Gratitude Is To Revere The Other

The first thing we need to understand is that no person has taken birth only to serve you. Every other person is also on the path of life just as we are. As a kind gesture, out of love, they do things for us. Even your own wife or husband is doing a very kind act of serving you, of providing for you or taking care of you.

Of course, marriage calls for give and take but the husband or wife can never be taken for granted. They can never be thought of as our birthright. Especially between partners, a lot of things are taken for granted.

Each individual plays an equal part in life. No one should be taken for granted. There has to be some gratitude for every person on planet earth. I always tell people that even if things don't work out between you and your husband or wife or between other relationships you have to part with gratitude.

Every relationship brings some good into our life. Every relationship is auspicious in its own way. Only, we are not able to see it that way. The problem is that somewhere we feel people are waiting to hurt us. It is not so. It is only our own insecurity that we project on others. We have a self defense mechanism that causelessly plays in every relationship. It is driven with the thought that others are waiting to hurt us. This very mechanism will disappear when gratitude flowers.

So many people feel ungrateful to their parents and society

for conditioning them in certain ways. In one of the gratitude meditations that we offer, we ask people to first give their gratitude to their parents and all of the people who gave then their mental setup, their attitude.

Understand, with the intelligence that you have now, you are able to see that you did not receive the right kind of mental setup earlier. You are now trying to transform to a new mental setup. That is perfectly alright. But it is not right to curse the people who gave you the earlier mental setup.

Those who gave us this body and mind did not have any intention to deprive us or disturb us in any way. Whatever they knew as their best, they just gave to us, that's all. We are going beyond it now because we have become more intelligent. Just feel grateful to them, that is enough.

Whenever you feel grateful to the people in your relationships, you will never try to possess them. You will look at them as beautiful individuals and leave it at that. Possessiveness happens only when you think of the other person as an object and not as an individual. With gratitude, you will allow the person to have his or her own space.

Whenever you feel grateful to the people in your relationships, you will never try to possess them.