How Gratitude Breaks Ego’s Momentum in Your Awareness

Since Thanksgiving and gratitude go hand-in-hand, I like to use this time of year to reflect on the mechanics that make gratitude such an important aspect of our inner journey.

First and foremost, gratitude is a great tool for breaking the energetic pull of ego in our awareness.

Ego loves to use what’s not working in our lives to usurp our attention. When we’re not mindful of ego’s unscrupulous ways, these thoughts of lack can begin to occupy most of our mind.

However, gratitude immediately diverts our attention from focusing on what’s missing in our life to all that’s working in our life. Without ego overtaking our mind with thoughts of lack, a space opens up, allowing us to be filled with feelings that spring from our deepest nature…feelings of joy, peace, and true abundance.

We’re temporarily relieved from being identified with an illusion of lack (everything of ego is an illusion) and we touch (maybe it’s a glimpse; maybe it’s a deeper anchoring) a reality that knows abundance beyond the trappings of the world (what ego would define as abundance).

When we consciously move from identifying with an inner state of lack to one of true abundance, what we perceive in our outer world changes, since everything we perceive is a reflection of our inner state.

If we’re living from an inner state of lack, that’s what’s going to be reflected back to us.

If we’re living from an inner state of abundance, that’s what’s going to be reflected back to us.

Oftentimes, we get caught in the illusion of what it means to be abundant. Our ideas and mental images around abundance get twisted into ego’s need to feel secure.

In the deepest sense of the word, “abundance” means to consciously know our own wholeness and completeness (i.e., that we are pure love and light).

We, in the ultimate sense of who we are, are already in this state. However, we still need to do the necessary inner work to consciously know this. It’s our primary purpose in life.

Sometimes we fool ourselves into believing we’re living from a mindset of abundance, all the while we’re doggedly pursuing a goal that we feel needs to be in place for us to feel fulfilled. This is self-deception. Be very mindful of this.

Anytime we feel that we need a certain outer state to be in place to feel whole and complete, we’re living from an inner state of lack. On some level, we’re looking for something outside of us to complete us…this is the self-deception that needs to be healed.

Processing this is what ultimately led me to let go of my goal to pursue building an interested audience in my spiritual sharing, and instead, to focus on healing what was leading me to need that to be in place to feel whole and complete.

Take a moment to filter your own goals through this litmus test. If the goal itself is in place to help you feel more abundant (whole & complete), consider that the real inner work is to heal what is leading you to chase the goal as a form of fulfillment (security or wholeness).

The part of yourself that is experiencing an inner sense of lack is what needs to be healed…from the inside out, not the outside in.

An outer goal can temporarily assuage this sense of lack (when the goal is met), but it can never heal it. It just places the sense of lack in a temporary dormancy, which only delays the inevitable healing that must take place at some point (whether it’s in this life or another).

Committing to doing your inner work changes how you relate to life…

Instead of constantly looking to get something out of a relationship, job/career, etc. (which is how ego relates, even at the most subtle levels), you become an instrument for the source of life (Love) to be lived through you.

You live as a constant extension of love, showing up in each moment of life as the greatest expression of love that the given situation calls for.

And it all starts by using gratitude to break ego’s momentum in your awareness in order to begin connecting to your deepest nature…knowing that you are pure love and light.

To Knowing True Abundance,

Shanna