Your task is not to seek love

            But merely to seek and find all the barriers

            That you have built against it.

            The same can be said of freedom; we build barriers against it, barriers born of fear-fear of death, fear of not having enough, fear of not being enough, fear of being happy. An antidote to these fears is gratefulness; when we cultivate our awareness of life as a gift freely given, instead of our enslavement to greed we learn the liberating power of  gratitude; we recognize our thankfulness for who we are rather than being trapped by the  compulsion to be perfect; rather than the fear of and the fixation on tomorrow, we feel the joy of the moment; we discover the capacity  to shed the chains of paralyzing guilt and embrace instead  the redeeming possibilities of gratefulness as the impetus for doing the good and the compassionate in life.      

            Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos into order, and confusion into clarity. It turns problems into gifts, failures into success, the unexpected into perfect timing, and mistakes into important events. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today and creates a vision for tomorrow.