Your struggles end when your gratitude begins. Being grateful shifts the energy of the world—it shifts the energy in our individual world first.  Sometimes I feel ashamed at how many years I wasted feeling/playing the victim.  We all have moments when we are victimized, some of us just stay in them longer.  The truth is there is so much beauty in this world and we waste a lot of time looking at what isn’t over what is, and we see what is missing instead of the gifts that are here.  As soon as we shift that outlook and take the time to sit in the appreciation of what is, we see how much abundance exists in our lives.  There are things we have materially that others don’t, there are gifts we have to express that others don’t.  Outside the realm of have/have not is the idea that we are given opportunities to be who we are and share that light with others.  It is a gift to have the ideas we do and the fact that we can take ownership of them and create something with our lives is a gift.      

One thing we struggle to wrap our heads around is the idea that we are owed anything.  This isn’t a contradictory statement about our worth, it’s a reminder that this life is a gift.  The fact that we wake up every day and have another chance to take action toward our dreams is a gift because we could easily not wake up.  The fact we have a safe place to sleep, eat, have clothes, have means to read this piece, all of that is a gift.  Not everyone has the means or the will to see their gifts through, not everyone has the idea or the drive to make things happen.  Some people aren’t able to take the ingredients of their lives and make something of it—like if we can’t make heads or tails of an experience so instead wallow in figuring out why something happened instead of taking action based on the event.  We are given all of the ingredients to make a life we love, sometimes we just have to learn how to put it all together. 

The most important aspect of gratitude are the possibilities.  The more grateful we are, the more possibilities we see in everything.  There is less likelihood to put a negative interpretation on events because we see them simply as things that happen, new data to make a new decision.  Gratitude opens the doors because we have shifted the framework of our minds and in some cases, even opened the doors.  So many of the problems we have are in our own head.  There are certainly external events, but how we cope with them is completely up to us.  The choices we make surrounding the event are up to us.  We can choose to play victim or even play perfectionist thinking that we have control over the situation.  Or we can choose to relax and allow and let go of the struggle through reframing our perception.  We hold the key in our perception.  Let go of the struggle.