An Attitude of Gratitude

God is always coming to you in the Sacrament of the Present Moment. Meet and receive Him there with gratitude in that sacrament.

- Evelyn Underhill


I’ll be honest. Gratitude has been a hard one for me. Growing up in a family beset with alcohol abuse and domestic violence, I developed a habit of holding onto bitterness and resentment. I am regularly depressed around the holidays and Christmas carols make me cringe. I learned at an early age to regard the world with cynicism and suspicion. When I became a teenager this attitude crystallized into an attitude of rebellion against all that was conventional, superficial and fake. I found my way to the bitter rebellious joy of getting high and drunk. Love and gratitude seemed to be concepts that were contaminated beyond recognition. Still there was a spiritual longing within me and a deep faith buried under multiple layers of defenses.

Eventually I found my way to India and the practice of yoga; not the commercialized yoga of glossy magazines but the deep spiritual yoga of the Bhagavad Gita and Yoga Sutras as taught by Swami Satyananda Saraswati. Yoga helped open my heart to the spiritual dimension of life but I was still conflicted inside. Now as a yoga teacher and a psychotherapist I see so many people with similar conflicts and defenses. It is hard sometimes to open to love and gratitude when you are going through or have lived through a personal hell. How do we find our way back to God and the Kingdom?

Research shows that an attitude of gratitude is beneficial for health and healing on both physical and psychological levels. Robert Emmons summarizes this research in Thanks!: How the New Science of Gratitude Can Make You Happier (Houghton Mifflin, 2007). Various studies showed that patients who use a daily gratitude journal "reap emotional, physical and interpersonal benefits." It seems to be an antidote for the stressful thoughts that can so disastrously affect our health and wellbeing. It is a form of writing meditation.

The practice of witnessing or observing thoughts in meditation is very helpful in this regard. Through meditation we can uncover and release some of the negative cognitive structures and emotional energy which have taken roost in the subconscious mind. By further focusing on feelings of love, gratitude and compassion we open up dormant functions of our brain/minds which help us to grow and evolve as spiritual beings. Of course we need to take this practice out into the world as well. The Buddhist teacher Atisha suggested we take up and practice the slogan: Be grateful to everyone. Now that might be a challenge!

However, we can learn to be open to the blessing of each moment in our lives. Each breath is a blessing, each sip of coffee, each encounter with another soul. When one’s heart is open the world is full of opportunities to feel grateful and compassionate. From a spiritual perspective, even the most horrible things that happen have meaning and can lead to the soul’s evolution. If we are just grateful for the good things in life, then what happens when they go away? How do we feel when “stuff happens?” Spiritual teachings tell us that this world of our experience is really a projection of the unconscious karma within us. It is a setting through which we can work out all the stuff that obscures our inherent divinity; an opportunity to go beyond the ego and to realize the Self. Practicing gratitude is a great way to make progress.

Accessing Quantum Consciousness

Oh Lord, I see within your body all the
gods and every kind of living creature. I see
Brahma, the Creator, seated on a lotus; I see
the ancient sages and celestial serpents.
I see infinite mouths and arms, stomachs and
eyes, and you are embodied in every form. I
see you everywhere, without beginning, middle,
or end. You are the Lord of all creation,
and the cosmos is your body.
- Bhagavad Gita


Mystical, shamanic, and yoga traditions tell us that there is a greater consciousness inherent in the universe through which we are all connected. It is the deeper “I” within each of us, the resplendent Self. This greater consciousness lives in and through us as embodied beings but is generally hidden to us due to the process of avidya, or self-forgetting. When we have forgotten our connection to this greater consciousness we believe ourselves to be separate body-mind entities living in an essentially hostile world. As the Taitirriya Upanishad states, “Until we know the unity of all life, we live in fear.” Once we know this unified consciousness; once we have overcome a chronic case of mistaken identity, we realize that there is no birth, no death and that we are eternally abiding.

