Being Grateful is a State of Awakened Awareness

Being grateful is something more than just saying, ‘thank you’ and then criticizing the person. Being grateful is a state of awakened awareness. Are we grateful for every breath we breathe? Are we grateful for every morsel of food or water, for the ability to see, for the ability to hear, for the ability to move?

If you have asthama and you are dying because can’t even get one breath, you start to value, what air really means to us. We are all just breathing thousands and thousands of times a day with no gratitude whatsoever. But if you have an asthama attack, you would give everything you own just for some air to come into your lungs. So sometimes the difficulties of life are there to help to deepen our awareness of what’s really valuable. As devotees, even at the time of death, we are grateful that we are eternal souls and we are grateful that Krishna is here to deliver us at this moment. And this is how we should be living with every breath of our life.

In bhakti we express our gratitude through seva, not through just saying ‘thank you’. We say thank you, but if we mean it we live that thank you. “How may I serve you in every situation? Because I am grateful.” – Radhanath Swami