Instead of being grateful, why not lean forward and engage your reality from a place of active appreciation?
TRANSCRIPTION:
So there’s no bad emotions. There’s no emotions you’re not supposed to feel. What I have observed is that there’s a lot of people get stuck on one particular word, one particular emotion, and that word is, gratitude. And I’m not suggesting that gratitude is a dirty word in personal development or spiritual growth. What I am suggesting is that, it’s my observation, there are so many people that use that word so conditionally and they use the word gratitude after something happens. So they want to get the raise, or they want to land the client, and then it happens, and then they say, “I’m so grateful.” Or they wake up in the morning and they look at all the things that they’ve been given, and then they say, “I’m so grateful.” And I’m not dismissing the power of that.
Gratitude is certainly a wonderful feeling compared to feeling helpless or feeling stuck or feeling powerless. Gratitude actually is a much nicer vibration. It’s a nicer frequency to be in. My observation is this.
The word gratitude has, in its pronunciation, the root gratis, free, and there’s nothing free in this entire universe. Everything happens because of something else. It’s a constant experience of cause and effect, before and after.
So, for the person who continually must have something happen first in order for them to experience that feeling of gratitude, it almost is like always waiting for something to happen and then you can feel good. And what I’ve found is there’s something far more powerful than that, far more effective, and something that’s always available to you because it reflects your actual power as a creator in your own life, and what I’m talking about is appreciation.
Specifically, a very active appreciation. Because when you are experiencing an active appreciation, you’re acknowledging the role that you’ve played in its presence. And that puts you back in charge. That means that from wherever you’re at in any given moment, you could begin to shift your attention, begin to shift your awareness towards those things, towards those people, those experiences for which you have an active appreciation. And the most powerful part of that is that since you are acknowledging not only the presence of the thing or the person or the relationship, not only do you acknowledge with appreciation its presence, but you’re actually acknowledging your own role that you’ve played. And what that does is it transforms any present moment.
That means that instead of feeling like, yes, that great, big thing happened, and it’s so awesome and now I can feel grateful, gosh, where’s the next big thing going to come from? Instead of doing that, what you actually do is you continue to lean forward and you continue to engage your reality from a place of active appreciation. And as simple as it sounds, this stuff is magic, man. This stuff will work miracles in your life. And I don’t mean that from a theological perspective. Although, if that works for you, that’s cool.
What I am suggesting is that the more you appreciate something… And what is appreciation? It’s the acknowledgement of positive aspects. It’s the awareness of something that is desired, and everything in this universe has both positive and negative elements. Even somebody you don’t like very much, there’s got to be at least one thing that you could sort of appreciate about them, even it’s the fact that you don’t like them so much that they’re making you do this stupid exercise. But this active appreciation.
If you give it a chance and you begin to allow yourself second by second, you’ll feel this momentum building, and you’ll feel this energy swirling and kind of swelling up, and you’ll start to feel an actual feeling of appreciation, a very empowered appreciation because you’ve played an active role, not only in noticing whatever it is that you might be appreciating, but also in attracting it, creating it, partnering with whatever that is.
So I’ll take appreciation over gratitude all day long when it comes to continuing to develop an ultrahuman OS. And logic, logic is an app. It’s not the operating system. You have the ability in any moment, including right now, to shift your attention a little bit more towards those things that you appreciate in your life. And by doing so, you’re transforming your present moment. And once you’ve done that, you are standing on an entirely new ground. You are like the king on the chess board. You can move any direction you want one move at a time.
So choose wisely, and why not operate from an active appreciation, because what you appreciate, whatever you give your positive attention to increases in value. Whatever you appreciate appreciates.