How’s your gratitude going? Today I wrote: “I’m really glad I was able to recover most of my work from my computer crash last night.” Most. Not all. Still grateful though. You be can angry you broke your arm in a car accident or you can be grateful you didn’t die. The choice is always yours. This week’s all about you getting serious about choosing appreciation.
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs orders what we need to reach our personal peak. First you must meet your Physiological needs. You have to have enough food and water and you must have enough shelter to be able to survive. It’s a painful to thing to want to be able to eat but to not be able to, whether you’re in a drought in Africa or a cancer ward in Edmonton. Most of us aren’t experiencing that and we can be grateful for that every day.
Next is Safety.
Next we get into connections to others. Maslow noted next you need Love. This is where you feel you belong. You are part of friendship or a family or maybe you have intimate contact with someone. This gives you a chance to give to a limited number of people as a kind of training ground for a higher purpose with all people. Love is the greatest feeling we experience and we should be deeply grateful for those that inspire it in us.
Next is Esteem. First and foremost you need to have self-esteem. You have to see that you deserved the love you were given. Having that, you will then benefit from the confidence and admiration of a group. In short you need to know that your impact will last beyond yourself and your days on this Earth. If you’re a boss or parent or coach or even a friend, you should feel grateful for the chance to serve others and to use your amazing abilities to inspire others to greatness themselves.
Next is your spiritual self so to speak. You need to Self-Actualize. You need to do something for the real you. The you that steers the physical you. You need to paint or dance or learn to fix cars or give a speech or travel. You need to enact your calling. You need to expand the universe by expanding yourself. It’s like taking your sense of love and expanding it outside yourself and into the larger world.
And that was where Maslow originally stopped because he wasn’t old enough yet to know there’s another phase after that.
Your final and most important shift is when you live in a state of Self-Transcendence. That’s when you are so complete, so overflowing with success that you can stop thinking about you and you can start investing your time in thinking about others instead. That’s what created my books, movies and this blog. It’s hard to suffer when your mind hasn’t even created a you to do the suffering. And there is no you because your mind is fully absorbed in what you’re doing and your appreciation of how it helps others. Do not steal from yourself the incredible joy of having been a person who really made a meaningful difference.
Wake up each day and be grateful and use that fuel to lift you higher and higher, past health and safety and love and success. Take it all the way to Buddahood. It’s just waiting for you to turn it on with your efforts. Be grateful, feel the energy build and before you know it a new outlet will appear and you will have a brand new canvas to fill with your dreams. I very much look forward to you making the world more beautiful with them. I am grateful for you.
Have a fantastic day everyone. Create that for yourself by filling it with appreciation. Even if it’s with a broken arm. 😉 Much love.
peace. s
Scott McPherson is a writer, public speaker, and mindfulness facilitator who works with individuals, companies and nonprofit organizations around the world.
Following a serious childhood brain injury Scott McPherson unwittingly spent his entire life meditating on the concepts of thought, consciousness, reality and the self. This made him as strange to others as they were to him. Seeing the self-harm people created with their own overthinking, Scott dedicated part of his life to helping others live with greater awareness. He is currently a writer, speaker and mindfulness instructor based in Edmonton, AB, where he finds it strange to write about himself in the third person.
