Week Three: Gratitude for the World Around Us

Practicing gratitude for the world around us is to remember that life is sustained by reciprocity. Here are ways you can engage with the theme this week:

• Daily Journaling. Set aside a few minutes each day for your gratitude journal. You can stick to this week's theme, or just let the gratitude flow...

• What Becomes of Gratitude in a Transactional World? Gratitude isn’t an abstract virtue; it’s the balance that sustains life itself. What does it mean to bring gratitude, on an elemental level, back into our lives?

• This week's Guided Breathing and Meditation are to release tension and open to the grace of being alive.

• An Intentional Act of Gratitude. This week, we are collecting donations for SHARE Family and Community Services. Learn how you can take part.

• Videos for Gratitude Practice. Yoga practices, breathing and meditation to help connect to gratitude.

What Becomes of Gratitude in a Transactional World?

Gratitude has become marginalized in our world. Sometimes, a feel-good gesture, occasionally, an exercise in virtue, or even a reprimand to “be grateful!” But in ancient traditions, it’s understood that gratitude is essential to the continuity of life, to the balance of giving and receiving that sustains our world. What does it mean to bring gratitude, on an elemental level, back into our lives?

I’m not assuming you're an atheist, but our culture has generally moved away from directing gratitude at large towards higher or divine powers, at least systematically. We instead live in a transactional society. Payments, taxes, and quantifiable economics have replaced the practice of offering thanks. Our economy accounts for what can be measured, but not for what is received freely, sunlight, air, rain, the generosity of non-human lives on earth. In a world of ledgers and balances, gratitude is ineffable, and so it becomes a dispensable practice.

Yet gratitude is not a pleasantry; it is an acknowledgment of indebtedness. It says, I have received something of value that I did not directly earn. Embedded in many Indigenous traditions, gratitude was a binding force between human life and the natural world. To receive without thanks was to upset the order of things. Gratitude carried power and responsibility, to give back, to care, to sustain balance.

Where are we now? We take from the world as if it were without consequence, without ceremony. We pay a carbon tax, nominally plant a tree, and move on… but rarely do we bow our heads in reverence at what has been given.

With gratitude comes onus. To say thank you is to recognize the preciousness of what we receive, and to promise that it will not be squandered. Gratitude opens a relationship, one that obliges us to return care, to sustain the flow of giving.

Even the sun, the most constant of givers (we cannot give its energy back to it), but we can honour this gift by maintaining the balance that allows life to thrive under its light. Gratitude becomes a way of staying in “right relationship” with natural powers; in other words, to live with grace.

Thank you to the trees for breathing my waste.
Thank you to the insects and smallest forms of life for turning my refuse into nourishment.
Thank you to the rain for returning to feed the flow of life.
Thank you to the plants and animals that have given their lives so I can eat.
Thank you to the sun for everything.
Thank you to all beings who have come before, for stewarding the gift of life itself.

Bows,
Karen & Chris

Daily Journaling Prompts

Here are a few prompts to inspire gratitude journaling for the world around you. These reflections are an opportunity to notice what we receive and help us live in balance with the gifts that sustain us.

• Think of something you've received today from the world around you that you rarely pause to acknowledge. How can this reflection of gratitude support a healthier relationship to the natural world?
   
• Notice a simple, everyday element of your environment, a sound, a sight, a smell. Spend a few moments giving it your attention. Can gratitude begin simply by noticing more deeply?
   
• Consider how our modern systems (say money, laws, or technology) affect what you take for granted. Is there something in your daily life that you might reimagine not as a transaction but as a gift? What shifts in you when you do?