I consciously practice gratitude everyday for various things in life. But today’s instance has taught me that my gratitude is superficial and I fell into the trap of taking blessings for granted. I realized how much I have taken for granted in my life.
I am very passionate about service as I have personally experienced that service improves my life. Service has helped me in many, many ways and got me tremendous amount of blessings. I have seen miracles in my life because of service. So, I dedicate at least 3 Hours per week for service as taught in TEH Level 1 course. I seeked for service opportunities and life is kind enough to send them.
One such service I do is updating IWC website with various things. Today, I got the thought – “I am so bored with regularly updating the website. Why don’t I give this job to others and take it easy?” When I was contemplating this thought, my inner Guru gave me a profound lecture – “Dear Geethanjali, you begged for this opportunity. Several years back, you dreamt of doing any little service to TEH teachers. You asked for it for many years and manifested with great difficulty. Now, you are bored and you want to quit. Your begging is for more number of years than the amount of time you have worked on the website. Its a pity.”
This inner Guru went on telling all the things I dreamt for in life and manifested after some struggle – like meditating regularly, being a TEH teacher, being associated with great teachers like Ruchi Sanjil, serving TEH teachers, marrying a meditator, retiring from IT job, pursuing my passion in life, living in my dream home, having good health, being prosperous etc.
My inner Guru further said – “you are ungrateful, Yes, boredom can come. Anything you do again and again can become monotonous. But stick to your dharma no matter what. Your dharma for this lifetime is to do spiritual work whether it is interesting, boring, tiring or whatever. Stick to your dharma because you have seeked this for many lifetimes and now life gave you an opportunity to live your dream. When the time has come to live the dream, why do you want to run away? You are taking your manifestations for granted. Now you are desiring for God but you wont be any different when God comes to you. You will be grateful for a day or 2 and then you will take God also for granted. Learn to be grateful for the blessings life brought you and give your best. Only then, there is some hope for you to progress spiritually.”
This was a profound insight for me as I realized I have taken many things for granted in my life. I have craved to serve a TEH teacher for many years(a TEH teacher does the noble job of spreading teachings that transform lives and its a great opportunity to be of any little service to such teachers.) and now, after becoming a TEH teacher myself, I took this service for granted. My husband, himself, is a TEH teacher but I treat him like my friend and many times, I forget that he is a TEH teacher.
After this inner conversation, I started looking at TEH teachers like I am a TEH student and that reverence and gratitude have come back for every teacher. I felt very happy and grateful to update IWC website and I definitely want to do this forever. It is easy to keep repeating mistakes. I don’t want to again fall in the trap of taking blessings for granted and lose them(yes, anything we take for granted will be gone very soon by our own actions). So I made a gratitude list. I decided to see this list every single day and night and say thank you to God for all these blessings.
We often take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude. What have you dreamt and worked hard to manifest and then started taking it for granted after few years?
Sarve jana sukhino bhavanthu!
-Contributed by Geethanjali Balachander