Now this may sound like a huge leap beyond reason, common sense and general sanity. It violates almost everything we have been taught either by science or traditional religion. Our whole lives have been structured around this sense of being a separate ego-identity and many of us feel terrified of the idea of giving this up. As one student put it, “If I and my world are not real, what is left?” The answer is: just all-encompassing unconditional love. Not so bad really.

Beginning in the early twentieth-century physicists investigating into the smallest units of matter encountered the interaction of consciousness with matter on the quantum level. Going on a century later scientists and philosophers are still arguing over what this means. Some say that it is either a) mistaken, or b) irrelevant. Others, of course, more aligned with “New Age” spirituality say that it means that “consciousness creates reality.” Personally, it seems that the former are simply overly attached to a materialist-reductionist paradigm and afraid to investigate beyond it. The later seem to be both naïve and opportunistic. On the level of ego-consciousness we have very little control over “reality,” mainly because we are identified with it. It is only when we are able to step outside of body-mind egos that we can grasp the bigger picture.

The body-mind ego is a particular constricted focus of consciousness. Mystics, shamans and yogis use various methods for altering consciousness so that they are able to move outside of the consensual trance in which most of us live. Investigating consciousness is a subjective endeavor. It is not a matter for physicists, neurophysiologists, intellectual philosophers, etc. It requires the courage to turn away from the world presented by the senses, projected by the mind and presumed to be the entirety of our world. It requires “pratyahara,” the yogic term for disciplined introversion. Just as externalized disciplines teach us to examine the world in a particular way, disciplines of consciousness seek to guide us on an inward journey.

Quantum Field theory, though, has given us a new language for understanding the greater consciousness. It has provided a model through which we can understand Consciousness as the field of infinite potential, wisdom and abiding Love through which our world comes into being:

The property of pure self-interaction of the Unified Field together with the resulting three-in-one structure of the 'measurement process' in quantum cosmology implies that the Unified Field generates sequentially progressing series of events through the process of pure self-observation. This quality of pure self-observation in turn means that the non-material, Quantum Mechanical Unified Field can be identified as the field of pure self-referral consciousness. http://www.worldpeaceendowment.org/invincibility/invincibility6.html


Meditative states of consciousness allow us to access this field (although we are never truly apart from it.) Meditation is essentially a way of retraining consciousness through a disciplined refocusing of attention. Meditation helps us to move awareness away from a fixation on the external world-projection in order to become aware of the field of awareness itself. Becoming aware of this unified field of consciousness is what Yogis have referred to as enlightenment. “Enlightenment results from extending the abilities of our brain, nervous system and consciousness into quantum fields of human potential that go beyond anything we have ever imagined.” (Bob Fickes, Quantum Enlightenment) The meditative state allows us to access our inner connection to infinite energy and intelligence.

States of consciousness can be measured through monitoring brain waves. Simply put: beta waves are generated in the waking ego state. Alpha waves represent a more relaxed and introverted consciousness, while theta waves are generated when consciousness disconnects from the outer world and delta waves signify deep sleep. Meditation helps us to move into alpha, theta even delta states with conscious awareness. Alpha represents a gateway into the quantum field consciousness. Through meditation the experienced practitioner can move from alpha into the deeper states of theta and delta at will and with awareness. It is in these deeper states that we come into contact with the greater consciousness within.

There are numerous ways for entering into meditative states of consciousness. It is not even necessary to receive official training in a traditional methodology although it helps. One technique which I learned through Swami Satyananda Saraswati is called Yoga Nidra. Yoga Nidra is a guided process of deep relaxation and inner awareness which can take one into the deeper layers of consciousness fairly easily. It helps with healing, learning, creative problem solving, inspiration and, of course stress reduction. I have made a recording of an introductory session which can be downloaded at http://soundcloud.com/turiyaom/yoga-nidra You can learn more about this profound technique in Swami Satyananda’s book Yoga Nidra.