THE COPENHAGEN TALKS

Gratitude: The Copenhagen Talks

Over the years some of my most inspired talks and retreats have been with my Danish friends. In this talk, I found myself discussing gratitude and the foundation of self-awareness that is needed to free you from seeing the world through your mind. We all know gratitude as a sudden visitation of grace, but it is also a practice that invites grace. Choosing to practice gratitude means resting in a new relationship to each moment of your life. It is a choice the heart can make that the mind does not understand. Gratitude asks a shift of perspective from a framework of behavior driven by stories, and a relationship to life that is always inevitably strategic and conditional, to one of the immediacy of feeling…This…the sensual knowing of the Now. As a practice it is a reframing of your perception and sense of what really matters as you relax into this moment and come back to where you are forever beginning anew. Choosing to be grateful is consciously embracing the what Is of life, rather than focused on the what was or the what may be. You are no longer looking backward trying to recover a remembered idealized past, or caught up in blaming or regret. You are no longer hoping for some future you imagine will be a better version of the past. Gratitude is the intelligence of the heart that brings you home, that is home.