How Gratitude can actually Keep you Small

How Gratitude can actually Keep you Small — Watch Out!

By: Daria Boissonnas, Certified Reconnective Healing Practitioner

“Think how gratification blocks change.” This phrase came up in a healing session one day and gave me some unusual insights into how we stay stuck. At first, I thought, “No, that can’t be right. Getting what you want keeps you reaching towards the next thing. Gratification of goals keeps you moving forward.”

Not always. Not for this client. Test it out yourself — think of those little habits you have that help you stay small and stuck. Avoidance behaviors, other tasks that seem more important, something that must be done first, helping other people with their bigger and more important problems, all those wonderful things to eat and do and watch and play — all that, instead of reaching for your dreams.

Now ponder in what way gratifying these desires, these attempted sidetracks into pleasure, actually blocks change and holds you back. Aha, the original statement starts to make sense. How does gratifying these little escapes prevent you from moving forward? That’s what the client had to see for herself. She thought they were helping, making her feel better by indulging a little to “fortify” her for the effort to move forward. Nope, it was holding her back. Today she saw that, let it go, and healed an erroneous, limiting belief or thought pattern.

When you reinforce the “yummy” reaction in those escapes, you reinforce staying where you are. You create a loop of attachment to how things are now. You reinforce the habit of gratification.

Since life moves forward, creating an attachment to this point in time and this way of being will eventually hurt. Since she’d been doing this since she was about age 7, she already was hurting! She wondered why she sometimes avoided doing the work she longed most to do.

Can Gratitude Keep You Small?

Then came the second part: ”Think how grateful allows me to feel safe.” (As in, falsely safe — safe from stretching into her Potential.)

What? Gratitude, a problem?

Yes. Gratitude is another powerful way to create attachment. When you use gratitude to inappropriately reinforce current patterns (“oh, I have so much, I am so lucky right now the way I am”), it may become easier to avoid moving forward and changing this wonderful situation. In fact, for this client, it allowed her to feel safe – meaning she didn’t HAVE to change.

To change in this situation, you have to do a little extra work to convince or move beyond the parts of your thinking mind that are grateful in that attached way. Most people with this thought pattern stay with the gratitude, unfortunately, especially since it’s so popular nowadays to use gratitude. Then they don’t move forward, and they wonder why not.

Gratitude and other spiritual skills of attachment and detachment are a double-edged sword! You can use a hammer to build a house — or to commit a crime — it all depends on how you use it. It’s a tool. Change comes from the consciousness behind it.

Gratitude and spiritual skills of attachment can help you connect to bigger, more expansive, more healing ways of thinking and being…. or they can help you attach to inappropriately small-minded, outdated, or painful ways of being. The solution is to learn how to use these spiritual skills appropriately.

The skill itself is not a panacea. You must learn to wield it.

“Gratitude blocks change.” What? How? When one feels gratitude, doesn’t this makes us want to do more? Not always. It is actually holding you back and keeping you in your comfort zone. In other words, not moving forward keeps you safe, which also translates to gratitude keeping you small. Think about it as you read this article.

Daria Boissonnas, Certified Reconnective Healing Practitioner, is the founder of the Global Institute for Awakening - dedicated to bringing more healing into the world. Beginning as a total skeptic, Daria learned from her own intense 12-year journey into healing and now supports others to reach their highest potential. Get your complimentary Spiritual Journey Wake-Up Kit to build wealth, wellness and wisdom: http://giawaken.com/

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