates Happiness. This simple shift puts us in control. Our happiness is not dependent on external factors and the mindless pursuit of external things. We become masters of every moment of every day, once we learn to practise gratitude and survey our blessings.
He offers the simple formula: Stop – Look – Go! Inviting us to build pauses into our daily hectic lives to appreciate simple pleasures. A few highlights:
· Grateful living – every moment is a gift and the gift within the gift is the opportunity. Since every moment is a gift, opportunity doesn’t knock just once, it comes time after time if we can slow down and pause.
· The master key to our own happiness is in our own hands
· We cannot be grateful for everything - loss, unfaithfulness, bereavement, war, violence etc. – but we can rise to the occasion and the opportunity that is given to us to grow, learn, understand something deep within ourselves.
· Difficult things happen, forcing us to stop – what lies in that opportunity - learn something which is painful – peace / compassion / stand up for conviction
· Living Gratefully – moment by moment
· Stop – look – Go – if we don’t stop – we miss opportunity – we have to build stop signs into our lives. Open our eyes / ears / nose / senses / richness of our lives / inspiration / creativity.
· And MOST powerful, if you’re grateful, you’re not fearful or envious of others; we are acting out of a sense of enoughness / not scarcity. This leads to mutual respect and the concept of non-violent revolution
A grateful world = a joyful and happy world => Opportunity to transform the world
My personal experience:
My life has transformed over the past two years through learning the practise of gratitude. I journal every morning for a couple of minutes (five to ten highly valuable minutes which sets me up for the day). I consider three things I am grateful for – small and big – from the birds singing outside my window to the incredible awe of my three beautiful healthy children, who give me such joy, as well as pain. But most powerfully, I am grateful for just being- the gift of life, knowing each day is special and unique and will not come again. I stop throughout my day and consciously give thanks for the smallest of things. I practise Awe when I am out walking. This simple focus has shifted my thinking radically and leaves little space to indulge in negative rumination and feelings of ill-will towards others. I cannot express how profoundly I have been impacted by this and
the sense of power and control I now have over everything I do. When we come from a place of “enoughness”, abundance follows.
© Jackie Wade 2021
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