Feeling Grateful

Hello everyone. Apologies for the disappearing act, a lot has gone on that I may one day explain, but not right now.

I wanted to write a post on gratitude, as I personally think that being grateful is something that us humans aren't very good at but that it is a vital part of growing as a person.
Don't get me wrong, it isn't always easy. I am as selfish as the next, and in many ways far more bitter and twisted. Recent realisations regarding how my upbringing has imposed severe limitations upon me that I had no say in, and have really contributed to a whole lot of f**k ups that I have commited, do not help in any attempts to fully appreciate what you have.

But to be truly grateful opens your eyes in so many ways. I follow the Buddhist viewpoint that life is essentially suffering, and that in order to live, we must suffer. It is not a bed of thornless roses,its bloody hard work, with a lot of blood, sweat and tears involved.
But it teaches you so much. To live with pain is to learn and love. If you sit with pain, if you talk with it and engage with it, learn to accept it, you no longer focus on it. Instead, rather than being this great big rock of resistence that you kick and pound until the blood runs in rivulets from your torn fists, it becomes lighter. It becomes part of you, it, this is really hard to explain....it sort of sinks into your body. You become one with it.

And if you can achieve this, even for just brief moments, you realise what else surrounds you apart from that pain. You feel joy at very simple things. The warmth of sun of your face, holding your lover's hand, the freedom of a bird singing with all its might from a tree top.
And you feel very grateful that these things exist.

Such gratitude bourn from pain opens your awareness, it allows you to engages more fully with your environment and also with other people. Your ability to empathise grows, and you are able to see far clearer what you have in front of you.
I have a number of blogs that I follow written by fellow daughters of narcissists. One poor soul has had a lot of drama to deal with recently, and she wrote a post detailing her memories of her treatment at the hands of her stepfather. Her situation was far worse than mine, my stepfather was a couple of scales down in the abusive ranks, and my situation today is also far preferable as my mother is simply indifferent to me now rather than using me for her narcissistic supply. Awful as this sounds, I felt very lucky to have had the upbringing that I have had, as this lady's story made it very clear just how much worse things could be.

I think this is something a lot of people fail to realise. Whilst it is true that the cup of suffering is not the same size for everybody, some people really do just whine when they have no right to. Things can always be an awful lot worse. By learning to be grateful, you can take what you have, however broken and tarnished, and turn it into someting beautiful, because you know that this world is full of light as well as dark.

This isn't a state that you can maintain all the time. I rail at the unfairness of it all far too often, but it is important to remember that we are not owed anything in this life. Life is what we make of it, and how can we live it to its fullest if we do not see and appreciate all that is around us. To find peace requires compassion and understanding of both ourselves and others, and I dont think that this can be acheived without gratitude. Gratitude makes us want to fully give of ourselves and interact with the world, it stops us from being insular and turning into ourselves. When we do this, and we dont like what we see, then the problems start.
We get entangled in our web of self loathing, and become bitter and hateful of those who we feel should be making it better. If we could all be a little more grateful, we would all feel a little lighter, and all be able to give a little bit of good back to the world as a result.