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Gratitude, part 2 of 3


Robyn Openshaw - Nov 23, 2010 - This Post May Contain Affiliate Links


From Liz Gilbert’s book, Eat Pray Love:

“I keep remembering one of my Guru’s teachings about happiness. She says that people universally tend to think that happiness is a stroke of luck, something that will maybe descend upon you like fine weather if you’re fortunate enough. But that’s not how happiness works.

“Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings. And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it, you must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it. If you don’t, you will leak away your innate contentment. It’s easy enough to pray when you’re in distress but continuing to pray even when your crisis has passed is like a sealing process, helping your soul hold tight to its good attainments.” (p. 260)

And this:

“The Yogis . . . say that human discontentment is a simple case of mistaken identity. We’re miserable because we think that we are mere individuals, alone with our fears and flaws and resentments and mortality. We wrongly believe that our limited little egos constitute our whole entire nature. We have failed to recognize our deeper divine character. We don’t realize that, somewhere within us all, there does exists a supreme Self who is eternally at peace. That supreme Self is our true identity, universal and divine. Before you realize this truth, say the Yogis, you will always be in despair, a notion nicely expressed in this exasperated line from the Greek stoic philosopher Epictetus: ‘You bear God within you, poor wretch, and know it not.'” (p. 122)

I hope you don’t mind my diverting off the path of talking about good nutrition, to talking about living an examined life of gratitude. To me, it’s all connected.

But tomorrow, a personal story about miracles and good food.

Posted in: Mind/Body Connection

2 thoughts on “Gratitude, part 2 of 3”

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  1. Oh thanks Robyn you have no idea how much I needed to read that today!!!!! We all have divinity within us, may we never forget it!

  2. Anonymous says:

    Hi Robyn,

    You have no idea how timely this is for me too. My too girls are having happiness issues and even though I have told them that happiness comes from within and it’s a choice that you make every morning when you wake up to be happy or miserable I can’t get thru to them. This says it so eloquently where my words have failed. Thank you so much for sharing this with us today. It was the perfect way for me to start my morning and I have sent it to both my girls. Hopefully, this message will help them change there thinking too.

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