There is a story I carry with me from a oneness course I attended years ago. The facilitator said something that stopped me completely: even if your parents had abandoned you at birth, even if they had left you in a dustbin, you would still owe them gratitude — because without them, you would never have existed at all.
I remember the resistance I felt in that moment. I was someone who felt entitled to receive things from the world — care, recognition, fairness, love — and this idea that gratitude could exist independent of what I had been given felt almost offensive. But the more I sat with it, the more I began to understand what was being pointed to. Gratitude is not a transaction. It is not a reward we extend when the world performs well. It is a way of seeing — one that reveals what is always already present, before we begin to measure what is missing.
That shift changed everything for me. Not overnight, and not without resistance. But slowly, I began to see my difficulties in proportion to the difficulties others carried. I learned to distinguish between discomfort, disappointment, and genuine injustice — to ask honestly whether what I was feeling was arising from within me, from comparison, or from something truly unfair. And in that discernment, a quiet sense of peace began to take root.
That peace, I came to understand, is what loving gratitude makes possible.
Appreciating the Abundance That Life Is
We live, most of us, in a state of perpetual attention to what is lacking. The comparison economy — social media, status markers, the constant measurement of ourselves against others — trains us to see what we do not have before we can see what we do. And yet, if we pause for even a moment, the abundance that surrounds and sustains us is staggering.
The air we breathe. The water we drink. The food that nourishes us. The flowers, the trees, the quality of light in the morning. The body that carries us through each day. The mind that makes meaning of experience. The friends who know us, the family we belong to, the communities that hold us — or that once held us, or that we are still searching for.
We may not have all of these. Many of us carry real absences, real losses. But loving gratitude does not ask us to pretend otherwise. It asks us to pause and gently hold what is present — to recognise the abundance that is here, even alongside what is not, and to feel the safety and groundedness that recognition can bring.
This is not a passive act. It is an act of attention — of choosing, in this moment, to see.
Spreading Loving Kindness
To truly cultivate gratitude is also to notice its absence in others — and to be moved by that noticing. When we become aware of the fullness in our own lives, we cannot remain indifferent to those who are navigating scarcity, loss, displacement, and pain.
To those who have lost their lands. To those separated from their families. To those who yearn for recognition of who they are. To those starving for water, air, and food. To those who are healing, and those who are struggling to return to themselves. To all of these, loving gratitude asks us to extend something — not pity, but warmth. Not charity, but genuine love.
May there be joy. May there be peace. May there be life and prosperity. May there be health, compassion, and the deep recognition of our shared humanity. May there be oneness — and may we, too, remember that we are part of it.
This practice of loving-kindness — or metta, as it is known in Buddhist traditions — is not abstract. It is a discipline of the heart, one that widens our circle of care and softens the edges of our own suffering in the process. Science is beginning to confirm what wisdom traditions have always known: gratitude and love activate the same neurological and hormonal pathways. As researchers at UC Berkeley have found, gratitude is deeply intertwined with oxytocin — the hormone of connection — meaning that the act of feeling grateful is, quite literally, the act of drawing ourselves closer to life.
Making Gratitude an Everyday Practice
And yet, this is perhaps the most honest thing that can be said about loving gratitude: it is difficult to sustain. Not because we do not believe in it, but because the world does not make it easy. Consumption, comparison, and the relentless pace of modern life pull us continuously toward scarcity thinking — toward what we lack, toward what others have that we do not.
Sustained gratitude practice is transformative across every domain of life — in relationships, in professional resilience, in emotional wellbeing, in our sense of meaning. But it requires cultivation. It does not simply arise because we wish it would.
One of the most reliable ways to begin is to gift yourself a journal — a simple, dedicated space where, initially, you will perhaps force yourself to write.
What am I grateful for today?
What is present in my life that I have taken for granted?
What difficulty I am facing right now might I be able to view not only as an obstacle, but as an invitation to go deeper within myself — to operate from a place of fullness rather than fear?
Over time, something shifts. What once felt like a discipline begins to feel like a homecoming. Abundance begins to flow not as something that arrives from outside, but as something that rises from within. And when we see this — when we begin to experience ourselves as part of the oneness we have been sending love toward — harmony does not need to be sought. It sings from the inside out.
Loving gratitude does not ask us to deny our difficulties. It invites us to meet them with the full power of our being — rooted in what is present, connected to something larger than ourselves, and open to the infinite potential that lies within each of us.
That is its quiet, profound gift.