by Rebbie Straubing

If you want uncommon joy, offer uncommon gratitude.

COMMON GRATITUDE

Common joy is the joy that comes from conditions. If the conditions are pleasing, the response is joy. Common joy.

Common gratitude is a feeling of thankfulness for the conditions that promote joy. This type of gratitude does bring joy and that is very good. Both the gratitude and the joy are highly recommended and beneficial on all levels. But there is a tight belt on the whole process that creates discomfort and ultimately puts a strain on the one offering this common gratitude. The tense dependency on pleasant conditions can ultimately squeeze the joy right out of the picture. It can create a need to look at already manifested conditions to determine what you can be thankful for.

UNCOMMON GRATITUDE

To find joy that is free from the limitations of conditions, offer gratitude that is outside the belt of manifestation.

There is much to be grateful for right there in the most difficult aspects of your life. And so, if your life is a mess, you are rich with potential joy.

NEGATIVES

If you can remember back before digital cameras, I’m sure you can flash on those eagerly awaited pockets of pictures with long skinny envelopes full of negatives.

In the good old days of film cameras, if you spilled coffee on your favorite snapshot of Fido or you gave your mom the best of your baby’s first birthday pictures, you had a good back up. All you had to do was dig up the negative and you could get another sharp, perfect print. Can you remember how grateful you were when you found that negative?
The key to uncommon gratitude is in valuing the negative. Once you see that the perfect picture is visible if you only shine your light through the negative, then your joy becomes invincible.

You begin to realize that every moment of your life is either a picture or a negative. So when your life is picture perfect, you have the joy of common gratitude. And when your life is painful or challenging, you have the backup of uncommon gratitude. It does take an extra step but it is worth it.

DEVELOPING YOUR NEGATIVES

When your body hurts or your lover leaves you or your wallet is light, try this. Understand these negative moments as encoded with all the vitality, love and abundance you could ever want. They just happen to be the negatives. But they are your negatives and if you shine some of your inner light through the struggles you are living, you will find that they turn into the very beautiful moments you are looking for.

You already have a darkroom. Just close your eyes.

Consider this thing that is bothering you. Notice how extreme or intense it is. That is how bright the picture will be once it is developed.

This is where uncommon gratitude comes in. Just like you used to be happy when you found the negative of a picture you had lost or damaged, I’d like you to get happy about finding the negative of the health or relationship or financial abundance you have lost or damaged. Why? Because if you have the negative, you can shine light through it and get a new manifestation.

How do you shine light through a period of illness and turn it into joyful harmonious expressiveness? How do you develop poverty into prosperity? How do you close your eyes and transform a negative into a positive?

You shine the light of uncommon gratitude right through the situation. You become grateful for the negative template that can guide you to your perfect positive. Everything that bothers you about your current condition has an exact opposite. And by turning the light of your attention to your love of the opposite of what you are living, you begin to develop your negative. And the more precisely you can imagine and feel the exact opposite of your problem, the more focused and recognizable will be your new life picture on that subject.

Once you learn to offer common gratitude for your positives and uncommon gratitude for your negatives, there is not a moment of your life when you cannot be grateful. That is when you experience uncommon joy.

 © 2007 Rebbie Straubing

Dr. Rebbie Straubing teaches a system of inner alignment in her book “Rooted in the Infinite.” You can download the beginning of the book at www.RootedintheInfinite.com. Rebbie is a workshop leader, Abraham Coach and spiritual writer. You can get her free eCourse at http://YOFA.net.