How gratitude can vanquish resentment (resentment that in the end only consumes us) and the interrelationship between the two fascinates me. Dr. Kerry Howells writes;

“I carried this murky feeling with me wherever I went. It cast a dark shadow over all my relationships, and eventually the parenting of my own daughter. It sat in a pit at the bottom of my stomach. I just couldn’t see that there was any way to release myself from it.

Oddly enough, the key to a new understanding of how I felt came from my experience as a young academic teaching a philosophy course to groups of students who had to take my course for their degree. They resented the fact that they had to do a compulsory subject they had no interest in. Eventually out of sheer frustration I asked them why they didn’t take the opportunity to learn something new. Their response changed my approach to teaching, my career and my life.

They said they wanted to be engaged but they didn’t know how. I responded that while they didn’t have a choice about doing the course, they did have a choice about how they were going to approach it. So we started exploring their feelings of resentment and how these were playing out through complaint and dissatisfaction. I invited them to reframe their feelings to ones of gratitude.”

Since every day is a gift, I try (sometimes better than other times) to get quickly to a place where I take the stones of negative feelings out of my “backpack” as soon as I can. Focusing on this important need to not let negativity consume my life is a practice I employ every day. Indeed, it is a “practice” that needs constant attention.

I found this article very powerful and wish to share it with you. How many of these themes, to one extent or another, have described a relationship, or problem, in our own lives. I hope you enjoy this article that is so poignant, raw, and well written: https://grateful.org/grateful-living/grateful-living-through-moving-past-resentment/

Bob Bianchi